New Haven,
Connecticut, Nov. 28.
Dear Sir: Permit a
friend of liberty and equitable law to address you a few brief thoughts, which
I hope may be acceptable to you and your family. Prayer was yesterday offered
for you in a colored congregation in this city, to whom a descendant of Africa,
a son of Georgia, a minister of Liberia, and also the writer of this farewell
letter, preached the true gospel.
You may be gratified
to know that I remember with interest your interview, some two years since,
with the cordial friends of Kansas in this city, while that injured territory
of our common country was subject to the scorpion lash prepared for the honest
advocates of the rights of man, and especially of that freedom which you
struggled to establish. These, your New Haven friends, some of whom so ably and
so kindly expostulated with our Chief Magistrate in reference to the wrongs of
Kansas, remember you with Christian sympathy in your present sufferings.
Take it to your
heart that a God of Justice and of Mercy rules, and the Deliverer of Israel
from their bondage in Goshen, has mercy in store for a greater number of
bondmen and bondwomen, truly as wrongfully oppressed. He has not granted you
the full measure of your wishes, but he has allowed you the opportunity of
conspicuously and emphatically showing your sympathy for the injured Slave
population of our otherwise happy country, and of preaching the duty of giving
"them that which is just and equal."
Forty years ago I
went among the savages of Polynesia, and preached the gospel of Him whose
office it was to proclaim liberty to captives. I plainly taught kings and
queens, chiefs and warriors, that He that ruleth men must be just, ruling in
the fear of God. I freely exhibited the opposition of God's law and our
Saviour's gospel to oppression and every sin found to be prevailing there, and
aided my associates in giving them the entire Bible in their own language, and
in teaching their tribes to read it and use it freely in all the ranks of life.
Though I labored
with them a score of years, and have corresponded with them a score of years
more, I have not, lest I should damage my mission, ever told them that I
belonged to a nation that deprives three or four millions of their
fellow-subjects of Jehovah's Government, of their dearest rights which God has
given them one of which is the free use of his own Holy Book.
But when the story
of your execution shall reach and surprise them, I will no longer hesitate to
speak to my friends there of your sympathy for four millions of the inhabitants
of our Southern States, held in unchristian bonds in the only Protestant
country on the globe that endorses Slavery.
I can, next week,
well afford to endeavor to give them an echo of that protest against the whole
system of American Slavery, which on and from the day of your execution, will
be louder in the ear of High Heaven than its abettors have been accustomed to
hear; rising from the millions of freemen in this noble cordon of Free States,
and other millions of now slaveholding freemen, and some slaveholders
themselves, in the Slave States.
Have you a kind
message to send to the Christian converts at the Sandwich Islands, or to the
heathen of Micronesia, a month's sail beyond, where my son and daughter are
laboring to give them the Bible and the richest blessings of Christianity? I
would gladly forward it to them if you have time to write it.
And now, dear sir,
trust in your gracious Saviour; forgive those that have trespassed against you;
leave your fatherless children, God will provide for them, and tell your widow
to trust in Him, in His holy habitation. "The hairs of your head are all
numbered," and not one "shall fall to the ground without your
Heavenly Father." Should a lock of your hair fall into my lap before the
execution shall help you to shake the pillars of the idol's temple, it would be
valued. The Lord bless you, and make your life and death a blessing to the
oppressed and their oppressors. Farewell!
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