cheated: I do not!

* * * * *

Caution is not always good policy in a cause like ours. It is said that,
when Napoleon saw the day going against him, he used to throw away
all the rules of war, and trust himself to the hot impetuosity of his
soldiers. The masses are governed more by impulse than conviction, and
even were it not so, the convictions of most men are on our side,
and this will surely appear, if we can only pierce the crust of their
prejudice or indifference. I observe that our Free Soil friends never
stir their audience so deeply as when some individual leaps beyond the
platform, and strikes upon the very heart of the people. Men listen to
discussions of laws and tactics with ominous patience. It is when Mr.
Sumner, in Faneuil Hall, avows his determination to disobey the
Fugitive Slave Law, and cries out: "I was a man before I was a
Commissioner,"--when Mr. Giddings says of the fall of slavery, quoting
Adams: "Let it come. If it must come in blood, yet I say let it
come!"--that their associates on the platform are sure they are
wrecking the party,--while many a heart beneath beats its first pulse of
anti-slavery life.

These are brave words. When I compare them with the general tone of Free
Soil men in Congress, I distrust the atmosphere of Washington and of
politics. These men move about, Sauls and Goliaths among us, taller by
many a cubit. There they lose port and stature. Mr. Sumner's speech
in the Senate unsays no part of his Faneuil Hall pledge. But, though
discussing the same topic, no one would gather from any word or argument
that the speaker ever took such ground as he did in Faneuil Hall. It
is all through, the law, the manner of the surrender, not the surrender
itself, of the slave, that he objects to. As my friend Mr. Pillsbury
so forcibly says, so far as any thing in the speech shows, he puts the
slave behind the jury trial, behind the habeas corpus act, and behind
the new interpretation of the Constitution, and says to the slave
claimant: "You must get through all these before you reach him; but, if
you can get through all these, you may have him!" It was no tone like
this which made the old Hall rock! Not if he got through twelve jury
trials, and forty habeas corpus acts, and constitutions built high
as yonder monument, would he permit so much as the shadow of a little
finger of the slave claimant to touch the slave! At least so he was
understood. * * *

Mr. Mann, in