Yet it was the city of fugitives, and fugitives had laid its old foundations down in pain and prayer. Winthrop and Dudley, Bellingham, Leverett, Coddington, the star-sweet Lady Arabella, with their compeers, men and women of true and gentle blood, and fugitives all, had reared it from the wilderness. Fugitives who taught a tyrant that he had a joint in his neck, had fled thither when the reborn tyranny again arose in their own land. Fugitives dwelling there who remembered in their own sufferings the sufferings of others, had helped frame the noble statute of 1641, welcoming to State and city any strangers who might fly thither from the tyranny or oppression of their persecutors. Fugitive hands—the hands of the Huguenot Faneuil—had dowered it with the cradling Hall of Liberty named with his name. Over it all, and through it all, and tincturing its history in the very grain, was the tradition of the fugitive. Still, in modern days, fugitives fled thither from the broken hopes, the baffled efforts, the lost battles of continental freedom. German fugitives, Italian fugitives, French fugitives, Irish fugitives, flying from their persecutors, arrived there and nestled under the broad wing of the old statute. At that period, too, the great Hungarian fugitive, Kossuth, had come, with a host of other Hungarian fugitives at his back, and the town, like the land, had roared and blazed in welcome. All these fugitives, of whatever nation, were safe in Boston. No tyrant could molest them. But the fugitives from the South—the black Americans, men and women, who had fled thither for protection from a tyranny in no wise different from any other, save in its sordid vileness and abominable excess of cruelty and outrage—there was no safety for them.