You
find friends, and begin to hope that you may be allowed to remain
and work, if you prove yourself industrious and well behaved.
Suddenly, you find yourself arrested and chained. Soldiers escort
you through the streets of Boston, and put you on board a Southern
ship, to be sent back to your master. When you arrive, he orders you
to be flogged so unmercifully, that the doctor says you will die if
they strike another blow. The philanthropic city of Boston hears the
bloody tidings, and one of her men in authority says to the public:
"Fugitive slaves are a class of foreigners, with whose rights
Massachusetts has nothing to do. It is enough for _us_, that they
have no right to be _here_."[1] And the merchants of Boston cry,
Amen.
[Footnote 1: Said by the U.S. Commissioner, George Ticknor Curtis,
at a Union Meeting, in the Old Cradle of Liberty.]
Legislators of Massachusetts! if _you_ had been thus continually
robbed of your rights by the hand of violence, what would _you_
think of the compact between North and South to perpetuate your
wrongs, and transmit them to your posterity? Would you not regard it
as a league between highwaymen, who had "no rights that you were
bound to respect"? I put the question plainly and directly to your
consciences and your common sense, and they will not allow you to
answer, No.
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