That, in view of the fact that two branches of the Government have already declared their wish and concurrence in the project of annexation, we deem it our duty distinctly to declare what ought to be, and what we have faith to believe will be, the course of Massachusetts, should the infamous plan be consummated. Deeming the act utterly unconstitutional and void, we declare that the people of this Commonwealth will never submit to it as the law of the land, but look upon the Union as dissolved, and proceed to form a new government for herself and such of the free States as will aid her in carrying out the great purposes of our fathers in behalf of civil liberty. And we call upon the several towns of the Commonwealth, whenever the President shall announce that Texas is annexed to this Union, immediately to assemble and choose delegates for a second session of this Convention, which shall take measures for the formation of a new Union with such States as do not tolerate domestic slavery—the Union of 1789 having then ceased to exist. Lib. 15.18.
The mover sustained this resolution with unpremeditated remarks which the daily press pronounced1 treasonable. He recalled a similar convention on the admission of Missouri, whose protest was embodied by Webster in an address. ‘That movement ended in words, words. Did they mean,’ asked Mr. Garrison, ‘to act that farce over again?’ Charles Francis Adams objected to jeoparding united action by any such radical proposition, and both the Lovejoy and Garrison resolutions were laid on the2 table.
Months passed, during which inaction on the part of the North paved the way to the catastrophe, and sapped the3 courage of the resistants—the political and ‘practical’ resistants. William H. Seward, in a public letter to Salmon P. Chase, submitted in advance to the inevitable 4 annex
