The same speaker protests against the return of Simms.
“Where shall I find a parallel with men who will do such a deed—do it in Boston? I will open the tombs and bring up most hideous tyrants from the dead. Come, brood of monsters, let me bring up from the deep damnation of the graves wherein your hated memories continue for all time their never-ending rot. Come, birds of evil omen! come, ravens, vultures, carrion crows, and see the spectacle! come, see the meeting of congenial souls! I will disturb, disquiet, and bring up the greatest monsters of the human race! Tremble not, women! They cannot harm you now! Fear the living, not the dead!”
Come hither, Herod, the wicked. Thou that didst seek after that young child’s life, and destroyed the innocents! Let me look on thy face! No, go! Thou wert a heathen! Go, lie with the innocents thou hast massacred. Thou art too good for this company! “Come, Nero; thou awful Roman emperor, come up! No, thou wast drunk with power! schooled in Roman depravity. Thou hadst, besides, the example of thy fancied gods. Go, wait another day. I will seek a worse man.
“Come hither, St. Dominic! come, Torquemada; fathers of the Inquisition! merciless monsters, seek your equal here. No; pass by. You are no companion for such men as these. You were the servants of the atheistic popes, of cruel kings. Go to, and get you gone. Another time I may have work for you—now, lie there, and persevere to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this comparison. Go, get you gone, lest the sun goes back at sight of ye!
“Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffries! thy hands deep purple with the blood of thy fellow-men. Ah! I know thee, awful and accursed shade! Two hundred years after thy death men hate thee still, not without cause. Look me upon thee! I know thy history. Pause, and be still, while I tell to these men. * * * Come, shade of judicial butcher. Two hundred years, thy name has been pillowed in face of the world, and thy memory gibbeted before mankind. Let us see how thou wilt compare with those who kidnap men in Boston. Go, seek companionship with them. Go, claim thy kindred if such they be. Go, tell them that the memory of the wicked shall rot; that there is a God; an eternity; ay, and a judgment, too, where the slave may appeal against him that made him a slave, to Him that made him a man.
“What! Dost thou shudder? Thou turn back! These not thy kindred! Why dost thou turn pale, as when the crowd clutched at thy life in London street? Forgive me, that I should send thee on such an errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe that tempted thee! Again, I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep company with such men! Thou only struckest at men accused of crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! Rest still, Herod! Be quiet, Nero! Sleep, St. Dominic, and sleep, O Torquemada, in your fiery jail! Sleep, Jeffries, underneath ‘the altar of the church’ which seeks, with Christian charity to hide your hated bones!”
William H. Seward’s Speech on the Higher Law.
In the U. S. Senate, March 11, 1850.
“But it is insisted that the admission of California shall be attended by a COMPROMISE of questions which have arisen out of SLAVERY! I am opposed to any such compromise in any and all the forms in which it has been proposed. Because, while admitting the purity and the patriotism of all from whom it is my misfortune to differ, I think all legislative compromises radically wrong, and essentially vicious. They involve the surrender of the exercise of judgment and the conscience on distinct and separate questions, at distinct and separate times, with the indispensable advantages it affords for ascertaining the truth. They involve a relinquishment of the right to reconsider in future the decision of the present, on questions prematurely anticipated. And they are a usurpation as to future questions of the providence of future legislators.