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HONEST TRUTH ABOUT YE “FLAUNTING
LIE.”

THE TOCSIN-PEALS OF TEN YEARS AGO.

As certain Democratic journals and orators
throughout the country have seen fit to attach
undue importance and a totally garbled construction
to an extract from a certain song which appeared
many years ago in the N. Y. Tribune, it may
be as well at this point to place on record a true
copy of that song, and a history of the events out of
which it grew, together with copies of certain other
songs on the same subject, forming a series of
which the much-quoted lyric was but a part.

The first song of the series appeared in the
Consulate of Franklin Pierce, and was called out
by the circumstances attending the capture and
imprisonment of one Anthony Burns, an alleged
fugitive slave from Virginia. This arrest created
intense excitement in Boston, insomuch that nearly
all business was suspended during its pendency.
The people and State authorities of the great Old
Commonwealth were perfectly willing to obey the
Fugitive Slave Law, provided its provisions were
properly complied with, and the accused given


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some chance of proving, if he could, that he was
not the character he had been taken for. This,
however, was not the policy of the then Federal
officials, who conducted the whole case with an
overbearing insolence and disregard of the popular
feelings which seemed to court an armed collision.

While the excitement was at its highest, a Boston
paper announced, with high commendation, that
“two companies of foreign-born soldiers had been
stationed in and around the Court-House to keep
back the rabble”—this “rabble,” we may remark,
embracing seven-eighths of all that was most eminent
in the learning, piety, public confidence, and
respectability of the Trimontane City. Taking
these words of the paper for his text, the author
of this series wrote and sent to The Independent
the following verses, which he called:

LINES FOR THE DAY.

Aye! throng the courts, that once were free,
With bands of savage soldiery—
Call out the foreign kern!
Beneath the shade of Bunker shaft,
Where earth the blood of freemen quaffed,
A different tale this day we learn.
Crush Massachusetts under foot,
Destroy our freedom, branch and root,
The Northern mind is bowed;

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No more the Pilgrim banner waves,
Content we see our fathers' graves
By Slavery's groaning cannon plowed.
Oh! Massachusetts, Mother home!
The rocks that dash to whitening foam
Those seas the Mayflower pressed—
Those very rocks cry out to-day,
The waves dash high their glittering spray,
To see thy weakness thus confessed.
And shall Virginia's jeering lords,
Backed and sustained by foreign swords,
Thy ancient soul subdue?
Shall hireling steel and Southern fraud
Reverse the mandate given by God—
“Do as ye would men do to you!”
Oh! never, while to misery's sob
Our eyes o'erflow, our pulses throb,
Can come a day so cursed;
While hope remains, while arms are strong,
While lives the sense of right and wrong,
These fetters be it ours to burst!
We have been patient, and our peace
Mistaken was for cowardice—
We try a different tense;
The passive mood hath brought us chains,
The active now alone remains
To bring these tyrants back to sense.
Up, Massachusetts, up and arm!
Let every steeple toll the alarm,
Rally thy freemen soon!

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Old Boston, as you hope to live,
Ne'er let that frightened fugitive
In fetters quit your barracoon!
Whether our rights we now defend,
Or if the North must yet descend
From depth to lower deeps;
Remember this—nor be you dumb
In the great struggle yet to come—
With us the South no promise keeps.

This song, immediately republished in the Tribune,
achieved a sudden and immense popularity,
being widely copied in the journals of the day,
and largely quoted from in the adverse speeches
of party orators. It was a veritable “tocsin peal,”
and was answered by an uprising of popular opinion
such as is rarely witnessed.

While these matters were going on in Boston,
a wretch to whose name we afford the charity of
oblivion, committed in one night a succession of
crimes at the bare recital of which the imagination
shudders. The scene of the occurrence was
in the vicinity of Flatbush, Long Island. The
monster entered a house in which he had formerly
been employed as a servant, for the double purpose
of robbing his master and outraging a young
girl who had been his fellow-servant and had
rejected his addresses. During the perpetration
of these crimes, his former master and mistress
were aroused, whereupon he split their heads open


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with a meat-axe, otherwise mangling them frightfully,
and then attempted to kill the girl he had
tried to ravish; after which he set fire to the house
in order to destroy the lifeless proofs of his guilt.

A horror so aggravated aroused all the neighboring
citizens to fury. Hundreds organized themselves
into a searching party, and hunted for the
villain through the swamp in which he had taken
refuge. He was at last found, after two or three
days' search, hidden up to his neck in mud; and
bleeding profusely from some wounds self-inflicted,
by which he hoped to cheat the gallows. On being
caught he at once confessed his crimes, and it was
for a moment debated as to whether he should not
be lynched upon the spot. The spirit of law and
justice prevailed, however, and it was decided to
give him a fair trial and an opportunity for counsel
to defend him.

The very same paper that gave particulars of
this tragedy, described, also, how Anthony Burns,
without any fair trial, had been ordered back to
slavery on the mere affidavit of a citizen of Virginia,
claiming to be his owner, and the arbitrary
decision of a Commissioner, who was paid an extra
five dollars by law for deciding against the black
man. All Boston closed its places of business on
the day that the military procession appeared as
an escort for Anthony Burns from the Court-House
to the wharf. The black man was in the centre


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of a square of infantry. Two sections of artillery,
loaded with grape, were paraded to repress any
popular outburst. Meanwhile appeared on nearly
every house-top the United States flag at half-mast,
while over Faneuil Hall, the old “Cradle of
Liberty,” the same flag was displayed at half-mast
and completely enshrouded in crape.

On these simultaneous events were written the
verses (originally published in the Tribune)
which we now subjoin:

THE CONTRAST.

These are two pictures roughly drawn,
Two scenes to meditate upon:
No rainbow tints o'erflood
The breathing figures they reveal:
The pencil was assassin steel,
The palette swam in blood!

LONG ISLAND.

Crouched in the swamp, amid the fern,
What hideous features we discern,
Torn, filthy, and aghast—
How brutishly his eyeballs glare,
As still he shrinks within his lair,
'Till those who hunt have passed!
And there are shouts and thrilling cries
As hunting group to group replies—
His covert they have hemmed;

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They hunt a monster steeped in crime,
And find him, grovelling in the slime,
Self-wounded, self-condemned.
What tongue describe the midnight scene,
When first the murderer crept within
That home of peaceful life?
When the dull meat-axe fell amain
Through the crushed bone and spattering brain
Of husband and of wife!
No matter—let the law decide!
Though he confesses how they died,
Although his guilt appears;
Let judges sit and counsel plan,
And let him answer as he can,
A jury of his peers.

NEW ENGLAND.

Our Boston streets are mute to-day,
Though tens of thousands throng the way,
Our flags are draped with crape;
No sound except the death-bell's toll,
The tramp of soldiers, and the roll
Of cannon brimmed with grape.
Lo! as the fettered black appears
Amid the square of serried spears,
How heaves the multitude!
They seek with flowers to strew his track,
But levelled bayonets drive them back—
Is his the crime of blood?

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Worse than all crimes! his skin is dark,
And Southern fraud has set her mark
Upon his fettered limbs.
Pampered and fed by Federal might,
Her Ark of Liberty and Right
On slavery's red-sea swims!
Nor does the man-thief even avow
That guilt has stained that ebon brow—
The crime is in the skin;
Yet, monster! hungering for your prey,
A whiter heart than yours to-day
That bosom beats within!
For him no trial—never pause—
Rough-ride New England's honored laws,
Make of our tears your mirth!
Our first-born Freedom ye have slain—
But in the “Cradle” once again
We swear to rock a nobler birth.

The troubles of Franklin Pierce and Company
were not yet half over, in reference to this poor
“colored American of African descent.” On the
trial being made, it was found that no ship or
steamer in Boston could be hired for the purpose
of carrying this alleged fugitive back to slavery.
The universal cry was: “Give him a trial. Demand
from the Virginian that he shall give as
much proof of ownership as would be required
to recover a stray dog! Comply only with these


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requisitions, and we bow as in duty bound to the
supremacy of the laws of the Union.”

Matters having arrived at this pass, Caleb
Cushing and Company had nothing for it but the
conversion of a national armed vessel into a slave
ship. The Morris was ordered to Boston for the
sole purpose of carrying back to Virginia this one
miserable wretch—alleged to be a fugitive from
slavery. Picture—those who know anything of
the Old Bay State—the horror created by this
ignominious desecration of a national ship! The
flag that had waved over slippery and smoking
decks in our early conflicts with Great Britain—
the flag to which our earliest and noblest captains
had lifted their eyes for inspiration through the
hot hours of many a bloody sea-fight—for that flag
Caleb Cushing and Company could find no better
business ten years ago than to cover, at the masthead
of the Morris, this isolated instance of the
slave-trade carried on in an armed vessel of the
Nation.

Just think of it! Bear in mind all the surroundings
of the case; and then read the following
lines, first published in the Tribune, June 13,
1854, with such comment and such appetites as
your natures may suggest. Taken as a whole,
and not merely looking at the three garbled
stanzas which a portion of the press saw fit to
give as the entire poem, it will be seen that the


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lines are really a glowing tribute to the glory and
greatness of our national banner; a glowing protest
against its desecration in one particular instance.

HAIL TO THE STARS AND STRIPES.[1]

[The U. S. cutter Morris has been ordered by President
Franklin Pierce to carry Anthony Burns from Boston to
Virginia, to be there enslaved for ever.—Boston Commonwealth.]

Hail to the Stars and Stripes!
The boastful flag all hail!
The tyrant trembles now,
And at the sight grows pale;
The Old World groans in pain,
And turns her eye to see,
Beyond the Western Main,
This emblem of the Free.
Hail to the Stripes and Stars!
Hope beams in every ray,
And through the dungeon bars
Points out a brighter way.
The Old World sees the light
That shall her cells illume,
And, shrinking back to night,
Oppression reads her doom.

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Hail to the Stars and Stripes!
They float in every sea;
O'er every ocean sweeps
Our emblem of the Free.
Beneath the azure skies
Of the soft Italian clime,
Or where the Aurora dies
In solitude sublime.
All hail the flaunting Lie!
The Stars grow pale and dim—
The Stripes are bloody scars,
A lie the flaunting hymn!
It shields a pirate's deck,
It binds a man in chains,
And round the captive's neck
Its folds are bloody stains.
Tear down the flaunting Lie!
Half-mast the starry flag!
Insult no sunny sky
With this polluted rag!
Destroy it, ye who can!
Deep sink it in the waves!
It bears a fellow-man
To groan with fellow-slaves.
Awake the burning scorn—
The vengeance long and deep,
That, till a better morn,
Shall neither tire nor sleep!

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Swear once again the vow,
By all we hope or dream,
That what we suffer now
The future shall redeem.
Furl, furl the boasted Lie,
Till Freedom lives again,
With stature grand and purpose high
Among untrammelled men!
Roll up the starry sheen,
Conceal its bloody stains;
For in its folds are seen
The stamp of rusting chains.
Swear, Freemen—all as one—
To spurn the flaunting Lie,
Till Peace, and Truth, and Love
Shall fill the brooding sky;
Then, floating in the air,
O'er hill, and dale, and sea,
'Twill stand for ever fair,
The emblem of the Free!

To all of treason, disloyalty, or contempt for
the national flag that the enemies of human freedom
can find in the foregoing verses, we bid them
heartily welcome. They have never heretofore
published more than a few stanzas, and even
those few were garbled and twisted out of their
proper sense and connection. The copy now submitted
is from a revise by the author; and as—
for good or evil—this song has passed into the


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history of our country and age, we think those
who have misquoted extracts from it should let
the whole of it be seen in its rightful shape.

And now for the last of the “tocsin-peals”
rung out in the columns of the Tribune.

On the arrival of the Morris in the South, with
her black prisoner duly fettered on board, there
was tremendous rejoicing through all slavedom—
late Jeffdom. All the orators and bards of the
“Chivalry” made speeches and wrote songs in
honor of their victory over the law-abiding citizens
of the old Bay State. Joy-bells were rung,
bonfires kindled, windows were illuminated, much
whiskey consumed—and the friends of Franklin
Pierce thought his renomination certain. There
was joy in the White House, but mourning in
the best hearts of New England. That a fugitive
slave, duly proved to be such, should be returned,
was a necessity in which very nearly all New
England acquiesced. But that a Southern master
should be sustained by the Federal Executive in
seizing a man in the streets of Boston, and hurrying
him away without any substantial proofs of
his identity or former servitude—this cup was a
bitter one, but President Pierce and Caleb Cushing
made Massachusetts drink of it to the very
dregs.

On the receipt of Anthony Burns in the Old
Dominion, he was solemnly turned over from the


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custody of National bayonets to that of the local
militia, an organization with which the North has
since become pretty thoroughly acquainted at
Manassas, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Fredericksburg,
the Wilderness, and elsewhere. By these
military scions of First Families of Virginia he
was ostentatiously escorted to the plantation of his
alleged owner; and it was on the report of the
joyous and triumphal ceremonies then and there
enacted that the following verses were struck off
and given to the public in the Tribune.

THE CURTAIN FALLS.

Hark! how the joy-bells of the South
Speak victory with brazen mouth!
What tyrant have they slain?
What conquered monarch comes to-day
Begirt by all this plumed array
Of proud and weaponed men?
Those joybells! Once I heard them ring
When Britain's dull and savage King
Loosed from our throat his grip;
Then sabres gleamed—then Kingship fell—
And are they pealed once more to tell
This Victory of the Whip?
Behold him in the centre, there!
The fettered image of despair,
While round him hotly flows,

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That “Chivalry” the Southrons boast—
And on the flag that leads the host
The name of “Freedom” glows!
Aye! lead him where the lilacs bloom
Around Mount Vernon's silent tomb—
Green be those trees and fresh!
And there, with oaths as fierce as deep,
Salute the mouldering tenant's sleep
With bids for human flesh!
Who cares for Boston? though her cry,
Her wail of bitter agony,
Through all the welkin swells!
She dared not face our shotted guns—
We drown the murmur of her sons
With shouts and clanging bells.
No respite—no surcease of woe!
And shall it be for ever so?
Was this the Pilgrim faith?
Shall Freedom's votaries still despair,
And must the living North yet bear
This yoke with moral death?

From the foregoing history, it will be seen that
the “Flaunting-Lie” story of the Copperhead journals
and orators was a “flaunting lie” indeed. It
will also be seen that, far from being an utterance
in contempt of the flag, it was a cry of sorrowful
indignation at beholding the desecration of that
sacred emblem. This statement we have felt due
to the truth of history, as also to relieve Mr. Greeley


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from much undeserved obloquy; and now the
subject stands dismissed, with only this concluding
remark: All four songs were tossed out, we
believe, in the heat and hurry of daily journalism,
and have this eminent value: that, however
deficient they may be in literary merit or polish,
they give a true, permanent, and intensified
expression to what were the convictions of the
popular mind on a subject which must for ever
remain of the highest interest.

 
[1]

This song has received the compliment of being the only
one copied in the first volume of Horace Greeley's “History of
the American Conflict,” being given as a sample of the spirit
aroused by the excessive exactions.