all are involved in one hot haste
of terror,--presidents of colleges and professors, saints and
brokers, lawyers and manufacturers; not a liberal recollection, not
so much as a snatch of an old song for freedom, dares intrude on
their passive obedience.... Mr. Webster, perhaps, is only following
the laws of his blood and constitution. I suppose his pledges were
not quite natural to him. He is a man who lives by his memory; a man
of the past, not a man of faith and of hope. All the drops of his
blood have eyes that look downward, and his finely developed
understanding only works truly and with all its force when it stands
for animal good; that is, for property. He looks at the Union as an
estate, a large farm, and is excellent in the completeness of his
defence of it so far. What he finds already written he will defend.
Lucky that so much had got well written when he came, for he has no
faith in the power of self-government. Not the smallest municipal
provision, if it were new, would receive his sanction. In
Massachusetts, in 1776, he would, beyond all question, have been a
refugee. He praises Adams and Jefferson, but it is a past Adams and
Jefferson. A present Adams or Jefferson he would denounce.... But
one thing appears certain to me: that the Union is at an end as soon
as an immoral law is enacted. He who writes a crime into the
statute book digs under the foundations of the Capitol.... The words
of John Randolph, wiser than he knew, have been ringing ominously in
all echoes for thirty years: 'We do not govern the people of the
North by our black slaves, but by their own white slaves.' ... They
come down now like the cry of fate, in the moment when they are
fulfilled."

The exasperation of Emerson did not subside, but went on increasing
during the next four years, and on March 7, 1854, he read his lecture on
the Fugitive Slave Law at the New York Tabernacle: "I have lived all my
life without suffering any inconvenience from American Slavery. I never
saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the check on my free speech
and action, until the other day, when Mr. Webster, by his personal
influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the country. I say Mr.
Webster, for though the bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he
was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had. It cost him his
life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered
the