Not content with controlling the bodies of
human beings, they swayed and controlled
their souls. Christians in a Christian land
forgetting the time when in the innocence o
youth they had sat on their mother's knees
and heard the sweet story of old, how Jesus
came down among men, sealed away the
revelation of God from millions of immortal
souls. For black men to read, or for white
men to teach the oracles of God, became by
law a crime. Laws were enacted by legisla-
tures over whose diurnal sessions a minister
of the omnipotent God was called to invoke
His blessing and His presence in their de-
liberations, forbidding the full Gospel of
Christ to be preached, because that was
truth, and truth would make men free. No-
thing that bad an element of freedom in it,
nothing that had an element of truth, could
be told these people.
Finally came the necessity for slavery, that
if it would progress it must be allowed an
unlimited expansion of territory. By its pe-
culiar method of agriculture it wears out the
land, and thus an unlimited expansion of
territory became necessary, if slavery was to
be maintained in this country. Texas was
added to the Union. Various compromises
with regard to the western territory were
made and finally broken. The honor, the
manhood, the integrity of the North and
West went down before the consolidated
union of slavery and democracy. The 25,-
000,000 of the free white men of the North
and West were forced to bow their necks to
the yoke of slavery more submissively than
the black man ever did. The slaveholders
had but to ask and they received; in larger
measure than they asked was it granted unto
them. The anomaly has been shown for
more than half a century in the legislation of
this country, that half a million of men have
controlled over twenty-five millions. Insult
upon insult was heaped upon the loyal North
and quietly endured.
South Carolina made a law that black men
brought into her ports in vessels should be
confined in jail so long as they remained
there. The State of Massachusetts, desiring
to try the constitutionality of the South
Carolina law, in South Carolina courts, so
far as it affected citizens of Massachusetts,
sent one of her most distinguished citizens,
an old grey-headed man, prominent for his
uprightness and his integrity, to test in a
South Carolina court the constitutionality of
South Carolina law. His daughter being in
delicate health, Judge Hoar took her with
him. When they arrived in Charleston, the
chivalrous, upright citizens of that city, men
of education, slaveowners, learning their
mission, waited upon that old man and his
invalid daughter and prayed him that he
would leave their city, or the citizens would
tar and feather him. Not being protected in
a State of the United States, under a Consti- |
tution which protects every citizen of one
State wherever he goes, the Massachusetts
judge had to go back to his home, unable to
try it question of State law in a State court,
because that question involved the right of
black men.
To please the slaveholding interest, the
Southern States would not allow that que-
tion to be tried. To please them, the North
and West passed the fugitive slave law, mak-
ing the soil of every northern and western
State ground for slave-hunting. It was an
outrage unparalleled to ask a South Caro-
lina court to listen to a protest in favor of
the black man; but it was right and just that
the free States of the North should be hunted
over to take a black man back into slavery.
Circumstances alter cases, I remember on
one occasion, in Boston, being myself wit-
ness—
Mr. BERRY, of Prince George's, Will the
gentleman allow me to ask him a question?
Were you in favor of carrying out the fugi-
tive slave law ?
Mr. CUSHING. I shall come to that in a
moment. I remember being in the city of
Boston, some ten years ago, then a boy, born
in Maryland, with all her prejudices, with an
immature judgment, as possibly the gentle-
man may think it is now, and being a strong
pro-slavery believer. I stood in the streets
of Boston and saw a black man, who had
come hundreds of miles for freedom, who had
endured all that humanity could endure,
solely to breathe the free air of the North.
I saw in that old Puritan city all the wheels
of commerce, and the delicate interweavings
of finance stop upon a summer's day, in
June, that this black man might be carried
by 1,500 free citizens of Massachusetts, under
the authority of the Federal Government,
down her principal banking street—this one
black man—out upon the wharf, that he
might sail into slavery. Pro-slavery man
that I was, as the Lord lives, had I been that
day a Massachusetts man, and had my life
paid the forfeit the next moment, I would not
have stood by and seen upon the soil of
Massachusetts that man rendered back to
slavery. [Applause, promptly suppressed by
the President.] It was an outrage upon all
the history of this land. I thought it was a
bitter thing for those old Puritan men who
slept under the sod, men that had left their
homes and had come in the bleak winter
across the stormy sea, solely that they might
breathe freedom, that in the city which they
had built under their free government, which
they had given to their sons, its citizens
turned out with alacrity to shoulder the
bayonet of despotism and send back a free
man escaping from the condition of slavery.
A MEMBER. Was that the Burns case?
Mr. CUSHING. Yes, sir. Time passed on ;
and willing as the North had been under the
teachings of Democracy to join the slave- |
