to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.” If
such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of a citizen with
impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the State; he bears
the sword in vain.[112] The Governor of Massachusetts is a trifler; the
State-House in Boston is a play-house; the General Court is a dishonored
body, if they make laws which they cannot execute. The great-hearted
Puritans have left no posterity. The rich men may walk in State Street,
but they walk without honor; and the farmers may brag their democracy
in the country, but they are disgraced men. If the State has no power
to defend its own people in its own shipping, because it has delegated
that power to the Federal Government, has it no representation in the
Federal Government?[113] Are those men dumb? I am no lawyer, and cannot
indicate the forms applicable to the case, but here is something which
transcends all forms. Let the senators and representatives of the State,
containing a population of a million freemen, go in a body before the
Congress and say that they have a demand to make on them, so imperative
that all functions of government must stop until it is satisfied. If
ordinary legislation cannot reach it, then extraordinary must be applied.
The Congress should instruct the President to send to those ports of
Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans such orders and such force as should
release, forthwith, all such citizens of Massachusetts as were holden
in prison without the allegation of any crime, and should set on foot
the strictest inquisition to discover where such persons, brought into
slavery by these local laws at any time heretofore, may now be. That
first; and then, let order be taken to indemnify all such as have been
incarcerated. As for dangers to the Union, from such demands!—the Union
already is at an end when the first citizen of Massachusetts is thus
outraged. Is it an union and covenant in which the State of Massachusetts
agrees to be imprisoned, and the State of Carolina to imprison?[114]
Gentlemen, I am loath to say harsh things, and perhaps I know too little
of politics for the smallest weight to attach to any censure of mine,—but
I am at a loss how to characterize the tameness and silence of the two
senators and the ten representatives of the State at Washington. To what
purpose have we clothed each of those representatives with the power of
seventy thousand persons, and each senator with near half a million,
if they are to sit dumb at their desks and see their constituents
captured and sold;—perhaps to gentlemen sitting by them in the hall?
There is a scandalous rumor that has been swelling louder of late
years,—perhaps wholly false,—that members are bullied into silence by
Southern gentlemen. It is so easy to omit to speak, or even to be absent
when delicate things are to be handled. I may as well say, what all men
feel, that whilst our very amiable and very innocent representatives
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