CHAP. II. 1842. 1842; Lid. 12:23. Jan. 28. ler; ante, 2:370. your friend is 'mightily popular among the Irish of Lowell,' though he is personally unknown to almost every mother's son of them. They have probably heard of his 'blarney,' let off in their behalf on sundry occasions and in various places." The production of this ark of the covenant was certainly Jan. 26-23, among the thrilling incidents of the three days of "highned feeling, triumphant enthusiasm, and complete satisfaction," occupied by the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society. It took place in Faneuil Hall, before a great gathering, in which one seemed to discern large Lib. 12:18. numbers of friendly Irishmen in a proper state of excitement. Mr. Garrison, who presided, read the Address J. P. Mil- with due emphasis, we may be sure. Colonel Miller spoke to it, alleging Irish blood in his Vermont veins. Bradburn, confessing himself the son of an Irishman, moved a resolution of sympathy with Ireland, then in the throes of the Repeal agitation. James Cannings Fuller, an actual old-countryman, told how he "stood in our Feb. 5, 1800. Irish House of Peers when Castlereagh took the bribe for the betrayal of Ireland." Wendell Phillips, with only the credentials of his eloquence, joined in what (but for its sincerity) might be called the "blarney" of the occasion. To no purpose, so far as the immediate object was concerned. On February 27, 1842, Mr. Garrison (whose Ante, 1:14. Irish descent might also have been paraded) wrote to Ante, 2:340. Richard Webb by the hand of Thomas Davis: MS. "Our meeting in Faneuil Hall, to unroll the Irish Address, with its sixty thousand signatures, was indescribably enthusiastic, and has produced a great impression on the public mind. I am sorry to add, and you will be not less ashamed to hear, Lib. 12:27, that the two Irish papers in Boston sneer at the Address, and denounce it and the abolitionists in true pro-slavery style. I Lib. 13:19, fear they will keep the great mass of your countrymen here from uniting with us." 29, 33. 29. Not only was the Irish press everywhere unanimous in this attitude, but the foremost Catholic prelate in the land, Lib. 12:43, Bishop Hughes of New York, impugned the genuineness of the Address, and, genuine or not, declared it the duty 47. " 1842. 50, 82, of every naturalized Irishman to resist and repudiate it CHAP. II. with indignation, as emanating from a foreign source. All the Irish Repeal associations at the South partic- Lib. 12:47, ularly took the same line, with explicit devotion to the existing "institutions" of their adopted country, however much they might deprecate slavery in the abstract. In short, the Address was no more successful than we can suppose a similar one, headed by Parnell in these days, would be, urging the Irish to abjure the "spoils system and to cling to the civil-service reformers. At a second, widely advertised exhibition of the Address in Boston in April, with Bradburn "trying the experiment" and Phillips assisting, hardly any Irish were visible even to the Lib. 12:59. eye of faith. The instinct of this, the lowest class of the white population at the North, taught it that to acknowledge the brotherhood of the negro was to take away the sole social superiority that remained to it, to say nothing of the forfeiture of its political opportunity through the Democratic Party. When the summer heat had brought the customary tendency to popular turbulence in this country, the Irish rabble of Philadelphia made their inarticulate, but perfectly intelligible, reply to the Address, by Lib. 12: 123, murderous rioting, directed in the first instance against a peaceable colored First of August procession, and ending with the burning of a "Beneficial Hall" built for moral purposes by one of the more prosperous of the persecuted -a close parallel to the destruction of Pennsylvania Ante, 2 : 216. Hall.1 The meeting in Faneuil Hall (for we must return to it) 126, 130, 138, 139. had for its main object to urge abolition in the District Lib. 12:18. of Columbia. As it fell to Mr. Garrison to preside, so to him was intrusted the drawing up of the resolutions. 1 For instance, the firemen would throw no water on the hall or on a colored meeting-house which was also fired. The day following these scenes (Aug. 3) the Grand Jury presented as a nuisance a new temperance hall for the colored people, because it had twice been fired; and ordered it torn down to avoid a third attempt! (Lib. 12: 126, 130, 133, 134, 138, 146.) The only Philadelphia clergyman who made this shocking outbreak the subject of a discourse was the Unitarian William H. Furness (Lib. 12:138). 1842. CHAP. II. These asserted once more the power of the Federal Government over the District; noticed the insolent exclusion of memorials on this subject emanating from the Legislatures of Massachusetts and Vermont; and (amid immense applause) returned thanks to John Quincy Adams for his bold and indefatigable advocacy of the right of petition. The following may not be summarized : Lib. 12:18. "7. Resolved, That when the Senators and Representatives of this Commonwealth, in Congress, find themselves deprived of the liberty of speech on its floor, and prohibited from defending the right of their constituents to petition that body in a constitutional manner, they ought at once to withdraw, and return to their several homes, leaving the people of Massachusetts to devise such ways and means for a redress of their grievances as they shall deem necessary. (Applause.) "8. Resolved, That the union of Liberty and Slavery, in one just and equal compact, is that which it is not in the power of God or man to achieve, because it is a moral impossibility, as much as the peaceful amalgamation of fire and gunpowder; and, therefore, the American Union is such only in form, but not in substance a hollow mockery instead of a glorious reality. (Applause.) "9. Resolved, That if the South be madly bent upon perpetuating her atrocious slave system, and thereby destroying the liberty of speech and of the press, and striking down the rights of Northern citizens, the time is rapidly approaching when the American Union will be dissolved in form as it is now in fact.” At the moment alike when these resolutions were preLib. 12:18. pared and were "adopted by an almost unanimous vote and in the most impressive manner," it is clear from internal evidence that news had not yet been received of closely related proceedings in Congress. That body had, as usual, at its opening, in Edmund Quincy's happy Lib. 12:31. phrase, been "resolved into a national Anti-Slavery Debating Society, with John Quincy Adams as leader”; the petitions of his presenting being (also as usual) flatly not received, or the question of their reception being reguLib. 12:18. larly laid upon the table. On the 24th of January, 1842, however, the ex-President offered a petition from Haver 1842. hill, Mass., praying for a peaceable dissolution of the CHAP. II. Union. It was the first of the kind that had ever reached Congress, and, curiously enough, it did not proceed from professed abolitionists: the first signer was a Locofoco Lib. 12:34. (alias Democrat) of high standing. Nor were the motives alleged ostensibly anti-slavery, but economic: there were, it affirmed, no reciprocal advantages in the Union; the revenues of one section were drained "to sustain the views and course of another section, without any adequate return." Moreover, Mr. Adams moved the reference of the petition to a committee with instructions to report adversely. What followed, therefore, would have been in the highest degree extraordinary but for the Southern consciousness that a Northern proposal of disunion was deadly to slavery. Wise. Thos. W. Gilmer. Wise of Virginia, with a Border State precipitancy, Henry A. hotly declared that the person who presented such a petition ought to be censured, and his colleague Gilmer lost no time in making a motion to that effect. This was superseded on the following day by resolutions concocted Lib. 12:18, in caucus, and presented in the House by Marshall of Kentucky-again a Border State taking the lead. The preamble is a landmark in the history of Southern opinion of the sacredness of the Union: 66 21, 25. Thos. F. Marshall. "Whereas, The Federal Constitution is a permanent form of Lib. 12:18. Government, and of perpetual obligation until altered or modified in the modes pointed out by that instrument, and the members of this House, deriving their political character and powers from the same, are sworn to support it, and the dissolution of the Union necessarily implies the destruction of that instrument, the overthrow of the American Republic, and the extinction of our national existence. A proposition, therefore, to the Representatives of the people to dissolve the organic law framed by their constituents, and to support which they are commanded by those constituents to be sworn, before they can enter upon the execution of the political powers created by it and intrusted to them, is a high breach of privilege, a contempt offered to this House, a direct proposition to the Legislature and each member of it to commit perjury, and involves CHAP. II. necessarily, in its execution and its consequences, the destruction of our country and the crime of high treason." 1842. Lib. 12:18. Ante, pp. 31, 32. Lib. 12:27. Lib. 12:34. The final therefore of this tremendous ratiocination was that Adams ought to be expelled; but rather let the House censure him most severely, and turn him over to his own conscience and the indignation of the American people. It was all the worse, said Marshall, in remarks of the same calibre with his resolutions, that Mr. Adams had asked for a committee to report against the petition for disunion, since this implied that the proposition was entertainable. The venerable object of this child's-play declined to make any reply till the censure should be voted; but he had the clerk read the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, enforcing the right and duty to alter or abolish forms of government which had become intolerably oppressive. He desired to tell the petitioners that it was not yet time to adopt this mode for the redress of their grievances of the past ten years, though he stood ready to prove, by a review of the recent attitude of certain Southern States toward certain Northern, "a settled system and purpose," on the part of the former, "to destroy all the principles of civil liberty in the free States, not for the purpose of preserving their institutions within their own limits, but to force their detested principles of slavery into all the free States." "If," he continued, "the right of habeas corpus and the right of trial by jury are to be taken away by this coalition of the Southern slaveholders and the Northern Democracy, it was time for the Northern people to see if they could not shake it off; and it was time to present petitions such as he had done." He repeated, it was not time to resort to disunion till other means had been tried. The attempt at censure failed on a direct vote (by 106 to 93), but at the North it excited indignation where it did not provoke laughter, and increased the disposition in that section to "calculate the value of the Union," and to murmur what Webster termed those "words of delu |