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

“ May your kind anticipations of me be not disappointed! I am but a plain man. I have nothing in me but honest fidelity to those principles which have made you great, and my most ardent wish is, that my own country may be, if not great as yours, at least as free and as happy, which it will be in the establishment of the same great principles. The sounds that I now hear seem to me the trumpet of resurrection for down-trodden humanity throughout the world.”

What! free as the land where the Bible is refused to every sixth person! Free as the land where it is a crime to teach every sixth person to read! Free as the land where, by statute, every sixth woman may be whipped at the public whipping-post! Free as the land where the murderer of the black man, if the deed is perpetrated only in the presence of blacks, is secure from legal punishment! Free as the land, the banks of whose Mississippi were lit up with the horrid sight, not seen even in Europe for two centuries, of a man torn from the hands of justice and burned in his own blood by a mob, of whom the highest legal authority proclaimed, afterward, that their act was the act of the people, and above the notice of the judiciary! Free as the land, the beautiful surface of whose Ohio was polluted by the fragments of three presses,--the emblems of free speech,--and no tribunal has taken notice of these deeds! Free as the land, whose prairie has drunk in the first Saxon blood shed for the right of free speech for a century and a half,--I mean the blood of Lovejoy! Free as the land where the fugitive dares not proclaim his name in the cities of New England, and skulks in hiding-places until he can conceal himself on board a vessel, and make his way to the kind shelter of Liverpool and London!