re is the boasted freedom of your
institutions--where is the vaunted impartiality, clemency, and
mildness of your courts of justice if an unfortunate prisoner, whom
your policy, and not justice, is about to deliver into the hands of
the executioner, is not suffered to explain his motives sincerely and
truly, and to vindicate the principles by which he was actuated? My
lords, it may be a part of the system of angry justice to bow a man's
mind by humiliation to the purposed, ignominy of the scaffold; but
worse to me than the purposed shame, or the scaffold's terrors, would
be the shame of such foul and unfounded imputations as have been laid
against me in this court. You, my lord, are a judge; I am the
supposed culprit. I am a man; you are a man also. By a revolution of
power we might change places, though we never could change
characters. If I stand at the bar of this court, and dare not
vindicate my character, what a farce is your justice! If I stand at
this bar and dare not vindicate my character, how dare you calumniate
it. Does the sentence of death, which your unhallowed policy inflicts
on my body, condemn my tongue to silence and my reputation to
reproach? Your executioner may abridge the period of my existence;
but while I exist I shall not forbear to vindicate my character and
motives from your aspersions; and, as a man, to whom fame is dearer
than life, I will make the last use of that life in doing justice to
that reputation which is to live after me, and which is the only
legacy I can leave to those I honor and love, and for whom I am proud
to perish. As men, my lords, we must appear on the great day at one
common tribunal; and it will then remain for the Searcher of all
hearts to show a collective universe, who was engaged in the most
virtuous actions, or swayed by the purest motives--my country's
oppressor, or"-----

[Here he was interrupted, and told to listen to the sentence of the
law].

"My lords, will a dying man be denied the legal privilege of
exculpating himself in the eyes of the community from an undeserved
reproach, thrown upon him during his trial, by charging him with
ambition, and attempting to cast away for a paltry consideration the
liberties of his country? Why did your lordships insult me? Or
rather, why insult justice, in demanding of me why sentence of death
should not be prono