It was generally conceded that his was one of the most powerful and impressive speeches of that memorable occasion. We extract the following from it. Said he, “Honorable mayor, whatever ideas of liberty I may have, have been received from reading the lives of your revolutionary fathers. I have therein learned that a man has a right to defend his castle with his life, even unto the taking of life. Sir, my house is my castle; in that castle are none but my wife and my children, as free as the angels of heaven, and whose liberty is as sacred as the pillars of God. If any man approaches that house in search of a slave,—I care not who he may be, whether constable or sheriff, magistrate or even judge of the Supreme Court—nay, let it be he who sanctioned this act to become a law, surrounded by his cabinet as his body-guard, with the Declaration of Independence waving above his head as his banner, and the constitution of his country upon his breast as his shield,—if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting-place, and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. O, no! he cannot enter that house and we both live.”
Such is a portion of the speech, remembered for its singular pathos and boldness, wrung from the lips of one whose soul was kindled with the sense of the outrages heaped upon his helpless race by a people maddened by success.
CHAPTER VIII.
A HIATUS.
His career thus far in life, while generally successful, had also its portion of failures as well as triumphs. Two, of a marked character, occurred about the winter of 1851-2. Their ill success seemed rather to belong to the method pursued in presenting them, than to the capability of the man to make them meritorious.
He had left Pittsburg for New York to make certain arrangements necessary for obtaining a caveat, preparatory to an application to the department at Washington for a patent for an invention, originally his own, for the ascending and descending of a locomotive on an inclined plane, without the aid of a stationary engine. Had he succeeded in his first plan, the second would have been satisfactory. In this piece of mechanism, he was wholly absorbed, and brought it to completion. At length he made it known to his friend, Dr. James McLune Smith, of New York. The doctor, being possessed of talents of high order, and devoted to scientific pursuits, looked favorably upon the plan, and at once proposed to take him to an extensive machine establishment in the city for consultation on the subject.
At this establishment much curiosity, if not real interest, was manifested concerning it. But the reticence which characterizes him in matters in which concealment is necessary in no wise deserting him, and as he revealed but little to the proprietor, himself an inventor, the visit and interview were of no avail.
Not disheartened by this, he applied to a distinguished patent attorney, who, on application for a caveat after all the arrangements necessary, abandoned the effort as being unsatisfactory, leaving the inference to be deduced by Major Delany and his friend Dr. Smith that the only cause of neglect or refusal to entertain the proposition at Washington was, that the applicant must be a citizen of the United States. His own opinion was contrary to the statement of the attorney,—he believing the right to obtain copyrights or patents as not being restricted to the citizens alone, but in the reach of any person, whether American or foreign. He made a subsequent attempt to have it patented, but finally abandoned it.