Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

We have just closed a war for the perpetuity of slavery (every man, North or South, acknowledges it),a war which even the Senate of the United States pronounced wicked and unnecessary; which the noblest intellects of the land have reprobated; which all parties have justified on the ground of its necessity to preserve the Union by aiding slavery, and not on the ground of justice, of humanity, or of liberty. What does he say of it? “Take, for instance, the glorious,” --we sent out a party from a slave State across to Mexican territories: we, Protestants, set up slavery on the soil which Catholics had purged from the stain,--“Take, for instance, the glorious struggle you had not long ago with Mexico, in which General Scott drove the President of that Republic from his capital.” Mark you that language! I shall have occasion to refer to it again.

“ I know how to read your people's heart. It is so easy to read it, because it is open like Nature, and unpolluted (!) like a virgin's heart (!!). Many others shut their ears to the cry of oppressed humanity, because they regard duties but through the glass of petty interests. Your people has that instinct of justice and generosity (!) which is the stamp of mankind's heavenly origin; and it is conscious of your country's power; it is jealous of its own dignity; it knows that it has the power to restore the law of nations to the principles of justice and right; and knowing itself to have the power, it is willing to be as good as it is powerful.”

These are the twenty millions of people whom George Thompson, with such striking truth, has described as engaged in one great slave hunt, with their President at their head, pursuing a poor, trembling fugitive, flying for refuge to the flag of Great Britain, on the other side of the lakes. “Your people have that instinct of justice ”