Year: 1859

|
voice of the African himself die un.
heard on the question of his own free.
don't No. 1t shall be perpetuated.
It shall he put in the record. The
slave himself, under circumstances
the must tempting and favorable to
his love OF freedom, if he has any,


surrounded by men and scenes b,ck.


oning him on to vengeance, to liberty


and dominion, with the power of life
and death over his master in his hands,
and the world open before him, with
the manacle and chain, which was
never forged or welded, except in the
heated furnace of riotous and pru.
rent imagination, stricken from his
body, turns eagerly and fondly to the
condition assigned him by the law not
merely Of Virginia, not merely of leg
islaturcs ond lawmakers, but by the
law OF his being, by the law which
governs his relation to the white man,
wherever the contact exists, by the
law which made the hewers of wood
and drawers of water under a gov
ernment formed by God himself, and
which, since the world began down
to the present time, has made the in
terior subordinate to the superior
whenever and wherever two unequal
races have been brought together
Let this fact 60 forth to the country.
Let it be fully understood by those
men and women who languish and
sigh over the condition Of your insti-
tutons that their sympathy is repudi-
ated, and that they themselves are
despised by both races in the South.
This, too, Virginia has proven.


Is there anything left to be done by
your verdict in peremptorily taking
the life Of the prisoner, and offering
it sacrifice to heal the wrongs of
your State! lhumbly conceive that
Virginia in no respect needs such
sacrifice. This much think | have
shown


And now let us turn to the prisoner.
If Virginia, through you, can afford
to be clement, your inquiry will then
be. is the object on whom you are ask
ed to bestow your clelnency worthy
to receive itl | know the field on
which now enter is filled with pre-.
conceived ideas, but in the spirit
Of truth | shall explore it and by
the truth Of what say | am willing
that my unfortunate client may be
judged by you, and moreover by that
God in whose presence no hidden
things exist, and before whom, at no.
distant day, you and shall stand with
him and see him and know him as he
is, and not as we see him and know
him now, encompassed by the dread
and awful calamities of this present
hour.


Wuo is JonN T.. CooK2 He has the
right himself to be heard before you;
but | will answer for him. Sprung
from an ancestory ofloyal attachment
to the American Government he in
herits no blood of tainted impurity.-
His grandfather, an officer of the Rev.
olution by which your liberty as we'll
as mine was achieved, and his gray
haired father, who lives to weep over
him, soldier of the war of 1912, he
brings no dishonored lineage into your
presence. If the blood which flows
in his veins has been offered against
your peace, the same blood in the
veins of those from whose loins he
sprang has been offered in fierce shock
of battle and foreign invasion in be.
half of the people of Virginia and
the Union. Born of a parent stock
occupying the middle walks of life,
and possessed Of all those tender and
domestic.virtues which escape the con-
tamination of those vices that dwell
on the frozen peaks, or in tAe dark
and deep cavcrns of society. he would
not have been here had precept and
example been remembered in the prod
igal wanderings of his short and
chequered life. Poor deluded boy
wayward, mislcd child An evil star
presided over thy natal hour and smote
it with gloom. The hour in which
thy mother bore thee and blessed thee
as her bue.eyed babe upon her knees
is to her now one OF bitterness as she
stands near the bank of the chill riv.
er OF death and looks back on a name
hitherto as unspotted and as pure as
the unstained snow. May God stand
by and sustain her, and preserve, the
mothers of Virg' MIA from the waves
of sorrow that now roll over her


Not only the ancestry of John E.
Cook, but all with whom his life is
now bound up, stand before the coun.
try rs your friends, and the friends of
the Constitution as handed down to us
by the vaor AMI Wisdom Of Wash.
ington. | will not shrink from the
full and absolute recognition of my
position. You and !, gentlemen Of
the jury, can have no secrets in this
case from one another. We will
withdraw the curtains, and look each
other fully in the face. A citizen Of
the State in which | live, who, by vir'
tue of his brilliant aud commanding
intellect, and because of his sound and
national principles, has been placed
at an early period of his life in the
highest position in the power OF a
State TO give, is here beside me, and


wears near his heart a sisters likeness
to this boy. And there is not in the
wide world, on tho broad green face
of fthe.earth, man, whose heart is not
wholly abandoned to selfish depravity,
who will not say that his presence