Theodore Parker

“ It is true, George Jeffreys, and these are not thy kin. Forgive me that I should send thee on such an errand, or bid thee seek companionship with such—with Boston hunters of the slave! Thou wert not base enough! It was a great bribe that tempted thee! Again I say, pardon me for sending thee to keep company with such men! Thou only struckst at men accused of crime; not at men accused only of their birth! Thou wouldst not send a man into bondage for two pounds! I will not rank thee with men who, in Boston, for ten dollars, would enslave a negro now! ”

“ I will do it as readily as I would lift a man out of the water, or pluck him from the teeth of a wolf, or snatch him from the hands of a murderer. What is a fine of a thousand dollars, and jailing for six months, to the liberty of a man? My money perish with me, if it stand between me and the eternal law of God. I trust there are manly men enough in this house to secure the freedom of every fugitive slave in Boston, without breaking a limb or rending a garment. ”

“ If you wish to kill a man, it is not bread you buy: it is poison. Some of the instruments of Government were such as one does not often look upon. But, of old time, an inquisitor was always 'a horrid-looking fellow, as beseemed his trade.' It is only justice that a kidnapper should bear 'his great commission in his look.'"
"I pity the kidnappers, the poor tools of men almost as base. I would not hurt a hair of their heads; but I would take the thunder of the moral world, and dash its bolted lightning on this crime of stealing men, till the name of kidnapping should be like Sodom and Gomorrah. ”

“ What a pity that the fugitive slave bill judge was not himself the grand-jury, to order the indictment! what a shame that the attorney was not a petty jury to convict! Then New England, like Old, might have had her "bloody assizes," and Boston streets might have streamed with the heart's gore of noble men and women; and human heads might have decked the pinnacles all round the town; and Judge Curtis and Attorney Hallett might have had their place with Judge Jeffreys and John Boilman of old. ”

“ You are to decide whether you will spread Slavery and the Consequences of Slavery all over the North; whether Boston, New England, all the North, shall kidnap other Ellen Crafts, other Thomas Sims, other Anthony Burns,—whether Sharkey and Grier, and Kane and Curtis, shall be Tyrants over you—forbidding all Freedom of Speech: or whether Right and Justice, the Christian Religion, the natural service of the Infinite God shall bless our wide land with the numberless Beatitudes of Humanity. ”

“ The fugitive has been a slave before: does the wrong you committed yesterday, give you a natural right to commit wrong afresh and continually? Because you enslaved this man's father, have you a natural right to enslave his child? The same right you would have to murder a man because you butchered his father first. The right to murder is as much transmissible by inheritance as the right to enslave! It is plain to me that it is the natural duty of citizens to rescue every fugitive slave from the hands of the marshal who essays to return him to bondage ”

“ Who can fail to see that the government would cease to be a government if it were to yield obedience to those local opinions? While it stands, all its laws must be faithfully executed, or it becomes the mere tool of the strongest faction of the place and the hour. If forcible resistance to one law be permitted practically to repeal it, the power of the mob would inevitably become one of the constituted authorities of the State, to be used against any law or any man obnoxious to the interests and passions of the worst or most excited part of the community ”

“ I have sometimes been amazed at the talk of men who call on us to keep the fugitive slave law, one of the most odious laws in a world of odious laws—a law not fit to be made or kept. I have been amazed that they should dare to tell us the law of God, writ on the heavens and our hearts, never demanded we should disobey the laws of men! ”

“ The price to pay is the religious integrity of fifteen million men; the thing to buy is a privilege for three hundred thousand slaveholders to use the North as a hunting field whereon to kidnap men at our cost. Judge you of that bargain."
"I adjure you to reverence a government that is right, statutes that are right, officers that are right; but to disobey every thing that is wrong. I intreat you by your love for your country, by the memory of your fathers, by your reverence for Jesus Christ, yea, by the deep and holy love of God which Jesus taught, and you now feel." ”

“ If a man undertakes to murder or steal a man, it is the duty of the bystanders to help their brother, who is in peril, against wrong from the two-legged man, as much as against the four-legged beast. But suppose the invader who seizes the man is an officer of the United States, has a commission in his pocket, a warrant for his deed in his hand, and seizes as a slave a man who has done nothing to alienate his natural rights—does that give him any more natural right to enslave a man than he had before? Can any piece of parchment make right wrong, and wrong right? ”

“ Your verdict is to vindicate Religion with Freedom of Speech, and condemn the stealing of men; or else to confirm Kidnapping and condemn Religion with Freedom of Speech. You are to choose whether you will have such men as Wendell Phillips for your advisers, or such as Benjamin F. Hallett and Benjamin R. Curtis for your masters, with the marshal's guard, for their appropriate servants. Do you think I doubt how you will choose?
Already a power of iniquity clutches at your children's throat; stabs at their life—at their soul's life. I stand between the living tyrant and his living victim ”

“ But, forgive me! you cannot commit such a crime against Humanity. Pardon the monstrous figure of my speech,—it is only conceivable, not also possible. These Judges could do it—their speeches, their actions, that Charge, this Indictment, proves all that—but you cannot;—not you. You are the Representatives of the People, the Country, not idiotic in Conscience and the Affections.
Gentlemen, I am a minister of Religion. It is my function to teach what is absolutely true and absolutely right. I am the servant of no sect,—how old soever, venerable and widely spread. ”

“ It is not merely whether we shall return fugitive slaves without trial by jury. We will not return them with trial by jury! neither 'with alacrity,' nor with the 'solemnity of judicial proceedings!' It is not merely whether slavery shall be extended or not. By and by there will be a political party with a wider basis than the free soil party, who will declare that the nation itself must put an end to slavery in the nation; and if the Constitution of the United States will not allow it, there is another Constitution that will. ”

“ But neither Attorney nor Judge dares accuse me of ill-will which would harm another man, or of selfishness that seeks my own private advantage. No, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am on trial for my love of Justice; for my respect to the natural Rights of Man; for speaking a word in behalf of what the Declaration of Independence calls the "self-evident" Truth,—that all men have a natural, equal, and unalienable Right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. ”

“ Let us look at the public conduct of any commissioner who will send an innocent man from Boston into slavery. I would speak of all men charitably; for I know how easy it is to err, yea, to sin. I can look charitably on thieves, prowling about in darkness; on rum-sellers, whom poverty compels to crime; on harlots, who do the deed of shame that holy woman's soul abhors and revolts at; I can pity the pirate, who scours the seas doing his fiendish crimes—he is tempted, made desperate by a gradual training in wickedness. ”

“ Cromwell and Blake are names not likely to perish while men can appreciate the heroism which sheds blood. But Westminster Hall has rung with more important thunder than cannon ever spoke, and Pym and Selden, St. John and Hampden—nay, Penn, Bunyan, Fox, Lilburne—have done great service for mankind. Gentlemen of the Jury, it is a matter of great magnitude which hinges on the small question of fact and law to-day. You are to open or shut for Humanity. If the People make themselves sheep there will be wolves enough to eat you up. ”

“ One thing more I think is very plain, that the fugitive has the same natural right to defend himself against the slave-catcher, or his constitutional tool, that he has against a murderer or a wolf. The man who attacks me to reduce me to slavery, in that moment of attack alienates his right to life, and if I were the fugitive, and could escape in no other way, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would drive a mosquito from my face. It is high time this was said. What grasshoppers we are before the statute of men! what Goliaths against the law of God! ”

“ Suppose the judge should be drunk and declare the fugitive slave bill in perfect harmony with the Sermon on the Mount, those noble words "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them,"—are jurors to believe him? What if the judge should be sober, and declare it a "misdemeanor" to call the fugitive slave bill a wicked and hateful statute, and all who thus offended should be put in jail for twelve months! Are honest men to take such talk for American law? ”

“ Nay, all the atrocities of the Saint Bartholomew Massacres, Gentlemen, they were "not immoral," for "the Standard of Morality" is "that which the law prescribes." So any legislature that can frame an act, any tyrant who can issue a decree, any court which can deliver an "opinion," can at once nullify the legislation of the Universe and "dissolve the union" of Man and God: "Religion has nothing to do with politics; there it makes men mad." Is that the doctrine of Young Massachusetts? ”

“ I am on trial because I hate Slavery, because I love freedom for the black man, for the white man, and for all the human Race. I am not arraigned because I have violated the statute on which the indictment is framed—no child could think it—but because I am an advocate of Freedom, because my Word, my Thoughts, my Feelings, my Actions, nay, all my Life, my very Existence itself, are a protest against Slavery. Despotism cannot happily advance unless I am silenced. ”