Anti-slavery bugle. [volume] (New-Lisbon, Ohio) 1845-1861, 1860-07-21

'"Nt 'h"' y W NNhNAo AhhN w
knows not Of (applause) You may dwarf his
mahooa by ;e iron Of bondage, you may dry up
tho fountain Of his intellectual life, but you can
never destroy bis faith in God and the ultimate
triumph Of bis almighty purpose, Over a sea OF
blood and tears, he catches, in every lull of the
midnight storm that breaks around him, the music
Of that still, small voice. that bids him 'EIopo
on, hope ever lie constitutes the very oxygen
Of civilization, potent in that arterial action that
imparts life and health to the permanent and sue
cessiul achievements of the human race. There
fore, ! do not Ike these gratuitous admissions on
the part Of men who 30 TO Congress from New
England with an anti'slavery purpose in their
hearts.
But, my friends, ] must bring my remarks to q
close; and | lay, that in view of the fact that the
influence Of slav cry is dominant in every depart.
meut of the Government, | would rather curse than
bless the hour that marked the fatal epoch in
American history, when We threw off the yoke of
o decent despotism, to become, in turn, the slaves
Of n mean and arrogant Democracy. Marc Antho.
ny said over the dead body Of the old Roman, i
come to Bury Caesar, not to praise him (applause1
Four millions oI my cou"tryinen in chains to-day,
ground between these two huge lies, like the upper
and the neither millstone-lhe Constitution Of the
United States and the Fourth Of July-scnd me to
this platform to tury the memories of that hour
that witnessed tho separation Of these colonies
from the mother country; for had we remained
linked to her by political and social ties, we should
inevitably have marched to freedom and equality,
as she has done, England stands to-day with the
trophies OF a thousand years clustering around her
head, as young and as vigorous in all the elements
that promise future physical and intellectual
development as when, upon the field Of Greasy
and Agincourt, her sons shattered, as with an iron
mace, the cmbattled Regions of France. She
stands to-day, and has stood for o quarter Of a
century, upon the side of freedom; while here in
Republican America, we have, for the last eighty
three years, been constantly tending towards a
despotism baser and blacker than anything that
history hns yet recorded. l say, then, l would
rather curse than bless the day that marked the
separation. IIunkorism, everywhere, as l said
before, will go out to-day 10 be glori6ed in the sun
light of lying eu!ogy poured upon the dead faith
whose iaithlessuess to every principle Of free
dom will yet cause their names to become a hiss
ing and a by-word to the ages yet to come, PRO.
claim liberty throughout all the land, to all the in.
thereof is the inscription upon the bell
that hangs in Independence Hall, in Philadelphia;
but the cid bell, more modest than the people,
cracked the first time it was rung, because it had
not brass enough to tell the lie again! Laugh.
ter and loud applause.)
Hypocrisy is not a growth peculiar to American
soil, but it has reached its most hateful, develop
ment here. American slavery the worst form of des.
potism ever imposed upon any people, is endors-
ed by Church and State as a great missionary insti.
tuition. Eighty-fcur years ago to-day, your fathers,
true to the impulses that brought them from he ia
therland, spoke this nation into existence, breathed
into it the breath of life, by asserting the selthood
of every human being. They had descended from
men who, for two hundred years, had battled for
freedom of conscience against the despotism of
the bloody Stuarts and when, in 1775, the Brit
ish Government passed the Stamp Act, and at
tempted to enforce it by British b~ayonets, against
the will and wishes of the American people, the
Roundhead and the Cavalier went up to bunker
Hill, and entered their bleeding protest against
George the Third, by the Grace of Cod In this
| say, they were true to their manly impulses.
They declare that all men are created equal :"
and brave men from beyond The Rhine, and from
the vine-clad hills Of France, viewing from a dis
lance that sublime struggle for the establishment
of a free government, threw themselves at once
into the conflict, and, by their noble devotion to
our cause, gave their names to history as a part
Of the glUries of the Republic. But what did the
fathers do to justify the expectations of these gal
liant strangers Let four millions of slaves in
our land answer the question | The liberty that
Lafayette fought for, our fathers, in an hour OF
compromise, forgot, and went into a convention
and sold the liberty of the black man, in order to
form this guilty covenant with death and agree
ment WIKI help and say, that 80 long as that
com promise exists, We ore bound to stand outside
the Government, aud not commit ourselves to the
dark spirit of slavery and to the political ospedi-
ency Of The hour.
The Constitution Of the United States is the
Janus of the American Capitol, looking both
ways, assuming any color, according as we turn
the political Kaleidoscope. This is the one re.
deeming feature in it-that we cannot understand
its carefully -concealed purpose without the aid of
contemporary history. Goethe says that no work
is complete, unless it involves some mystery. | be-
lieve that the Constitution, in that respect, may be
tortured into q %yirtuous instrument. 1t does in
volve a great mystery. But, as anti-slavery men.
seeking the overthrow of slavery in the shortest
possible way, wo have to deal with the facts of the
Government as the fathers made it and construed
it while they lived. l am willing, for one, to ac-
cept the unbroken testimony Of three-quarters of
a century against the anti-slavery charac! err of the
American Constitution, and not dodge behind its
equiVocal phrases for the purpose of cheating The
Shareholder, and saving the memory of our dishon-
est and timc-serving fathers from the gibbet of
impartial history. Achilles, the hero Of the Had,
lie introduced by Homer as saying these memora-
BILE words Il detest, as the very gates of hell, the
wretch who has the bnseuess to say one thing, and
mean another / do not believe that the fathers
wrote that Constitution, intending it to serve the
purposes of freedom, and then turned round and
construed it on the side Of despotjsm and slavorr