And yet there are persons among us who seek to put this great question aside. Some clamor for financial reform, and hold up a tax-bill; others clamor for a modification of the elective franchise, and they hold up the Pope; some speak in the name of old parties, calling themselves Democrats or Whigs; others in the name of a new party, which shall be nameless at present. Surely the people of Massachusetts will not be diverted from the true issue, involving Freedom for broad territories and Freedom for themselves, by holding up a tax-bill or by holding up the Pope. The people of Massachusetts are intelligent and humane.
But above all these is heard the great question, which will not be postponed, Are you for Freedom, or are you for Slavery? “Under which king, Bezonian? Speak or die!” Are you for Freedom, with its priceless blessings, or are you for Slavery, with its countless wrongs and woes? Are you for God, or are you for the Devil?
Fellow-Citizens, I speak plainly; nor can words exhibiting the enormity of Slavery be too plain, whether it be regarded simply in the legislative and judicial decisions by which it is upheld, or in the unquestionable facts by which its character is revealed. It has been my fortune latterly to see Slavery face to face in its own home, in the Slave States; and I take this early opportunity to offer my testimony to the open barbarism which it sanctions. I have seen a human being knocked off at auction on the steps of a court-house, and, as the sale went on, compelled to open his mouth and show his teeth, like a horse; I have been detained in a stage-coach, that our driver might, in the phrase of the country, “help lick a nigger”; and I have been constrained, at public table, to witness the revolting spectacle of a poor slave, yet a child, almost felled to the floor by a blow on the head from a clenched fist. Such incidents were not calculated to shake my original convictions. The distant slaveholder, who, in generous solicitude for that truth which makes for Freedom, feared, that, like a certain Doctor of Divinity, I might, under influence of personal kindness, be hastily swayed from these convictions, may be assured that I saw nothing to change them one tittle, but much to confirm them,--while I was entirely satisfied that here in Massachusetts, where all read, the true character of Slavery is better known than in the Slave States themselves, where ignorance and prejudice close the avenues of knowledge.