Court Street,
Boston, April 19, 1851.
May you live a thousand
years, always preaching the truth of Fast Day!1 That sermon
is a noble effort. It stirred me to the bottom of my heart, at times
softening me almost to tears, and then again filling me with rage. I wish it
could be read everywhere throughout the land.
You have placed the
commissioner in an immortal pillory, to receive the hootings and rotten eggs of
the advancing generations.
I have had no
confidence from the beginning, as I believe you know, in our courts. I was
persuaded that with solemn form they would sanction the great enormity,
therefore I am not disappointed. My appeal is to the people, and my hope is to
create in Massachusetts such a public opinion as will render the law a dead
letter. It is in vain to expect its repeal by Congress till the slave-power is
over thrown.
It is, however, with
a rare dementia that this power has staked itself on a position which is so
offensive, and which cannot for any length of time be tenable. In enacting that
law, it has given to the Free States a sphere of discussion which they would
otherwise have missed. No other form of the slavery question, not even the
Wilmot Proviso, would have afforded equal advantages.
1 On the rendition of Sims, a fugitive slave.
SOURCE: Edward L.
Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 246; John
Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore
Parker, Vol. 2, p. 107
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