Essays, Henry David Thoreau [ebook reader with android os txt] 📗

heard the voice of Freedom of late? Next week will answer.

“Poor, cold, winter-ridden New Hampshire⁠—winter-killed, I like to have said⁠—she will be there, barefoot, and barelegged, making tracks like her old bloody-footed volunteers at Trenton. She will be there, if she can work her passage. I guess her minstrelsy will⁠—for birds can go independently of car, or tardy stagecoach.⁠—”

“Let them come as Macaulay says they did to the siege of Rome, when they did not leave old men and women enough to begin the harvests. Oh how few we should be, if every soul of us were there. How few, and yet it is the entire muster-roll of Freedom for all the land. We should have to beat up for recruits to complete the army of Gideon, or the platoon at the Spartan straits. The foe are like the grasshoppers for multitude, as for moral power. Thick grass mows the easier, as the Goth said of the enervated millions of falling Rome. They can’t stand too thick, nor too tall for the anti-slavery scythe. Only be there at the mowing.”

In noticing the doings of another Convention, he thus congratulates himself on the liberty of speech which anti-slavery concedes to all⁠—even to the Folsoms and Lamsons:⁠—

“Denied a chance to speak elsewhere, because they are not mad after the fashion, they all flock to the anti-slavery boards as a kind of asylum. And so the poor old enterprise has to father all the oddity of the times. It is a glory to anti-slavery that she can allow the poor friends the right of speech. I hope she will always keep herself able to afford it. Let the constables wait on the state house, and jail, and the meeting houses. Let the doorkeeper at the Anti-Slavery Hall be that tall, celestial-faced woman, that carries the flag on the National Standard, and says, ‘without concealment,’ as well as ‘without compromise.’ Let everybody in who has sanity enough to see the beauty of brotherly kindness, and let them say their fantasies, and magnanimously bear with them, seeing unkind pro-slavery drives them in upon us. We shall have saner and sensibler meetings then, than all others in the land put together.

More recently, speaking of the use which some of the clergy have made of Webster’s plea in the Girard case, as a seasonable aid to the church, he proceeds:

“Webster is a great man, and the clergy run under his wing. They had better employ him as counsel against the Comeouters. He wouldn’t trust the defence on the Girard will plea though, if they did. He would not risk his fame on it, as a religious argument. He would go and consult William Bassett, of Lynn, on the principles of the ‘Comeouters,’ to learn their strength; and he would get him a testament, and go into it as he does into the Constitution, and after a year’s study of it he would hardly come off in the argument as he did from the conflict with Carolina Hayne. On looking into the case, he would advise the clergy not to go to trial⁠—to settle⁠—or, if they couldn’t, to ‘leave it out’ to a reference of ‘orthodox deacons.’ ”

We will quote from the same sheet his indignant and touching satire on the funeral of those public officers who were killed by the explosion on board the Princeton, together with the President’s slave; an accident which reminds us how closely slavery is linked with the government of this nation. The President coming to preside over a nation of free men, and the man who stands next to him a slave!

“I saw account,” says he, “of the burial of those slaughtered politicians. The hearses passed along, of Upshur, Gilmer, Kennon, Maxcy, and Gardner⁠—but the dead slave, who fell in company with them on the deck of the Princeton, was not there. He was held their equal by the impartial gun-burst, but not allowed by the bereaved nation a share in the funeral.⁠ ⁠… Out upon their funeral, and upon the paltry procession that went in its train. Why didn’t they enquire for the body of the other man who fell on that deck! And why hasn’t the nation inquired, and its press? I saw account of the scene in a barbarian print, called the Boston Atlas, and it was dumb on the absence of that body, as if no such man had fallen. Why, I demand in the name of human nature, was that sixth man of the game brought down by that great shot, left unburied and aboveground⁠—for there is no account yet that his body has been allowed the right of sepulture.⁠ ⁠… They didn’t bury him even as a slave. They didn’t assign him a jim-crow place in that solemn procession, that he might follow to wait upon his enslavers in the land of spirits. They have gone there without slaves or waiters.⁠ ⁠… The poor black man⁠—they enslaved and imbruted him all his life, and now he is dead, they have, for aught appears, left him to decay and waste aboveground. Let the civilized world take note of the circumstance.”

We deem such timely, pure, and unpremeditated expressions of a public sentiment, such publicity of genuine indignation and humanity, as abound everywhere in this journal, the most generous gifts which a man can make, and should be glad to see the scraps from which we have quoted, and the others which we have not seen, collected into a volume. It might, perchance, penetrate into some quarters which the unpopular cause of freedom has not reached.

Long may we hear the voice of this Herald.

H. D. T.

Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum

Letter to the editor of The Liberator, March 28, 1845.

Mr. Editor:⁠—

We have now, for the third winter, had our spirits refreshed, and our faith in the destiny of the Commonwealth strengthened, by the presence and the eloquence of Wendell Phillips; and we wish to tender to him our thanks and our