SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS

Rather than do thus, I need not say what match I would touch, what
system endeavor to blow up; but as I love my life, I would side with
the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my
mother and my brother to follow.

I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and
Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable
law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body
together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

I am sorry to say that I doubt if there is a judge in
Massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living
innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence under a
law which is merely contrary to the law of God. I am compelled to
see that they put themselves, or rather are by character, in this
respect, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his
musket in any direction he is ordered to. They are just as much tools,
and as little men. Certainly, they are not the more to be respected,
because their master enslaves their understandings and consciences,
instead of their bodies.

The judges and lawyers- simply as such, I mean- and all men of
expediency, try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. They
consider, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether
it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constitutional, or
vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? In important moral and
vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a
law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or
not. They persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not
the servants of humanity. The question is, not whether you or your
grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to
serve the Devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but
whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God- in spite of
your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor- by obeying that
eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or
Adams, has written in your being.