I then swore eternal vengeance on the insti-
tution of slavery."
At such times men become abolitionists, or
they cease to be men.
Can a system endure which thus outrages
all the finer feelings of our nature, which in-
sults the memories of our Christian mothers.
" Morbid sentimentality "is it? I ask the
gentleman from St. Mary's (Mr. Billingsley)
to recall to his memory the period when the
apostle Paul laid his band upon the idol dedi-
cated to the " Unknown God," and pro-
claimed to the astonished Athenians, " Whom
ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto
you, the God that made heaven and earth."
We hear the ringing echoes of that clarion
voice across the centuries, and with it came
the teachings of the Saviour. His disciples
then were but a handful of men; the light
which they kindled burned but dimly; and
on through years and years of the dark ages,
its flickering flame is scarcely seen. To-day
its wide-spread effulgence illuminates half a
globe, and we stand here this hour in the full
light of the universal blaze of the Sun of
Righteousness.
This is a Christian land ! Nightly through-
out its vast extent, little children kneel in
prayer, taught by their Christian mothers to
worship the God of justice, of mercy, and of
love—those brave American mothers at
whose knees, in infancy and youth, are trained
the berues of the world.
This is a Christian land ! See the converse
of the picture, yonder in that hospital, al-
most within sight and sound of this Hall,
there was and is yet presented to our Chris-
tian gaze, a spectacle so full of horror that
the soul sickens and utterance is lost to us.
I cannot describe it. Who were the hell
hounds that did this thing?
My friend from Baltimore city tells me the
story of a man, an American citizen in one of
these hospitals, who came here in the last
stages of starvation, whose mind tarred into
idiocy, could only comprehend one fact, and
as he lay an utter wreck, could only hold up
before him his emaciated hands and chatter,
"Starved to death I starved to death !
starved to death !' '
There is nothing in the annals of barbaric
ages, nothing, however damning, heretofore
considered or conceived, but is merciful and
lovely as compared to the infamy of this
"Christian" deed.
His Christian majesty enthroned at Rich-
mond. adds to the infamy, (if that be possi-
ble) by announcing to the world in a State
paper, that these brave men were dying from
home sickness. That lie is the cap-stone to
the monument he has builded to his eternal
shame.
Why this quintessence of the refinement of
cruelty? Why make not only this nation
but the world blush for ages to come for the
shame thus secured, to the whole race of man ? |
They might have been killed outright; for
that mercy they could have been thankful.
They might have been drowned in boiling
oil, smothered in the cess-pools of the city,
or flayed alive; and that were merci-
ful. Whole hecatombs of them could have
been heaped up around the infernal city
(immortal funeral pyres!) and burned to
ashes, and their brethren could have found
in this some grain of comfort. But to be
starved to death by inches; to be months
and months, that is to say, ages and ages
a-dying; daily and hourly dying, and yet not
dead!
Whence come the fiends who can do such
deeds? Their spirit is the real spirit which
any system of human slavery engenders and
invokes. Deeds that make other men trem-
ble with horror are enacted frequently as a
matter of course by the slave master or slave
driver in the South.
Abuses of the system? but they are abuses
which cannot be remedied by law while the
law sustains the system ilself, since it is of
the very essence of any and all despotism
that it cannot be restrained or regulated. And
then comes this insatiate spirit of hatred
which keeps even pace with its demands and
is "more fell than anguish, hunger or the
sea."
The final argument that I shall urge in
favor of the abolition of slavery in Maryland
is that which has been repeatedly used in this
debate. Slavery is the link that connects
us with the rebellion, and it must be severed.
Loss of property may ensue; what matter?
immense loss of property has ensued from
this rebellion throughout the whole of the
State. I make the charge and challenge re-
futation that slavery was the cause of this
rebellion; that the rebellion is to-day nothing
more, nothing less than slavery fighting for
power; and that inasmuch as we sympa-
thize with, or attempt to bolster up, or defer
the obliteration of slavery in this State, by
just so much do we sympathize with, bolster
up, and defer the crushing out of the rebellion;
and byjust so much do we add to the bur-
dens of our already overburdened country
struggling for life. Not for an instant of
time, not by a breath from my nostrils will
I now or ever while God gives me life ap-
proach or seem to approach by a hair's
breadth, toward even the imagined commis-
sion of that damning deed.
Gentlemen are in favor of a return to the
Union; there is but one road to that goal.
It lies through universal emancipation in
America.
I also am in favor of a reunion upon a
more enduring basis. A basis now thoroughly
understood in Maryland and expressed now
in her organic law by the 4th article of the
Bill of Rights.
And I may say here, that I do not believe
the disorganizing idea of "States' rights" |
