Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

On these principles, I am willing to stand before the community in which I was born and brought up,--where I expect to live and die,--where, if I shall ever win any reputation, I expect to earn and to keep it. As a sane man, a Christian man, and a lover of my country, I am willing to be judged by posterity, if it shall ever remember either this meeting or the counsels which were given in its course. I am willing to stand upon this advice to the fugitive slave — baffled in every effort to escape, or bound here by sufficient ties, exiled from the protection of the law, shut out from the churches — to protect himself, and make one last appeal to the humane instincts of his fellow-men. Friends, it is time something should be said on these points. Twenty-six cases--twenty-six slave cases, under this last statute, have taken place in the single State of Pennsylvania. I do not believe one man in a hundred who hears me supposed there were half a dozen cases there. So silently, so much a matter of course, so much without any public excitement, have those slaves been surrendered Should the record be made up for the other States, it would probably be in proportion. Recollect, beside, the cases of kidnapping, not by any means unfrequent, which are so much facilitated by the existence of laws like this. For slaves to stay among us and be surrendered may excite commiseration; but remember, and this is a very important consideration, familiarity with such scenes begets indifference; the tone of public sentiment is lowered; soon cases pass as matters of course, and the community, burnt over with previous excitement, is doubly steeled against all active sympathy with the sufferers. What was usurpation yesterday is precedent to-morrow. When we asked the Supreme Court of Massachusetts to interfere in Sims's behalf, on the ground that the law of 1850 was unconstitutional, they declined, because the law was much the