ax and Stamp Act
laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's
usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary
history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a
precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people
rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the province. The rioters
of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the
gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by
side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those
pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken
into voice to rebuke the recreant American,--the slanderer of the dead.
Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the
prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have
yawned and swallowed him up. Imprudent to defend the liberty of the
press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild
crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion
into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw
away the scabbard?"

The next morning young Phillips, like Lord Byron, awoke to find himself
famous. Merchants, politicians, who had long been staggering like
drunken men, indifferent to their rights, and confused in their
feelings, were stunned into sobriety, and began to discuss principles,
and weigh characters, and analyze public leaders, and wakening, men
found that they had been standing on the edge of a precipice. Phillips,
already devoted to the slave, became now his tireless champion through
many years, till the emancipation of 1863.

One evening in May, 1854, a negro was seen skulking in the shadows near
a dock in Boston. This coloured man, Anthony Burns by name, was a slave,
who had escaped from his Southern master, and after weeks had reached
Philadelphia, where a Quaker had stowed him away in a ship bound for
Boston. A Boston policeman who caught sight of the negro recalled the
rewards offered for the capture of slaves, and soon ran the fugitive
down, and had him before United States Commissioner Loring. The next
morning Theodore Parker hastened to the court-room to say that he was
the chaplain of the Abolition Society, and had come to offer counsel.
But the fugitive was afraid to accept the overture, lest his master
punish him the more severely.

The news spread quickly throughout the city