 | The poetical works of John Greenleaf Whittier |  |
A SUMMONS.
Written on the adoption of Pinckney's Resolutions in the House of Representatives, and the debate on Calhoun's “Bill for excluding Papers written or printed, touching the subject of Slavery, from the U. S. Post-office,” in the Senate of the United States.
Mr. Pinckney's resolutions were in brief that Congress had no authority to interfere in any way with slavery in the States; that it ought not to interfere in any way with slavery in the States; that it ought not to interfere with it in the District of Columbia, and that all resolutions to that end should be laid on the table without printing. Mr. Calhoun's bill made it a penal offence for postmasters in any State, District, or Territory “knowingly to deliver, to any person whatever, any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill, or other printed paper or pictorial representation, touching the subject of slavery, where, by the laws of the said State, District, or Territory, their circulation was prohibited.”
Of the true-hearted and the unshackled gone?
Their names alone?
Stoops the strong manhood of our souls so low,
That Mammon's lure or Party's wile can win us
To silence now?
In God's name, let us speak while there is time!
Now, when the padlocks for our lips are forging,
Silence is crime!
Rights all our own? In madness shall we barter,
For treacherous peace, the freedom Nature gave us,
God and our charter?
Here the false jurist human rights deny,
And in the church, their proud and skilled abettors
Make truth a lie?
To sanction crime, and robbery, and blood?
And, in Oppression's hateful service, libel
Both man and God?
But stoop in chains upon her downward way,
Thicker to gather on her limbs and stronger
Day after day?
From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie;
From her blue rivers and her welling fountains,
And clear, cold sky;
Gnaws with his surges; from the fisher's skiff,
With white sail swaying to the billows' motion
Round rock and cliff;
From her free laborer at his loom and wheel;
From the brown smith-shop, where, beneath the hammer,
Rings the red steel;
Our land, and left us to an evil choice,
Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken
A People's voice.
Over Potomac's to St. Mary's wave;
And buried Freedom shall awake to hear it
Within her grave.
By Santee's wave, in Mississippi's cane,
Shall feel the hope, within his bosom dying,
Revive again.
Sadly upon us from afar shall smile,
And unto God devout thanksgiving raising,
Bless us the while.
For the deliverance of a groaning earth,
For the wronged captive, bleeding, crushed, and lowly,
Let it go forth!
With all they left ye perilled and at stake?
Ho! once again on Freedom's holy altar
The fire awake!
Put on the harness for the moral fight,
And, with the blessing of your Heavenly Father,
Maintain the right!
| The poetical works of John Greenleaf Whittier | |