Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)Parker, Theodore
Religion
Speeches, Addresses, and Occasional Sermons, Volume 2 (of 3)
Parker, Theodore
Sermons, American; Unitarianism
Then the calculator begins to remember past times--opens the
account-books and turns back to old charges: five slaves count the same
as three freemen, and the three million slaves, which at home are
nothing but property, entitle their owners to as many representatives in
Congress as are now sent by all the one million eight hundred thousand
freemen who make the entire population of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,
Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, and have created a vast amount of
property worth more than all the slave States put together! Then the
North must deliver up the fugitive slaves, and Ohio must play the
traitor, the kidnapper, the bloodhound, for Kentucky! The South wanted
to make two slave States out of Florida, and will out of Texas; she
makes slavery perpetual in both; she is always bragging as if she made
the Revolution, while she only laid the Embargo, and began the late war
with England,--but that is going further back than is needful. The South
imprisons our colored sailors in her ports, contrary to justice, and
even contrary to the Constitution. She drove our commissioners out of
South Carolina and Louisiana, when they were sent to look into the
matter and legally seek for redress. She affronts the world with a most
odious despotism, and tried to make the English return her runaway
slaves, making the nation a reproach before the world; she insists on
kidnapping men even in Boston; she declares that we shall not abolish
slavery in the capital of the Union; that she will extend it in spite of
us from sea to sea. She annexed Texas for a slave-pasture, and then made
the Mexican war to enlarge that pasture, but the North must pay for it;
she treads the Constitution under her feet, the North under her feet,
justice and the unalienable rights of man under her feet.
The North has charged all these items and many more; now they are
brought up for settlement, and, if not cancelled, will not be forgot
till the Muse of History gives up the ghost; some Northern men have the
American sentiment, and the American idea, put the man before the
dollar, counting man the substance, property the accident. The sentiment
and idea of liberty are bottomed on Christianity, as that on human
nature; they are quite sure to prevail; the spirit of the nation is on
their side--the spirit of the age and the everlasting right.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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