It was not until Lovejoy fell, while defending his press at Alton, in November, 1837, that an American citizen was killed by a raging mob for declaring, in a free State, the right of innocent men and women to their personal liberty. This tragedy, like the deadly blow at Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber, twenty years afterward, awed the whole country with a sense of vast and momentous peril. Never since the people of Boston thronged Faneuil Hall on the day after the massacre in State Street, had that ancient hall seen a more solemn and significant assembly. It was the more solemn, the more significant, because the excited multitude was no longer, as in the Revolutionary day, inspired by one unanimous and overwhelming purpose to assert and maintain liberty of speech as the bulwark of all other liberty. It was an unwonted and foreboding scene. An evil spirit was in the air.
When the seemly protest against the monstrous crime had been spoken, and the proper duty of the day was done, a voice was heard,—the voice of the high officer solemnly sworn to prosecute, in the name of Massachusetts, every violation of law, declaring, in Faneuil Hall, sixty years after the battle of Bunker Hill, and amid a howling storm of applause, that an American citizen who was put to death by a mad crowd of his fellow citizens for defending his right of free speech, died as the fool dieth. Boston has seen dark days, but never a moment so dark as that. Seven years before, Webster had said, in the famous words that Massachusetts binds as frontlets between her eyes, "There are Boston and Concord, and Lexington and Bunker Hill, and there they will remain forever." Had they already vanished? Was the spirit of the Revolution quite extinct? In the very Cradle of Liberty did no son survive to awake its slumbering echoes? By the grace of God such a son there was. He had come with the multitude, and he had heard with sympathy and approval the speeches that condemned the wrong; but when the cruel voice justified the murderers of Lovejoy, the heart of the young man burned within him. This speech, he said to himself, must be answered. As the malign strain proceeded, the Boston boy, all on fire, with Concord and Lexington tugging at his heart, unconsciously murmured, "Such a speech in Faneuil Hall must be answered in Faneuil Hall." "Why not answer it yourself?" whispered a neighbor, who overheard him. "Help me to the platform and I will,"—and pushing and struggling through the dense and threatening crowd, the young man reached the platform, was lifted upon it, and, advancing to speak, was greeted with a roar of hostile cries. But riding the whirlwind undismayed, as for many a year afterward he directed the same wild storm, he stood upon the platform in all the beauty and grace of imperial youth,—the Greeks would have said a god descended,—and in words that touched the mind and heart and conscience of that vast multitude, as with fire from heaven, recalling Boston to herself, he saved his native city and her Cradle of Liberty from the damning disgrace of stoning the first martyr in the great struggle for personal freedom. "Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton, side by side with Otis and Hancock, and Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American—the slanderer of the dead." And even as he spoke the vision was fulfilled. Once more its native music rang through Faneuil Hall. In the orator's own burning words, those pictured lips did break into immortal rebuke. In Wendell Phillips, glowing with holy indignation at the insult to America and to man, John Adams and James Otis, Josiah Quincy and Samuel Adams, though dead, yet spake.
In the annals of American speech there had been no such scene since Patrick Henry's electrical warning to George the Third. It was that greatest of oratorical triumphs when a supreme emotion, a sentiment which is to mold a people anew, lifted the orator to adequate expression. Three such scenes are illustrious in our history: that of the speech of Patrick Henry at Williamsburg, of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall, of Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg,—three, and there is no fourth.
ON THE DISPOSAL OF PUBLIC LANDS
From reports of the Webster-Hayne debate in the United States Senate,
January, 1830
BY ROBERT Y. HAYNE
In 1825 the gentleman told the world that the public lands "ought not to be treated as a treasure." He now tells us that "they must be treated as so much treasure." What the deliberate opinion of the gentleman on this subject may be, belongs not to me to determine; but I do not think he can, with the shadow of justice or propriety, impugn my sentiments, while his own recorded opinions are identical with my own. When the gentleman refers to the conditions of the grants under which the United States have acquired these lands, and insists that, as they are declared to be "for the common benefit of all the States," they can only be treated as so much treasure, I think he has applied a rule of construction too narrow for the case. If, in the deeds of cession, it has been declared that the grants were intended "for the common benefit of all the States," it is clear, from other provisions, that they were not intended merely as so much property; for it is expressly declared that the object of the grants is the erection of new States; and the United States, in accepting this trust, bind themselves to facilitate the foundation of those States, to be admitted into the Union with all the rights and privileges of the original States.
This, sir, was the great end to which all parties looked, and it is by the fulfillment of this high trust that "the common benefit of all the States" is to be best promoted. Sir, let me tell the gentleman that, in the part of the country in which I live, we do not measure political benefits by the money standard. We consider as more valuable than gold, liberty, principle, and justice. But, sir, if we are bound to act on the narrow principles contended for by the gentleman, I am wholly at a loss to conceive how he can reconcile his principles with his own practice. The lands are, it seems, to be treated "as so much treasure," and must be applied to the "common benefit of all the States." Now, if this be so, whence does he derive the right to appropriate them for partial and local objects? How can the gentleman consent to vote away immense bodies of these lands for canals in Indiana and Illinois, to the Louisville and Portland Canal, to Kenyon College in Ohio, to schools for the deaf and dumb, and other objects of a similar description?
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
From "Speeches and Presidential Addresses," Current Literature
Publishing Company, New York.