ble us to keep that; to hinder us from disobeying that. So long as laws do this we should obey them; New England will be loyal to such laws.

But the fugitive slave law is one which contradicts the acknowledged precepts of the Christian religion, universally acknowledged. It violates the noblest instincts of humanity; it asks us to trample on the Law of God. It commands what Nature, Religion, and God alike forbid; it forbids what Nature, Religion, and God alike command. It tends to defeat the object of all just human law; it tends to annihilate the observance of the Law of God. So faithful to God, to Religion, to Human Nature, and in the name of Law itself, we protest against this particular statute, and trample it under our feet.

Who is it that oppose the fugitive slave law? Men that have always been on the side of "law and order," and do not violate the statutes of men for their own advantage. This disobedience to the fugitive slave law is one of the strongest guaranties for the observance of any just law. You cannot trust a people who will keep law, because it is law; nor need we distrust a people that will only keep a law when it is just. The fugitive slave law itself, if obeyed will do more to overturn the power of human law, than all disobedience to it-the most complete.

Then as to dissolution of the Union. I [have] thought if any State wished to go, she had a natural

right to do so. But what States wished to go? Certainly not New England: by no means. Massachusetts has always been attached to the Union, has made sacrifices for it. In 1775, if she had said, "There shall be no Revolution," there would have been none. But she furnished nearly half the soldiers for the war, and more than half of the money. In '87, if Massachusetts had said, "Let there be no Union!" there would have been none. It was with difficulty that Massachusetts assented to the Constitution. But that once formed, she has adhered to it; faithfully adhered to the Union. When has Massachusetts failed in allegiance to it? No man can say. There is no danger of a dissolution of the Union; the men who make the cry know that it is vain and deceitful. You cannot drive us

asunder;—just yet.

But suppose that was the alternative: that we must have the fugitive slave law, or dissolution. Which were the worst; which comes nearest to the law of God which we all are to keep. It is very plain. Now for the first time since '87, many men of Massachusetts calculate the value of the Union. What is it worth? Is it worth to us so much as Conscience; so much as Freedom; so much as allegiance to the Law of God? let any man lay his hand on his heart and say, "I will sacrifice all these for the union of the thirty States? For my own part, I would rather see my own house burnt to the

ground, and my family thrown, one by one, amid the blazing rafters of my own roof, and I myself be thrown in last of all, rather than have a single fugitive slave sent back as Thomas Sims was sent back. Nay, I should rather see this Union "dissolved," till there was not a territory so large as the county of Suffolk! Let us lose every thing but fidelity to God.

Mr. Osgood reflects on me for my sermons; they are poor enough. You know it if you try to read such as are in print. I know it better than you. But I am not a going to speak honeyed words and prophesy smooth things in times like these, and say, "Peace! Peace! when there is no peace!"

A little while ago we were told we must not preach on this matter of slavery, because it was "an abstraction;" then because the "North was all right on that subject;" and then because "we had nothing to do with it," "we must go to Charleston or New Orleans to see it." But now it is a most concrete thing. We see what public opinion is on the matter of slavery; what it is in Boston; nay, what it is with members of this Conference. It favors slavery and this wicked law! We need not go to Charleston and New Orleans to see slavery; our own Court House was a barracoon; our officers of this city were slave hunters, and members of Unitarian churches in Boston are kidnappers.

I have in my church black men, fugitive slaves.

They are the crown of my apostleship, the seal of my ministry. It becomes me to look after their bodies in order to "save their souls." This law has brought us into the most intimate connection with the sin of slavery. I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnapper. Yes, gentlemen, I have been obliged to do that; and then to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night. Yes, I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol in my desk, — loaded, a cap on the nipple, and ready for action. Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I have done in Boston; in the middle of the nineteenth century; been obliged to do it to defend the [innocent] members of my own church, women as well

as men!

You know that I do not like fighting. I am no non-resistant, "that nonsense* never went down with me." But it is no small matter which will

compel me to shed human blood. But what could I do? I was born in the little town where the fight and bloodshed of the Revolution began. The bones of the men who first fell in that war are covered by the monument at Lexington, it is "sacred to Liberty

* Mr. May of Syracuse afterwards objected to the word nonsense as applied to non-resistance. The phrase was quoted from another member of the Conference, whose eye caught mine while speaking, and suggested his own language.

and the Rights of Mankind:" those men fell “in the sacred cause of God and their country." This is the first inscription that I ever read. These men were my kindred. My grandfather drew the first sword in the Revolution; my fathers fired the first shot; the blood which flowed there was kindred to this which courses in my veins to-day. Besides that, when I write in my library at home, on the one side of me is the Bible which my fathers prayed over, their morning and their evening prayer, for nearly a hundred years. On the other side there hangs the firelock my grandfather fought with in the old French war, which he carried at the taking of Quebec, which he zealously used at the battle of Lexington, and beside it is another, a trophy of that war, the first gun taken in the Revolution, taken also by my grandfather. With these things before me, these symbols; with these memories in me, when a parishioner, a fugitive from slavery, a woman, pursued by the kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do less than take her in and defend her to the last? But who sought her life—or liberty? A parishioner of my Brother Gannett came to kidnap a member of my church; Mr. Gannett preaches a sermon to justify the fugitive slave law, demanding that it should be obeyed; yes, calling on his church members to kidnap mine, and sell them into bondage forYet all this while Mr. Gannett calls himself "a Christian," and me an "Infidel;" his doctrine is

ever.