Of course judgments of courts are binding upon inferior tribunals, and their own executive officers, whose virtue does not prompt them to resign rather than aid in executing an unjust mandate. Over all citizens, whether in public or private station, they will naturally exert, as precedents, an impartial influence. This I admit. But no man, who is not lost to self-respect, and ready to abandon that manhood which is shown in the Heaven-directed countenance, will voluntarily aid in enforcing a judgment which in conscience he believes wrong. He will not hesitate "to obey God rather than men," and calmly abide the peril he provokes. Not lightly, not rashly, will he take the grave responsibility of open dissent; but if the occasion requires, he will not fail. Pains and penalties may be endured, but wrong must not be done. [Cheers.] "Where I cannot obey I am willing to suffer," was the exclamation of the author of "Pilgrim's Progress," when imprisoned for disobedience to an earthly statute. Elsewhere I have said what I now repeat and proclaim on the house-top. Better suffer injustice than do it. Better be even the poor slave returned to bondage than the unhappy Commissioner. [Applause and sensation.]
I repeat, judges are but men, and I know no difference between the claim of power now made for them and that other insulting pretension put forth sometimes in the name of a king and sometimes of a people. Listen to what King James of England once wrote: "It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: good Christians content themselves with his will revealed in his word. So it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that: but rest in that which is the king's revealed will in his law."[137] Thus wrote one who was called "the wisest fool of Christendom." And so we are to rest in that popular will revealed in the Fugitive Slave Act, and ratified by the Supreme Court. The rabble of revolutionary France, in a spirit kindred to that of King James, cried out, as the executioner's cart tracked its way in blood, "We can do what we please,"—adding, "There is no God." Of course, if there were no God, they could not do as they pleased; nor could the king, whose pretension for himself was no better than that of the rabble. But there is a God, to be obeyed in all things, although kings, people, and even courts, assert the contrary.
The whole dogma of passive obedience must be rejected, whatever guise it assumes, under whatever alias it skulks,—whether in tyrannical usurpations of king, parliament, or judicial tribunal,—whether in exploded theories of Sir Robert Filmer, or rampant assumptions of the Fugitive Slave Act. The rights of the civil power are limited; there are things beyond its province; there are matters out of its control; there are cases in which the faithful citizen may say,—ay, must say,—"I will not obey." One of the highest flights of Mirabeau was, when, addressing the National Assembly of France, he protested against a law then pending, and exclaimed, "If you make such a law, I swear never to obey it!"[138] No man now responds to the words of Shakespeare, "If a king bid a man be a villain, he is bound by the indenture of his oath to be one." Nor, in this age of civilization and liberty, will any prudent reasoner, who duly considers the rights of conscience, claim for any earthly magistrate or tribunal, howsoever styled, a power which the loftiest monarch of a Christian throne, wearing on his brow "the round and top of sovereignty," dare not assert.
On this twofold conclusion I rest, and do not doubt the final result. The citizen who has sworn to support the Constitution is constrained to support it simply as he understands it. The citizen whose private life has kept him from assuming the obligations of official oath may bravely set at nought the unrighteous ruling of a magistrate, and, so doing, he will serve justice, though he expose himself to stern penalties.
Fellow-citizens of Massachusetts, our own local history is not without encouragement. In early colonial days, the law against witchcraft, now so abhorrent to reason and conscience, was regarded as constitutional and binding,—precisely as the Fugitive Slave Act, not less abhorrent to reason and conscience, is regarded as constitutional and binding. A special Court of Oyer and Terminer, with able judges, whose names are entwined with our history, enforced this law at Salem by the execution of nineteen persons as witches,—precisely as petty magistrates, acting under sanction of the Supreme Court of the United States, and also of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, have enforced the Fugitive Act by the reduction of two human beings to slavery. The clergy of Massachusetts, particularly near Boston, and also Harvard College, were for the law. "Witchcraft," shouted Cotton Mather from the pulpit, "is the most nefandous high treason," "a capital crime,"—even as opposition to the Fugitive Act has been denounced as "treason." [Laughter.]
But the law against witchcraft was not triumphant long. The General Court of the Province first became penitent, and asked pardon of God for "all the errors of his servants and people in the late tragedy." Jurymen united in condemning and lamenting the delusion to which they had yielded under the decision of the judges, and acknowledged that they had brought the reproach of wrongful bloodshed on their native land. Sewall, one of the judges, and author of the early tract against Slavery, "The Selling of Joseph," whose name lives freshly in his liberty-loving descendant [Hon. S.E. Sewall] [applause], stood up in his place at church, before the congregation, and implored the prayers of the people, that the errors he had committed might not be visited by the judgments of an avenging God on his country, his family, or himself. And now, in a manuscript diary of this departed judge, may be read, on the margin against the contemporary record, in his own handwriting, words of saddest interjection and sorrow: Væ! væ! væ! Woe! woe! woe![139] [Sensation.]
The parallel between the law against witchcraft and the Fugitive Act is not yet complete. It remains for our Legislature, successor of that original General Court, to lead the penitential march. [Laughter.] In the slave cases there have been no jurymen to recant [laughter]; and it is too much, perhaps, to expect any magistrate who sanctioned the cruelty to imitate by public penitence the magnanimity of other days. Yet it is not impossible that future generations may be permitted to read, in some newly exhumed diary or letter by one of these troubled functionaries, words of woe not unlike those wrung from the soul of Sewall. [Sensation.]
Fellow-citizens, one word in conclusion: Be of good cheer. ["That's it!">[ I know well the difficulties and responsibilities of the contest; but not on this account do I bate a jot of heart or hope. [Applause.] At this time, in our country, there is little else to tempt into public life an honest man, who wishes, by something that he has done, to leave the world better than he found it. There is little else to afford any of those satisfactions which an honest man can covet. Nor is there any cause which so surely promises final success. There is nothing good—not a breathing of the common air—which is not on our side. Ours, too, are those great allies described by the poet,—