Epigraphs
The Saint, whose fate yet hangs in suspense, but whose martyrdom, if it shall be perfected, will make the gallows glorious like the Cross. --Ralph Waldo Emerson.
He was one who recognized no unjust human laws, but resisted them as he was bid. No man in America has ever stood up so persistently for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for man, and the equal of any and all governments. He could not have been tried by his peers, for his peers did not exist. --Henry D. Thoreau.
God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon, and say to the American people that, whether that old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered about him, and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac, doubly dear now to History and to Man! The dust of Washington rests there; and History will see forever on that river side the brave old man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his Country would be proud to make room for beside his own. Wendell Phillips.