Appendix I.
On page [137] I have alluded to Hon. J. G. Palfrey. He evinced his respect for the rights of man by an act which was incomparably more significant and convincing than the most eloquent words could have been. On the death of his father, who was a slaveholder in Louisiana, he became heir to one third of the estate, comprising about fifty slaves. His co-heirs would readily have taken his share of these chattels and have given him an equivalent in land or money. But he was too conscientious to consent to such a bargain. If his portion of his father’s bondmen should thereafter continue in slavery, it must be by an act of his own will, and involve him in the crime of making merchandise of men. From this his whole soul revolted. Accordingly, he requested that such a division of the slaves might be made as would put the largest number of them into his share. The money value of the women, children, and old men being much less than that of the able-bodied men, twenty-two of the slaves were assigned to him. I presume their market value could not have been less than nine thousand dollars. All of them were brought on, at Mr. Palfrey’s expense, from Louisiana to Massachusetts.
Assisted by his Abolitionist friends, especially Mrs. L. M. Child, Mrs. E. G. Loring, and the Hathaways of Farmington, N. Y., and their Quaker friends, he succeeded after a while in getting them all well situated in good families, where the old were kindly cared for, the able-bodied adults were employed and duly remunerated for their labors, and the young were brought up to be worthy and useful. It has been my happiness to be personally acquainted with some of them and their friends, and to know that what I have stated above is true. Their transportation from Louisiana to Massachusetts; their maintenance here until places were found for them; and their removal to their several homes, must have cost Mr. Palfrey several hundred dollars,—I suppose eight or ten hundred. If so, he nobly sacrificed ten thousand dollars’ worth of his patrimony to his sense of right and his love of liberty.
In 1847 this excellent man was elected a Representative of Massachusetts in the Congress of the United States. As those who knew him best confidently expected, he early took high antislavery ground there.
The following are extracts from his first speech in Congress: “The question is not at all between North and South, but between the many millions of non-slaveholding Americans, North, South, East, and West, and the very few hundreds of thousands of their fellow-citizens who hold slaves. It is time that this idea of a geographical distinction of parties, with relation to this subject, was abandoned. It has no substantial foundation. Freedom, with its fair train of boundless blessings for white and black,—slavery, with its untold miseries for both,—these are the two parties in the field.... I will now only express my deliberate and undoubting conviction, that the time has quite gone by when the friends of slavery might hope anything from an attempt to move the South to disunion for its defence.... I do not believe it is good policy for the slaveholders to let their neighbors hear them talk of disunion. Unless I read very stupidly the signs of the times, it will not be the Union they will thus endanger, but the interest to which they would sacrifice it. If they insist that the Union and slavery cannot live together, they may be taken at their word, but it is the Union that must stand.”
At its close, the Hon. J. Q. Adams is reported to have exclaimed: “Thank God the seal is broken! Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.” And “the old man eloquent” died at his post a month afterwards.