[58]
the surrender of Thomas Sims by the city, its sanction of the cowardly and lying policy of the police, its servile and volunteer zeal in behalf of the man-hunters, and its deliberate, wanton, and avowed violation of the laws of the Commonwealth, for the basest of all purposes,--slave-trading, selling a free man into bondage, that State Street and Milk Street might make money.
Next we come to that man [
John P. Bigelow] who stood at yonder door, looking on, while
George Thompson was mobbed from this platform; who, neither
an honorable Mayor nor a gentleman, broke at once his oath of office and his promise as a gentleman to give us this hall for certain eighty dollars to be paid him, and when he had stood by and seen us mobbed out of it, thought he mended his character by confessing his guilt, in not daring to send in a bill
Resolved, That the circumstances of the case will not allow us to believe that this infamous deed was the act of the City Government only; and then, as Boston-born men, some of us, comforting ourselves in the reflection that the fawning sycophant who disgraced the Mayor's chair was not born on the peninsula whose fair fame he blotted; but all the facts go to show, that in this, as in all his life, he was now the easy and shuffling tool of the moneyed classes, and therefore too insignificant to be remembered with any higher feeling than contempt.
Resolved, That we cherish a deep and stern indignation towards the judges of the Commonwealth, who, in personal cowardice, pitiful subserviency, utter lack of official dignity, and entire disregard of their official oaths, witnessed in silence the violation of laws they were bound to enforce, and disgraced the Bench once honored by the presence of a Sedgwick and a Sewall.
I do not forget that the
Church, all the while this melancholy scene was passing, stood by and upheld a merciless people in the execution of an inhuman law, accepted the barbarity, and baptized it “ Christian duty.”