I repeat what I said to the
State Convention of Massachusetts after the death of President
McKinley:
"When I first came to manhood and began to take part in public
affairs, that greatest of crimes, human slavery, was entrenched
everywhere in power in this Republic. Congress and Supreme
Court, Commerce and Trade and Social Life alike submitted
to its imperious and arrogant sway. Mr. Webster declared
that there was no North, and that the South went clear up
to the Canada line. The hope of many wise and conservative
and, as I now believe, patriotic men, of saving this country
from being rent into fragments was in leaving to slavery forever
the great territory between the Mississippi and the Pacific,
in the Fugitive Slave Law, a law under which freemen were
taken from the soil of Massachusetts to be delivered into
perpetual bondage, and in the judgment of the Supreme Court
which declared it as the lesson of our history that the Negro
had no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
"Last week at Dartmouth, at the great celebration in honor
of Daniel Webster, that famous college gave the highest honor
in its power to a Negro, amid the applause of the brilliant
assembly.
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