At this moment the orator and candidate of the day, stalking up in high dudgeon to find what superior attraction had robbed him of his audience, laid eyes upon me. I thought I had seen him before; and verily I had. He was that identical gentleman, the master of the fugitive slave whom I had concealed in my house in Philadelphia, and then clapped into prison for robbing me, whence his master recovered him. There was no mistaking the gentleman: He was a young man of twenty-six or seven, six feet high and one foot wide, long-limbed, with small feet and huge hands, a great shock of Indian-looking hair, vast, solemn black eyes, a mouth wide and square, and a brow that might have suited a patriarch, it was so wide, and lofty, and wrinkled. He was evidently a man destined to shake the walls of the Capitol, and cause stenographers to groan; the Tully shone in his eye, the Demosthenes moved on his lip—there was genius even in the shape of his nose.
"I recollect the man," said he, with a voice that might have come from the bowels of a double-bass, it was so deep, rolling, and sonorous; "he hid my boy Pompey. His name is Longshanks; he is a Quaker, a philanthropist—an abolitionist!"
"Hampden Jones for ever!" cried the delighted sovereigns. "We'll hang him" (meaning me, however, and not the orator) "over the poll-window, and then vote for Hampden Jones, the friend of the law, the friend of the constitution, the friend of the south!"
"Stay, friends," said Hampden Jones, and his voice stilled the tumult; "I have a word to say on the subject of abolition."
"Hampden Jones for ever!" cried the republicans; and Hampden Jones stepped up on the head of a barrel, and stretched forth his right arm. He stretched forth his left also, and then, clinching both fists, and pursing his brows together until the balls beneath them looked like rolling grape-shot, he said,—
"Gentlemen—fellow-freemen of Virginia! The bulwarks of a nation's liberties are the virtues of her children. Compared with these, what is wealth? what is grandeur? what even are power and glory? These—riches and greatness, power and renown—are the possessions of the Old World; yet what have they availed her? Look around that ancient hemisphere, and tell me where among its blood-stained battle-fields! where under its polluted palaces! where in its haunts of the despot and the slave! you can find the love of liberty, the love of law, the love of order, the love of justice, that give permanence to the institutions they adorn, and, like the laurel crown of the Cesars, guard from the thunderbolt the temples they bind in the wreath of honour? Look for them in the Old World, but look in vain. The mighty Colossus of Christendom, once vital with virtue, lifts its decrepit bulk beyond the verge of the Atlantic, a vast and mournful monument of decay! Age and the shocks of the elements, the wash of the tempest and the lightning-stroke, have ploughed its marble forehead with wrinkles; mosses hang from its brows, and the dust of its own ruin—dust animated only by insects and reptiles, the offspring of corruption—moulders over its buried feet! The virtues that once distinguished—that almost deified—the immortal Colossus, have fled from the old, to find their home in the New World. I look for them only in the bosoms of Americans!"
Here the orator, who had pronounced this sublime exordium with prodigious earnestness and effect, paused, while the welkin rung with the shouts of rapture its complimentary close was so well fitted to inspire. As for me, I felt a doleful skepticism as to the justness of the compliment, having the very best reason to distrust that love of liberty, law, order, and justice, which was about to consign me to ropes and flames, without asking the permission of a judge and jury. Moreover, I could not exactly see how Mr. Hampden Jones's remarks on the old and new world had any thing to do with the subject of abolition, which he had risen to discuss; and, indeed, this difficulty seemed to have beset others as well as myself, several crying out with great enthusiasm, "Let's have something on abolition; and then to the Lynching!" while others exclaimed, "Let's have the Lynching first, and the speech afterward."
"Abolition, my fellow-citizens!" said the orator, "it is my intention to address you on the subject of abolition. But first let me apply what I have already said. I have said, and I repeat, that the love of liberty, of law, of order, of justice, belongs peculiarly to the free sons of America. Let me counsel, let me advise, let me entreat you, to have this noble truth in remembrance on this present occasion. Beware lest, in what you now intend to do, you give occasion to the enemies of freedom to doubt your virtue, to suspect the reality of your love of law, order, and justice, to stigmatize you as friends only of riot and outrage."
These words filled me with joyful astonishment. I began to believe the youthful Tully was about to interfere in my favour, to rebuke the violence of his adherents, and so save them from the sin of blood-guiltiness.
So also thought the indignant sovereigns themselves; and many, elevating their voices, demanded furiously, "if he meant to protect the bloody abolitionist?"