19. CHAPTER XIX.
Containing a specimen of eloquence, with some account of the dangers
of Lynchdom.
At this moment the orator and candidate of the
day, stalking up in high dudgeon to find what superior
attraction had robbed him of his audience,
laid eyes upon me. I thought I had seen him before;
and verily I had. He was that identical gentleman,
the master of the fugitive slave whom I
had concealed in my house in Philadelphia, and
then clapped into prison for robbing me, whence
his master recovered him. There was no mistaking
the gentleman: He was a young man of
twenty-six or seven, six feet high and one foot
wide, long-limbed, with small feet and huge hands,
a great shock of Indian-looking hair, vast, solemn
black eyes, a mouth wide and square, and a brow
that might have suited a patriarch, it was so wide,
and lofty, and wrinkled. He was evidently a man
destined to shake the walls of the Capitol, and
cause stenographers to groan; the Tully shone in
his eye, the Demosthenes moved on his lip—there
was genius even in the shape of his nose.
“I recollect the man,” said he, with a voice that
might have come from the bowels of a double-bass,
it was so deep, rolling, and sonorous; “he hid my
boy Pompey. His name is Longshanks; he is a
Quaker, a philanthropist—an abolitionist!”
“Hampden Jones for ever!” cried the delighted
sovereigns. “We'll hang him” (meaning me, however,
and not the orator) “over the poll-window,
and then vote for Hampden Jones, the friend of the
law, the friend of the constitution, the friend of the
south!”
“Stay, friends,” said Hampden Jones, and his
voice stilled the tumult; “I have a word to say on
the subject of abolition.”
“Hampden Jones for ever!” cried the republicans;
and Hampden Jones stepped up on the head
of a barrel, and stretched forth his right arm. He
stretched forth his left also, and then, clinching both
fists, and pursing his brows together until the balls
beneath them looked like rolling grape-shot, he
said,—
“Gentlemen—fellow-freemen of Virginia! The
bulwarks of a nation's liberties are the virtues of
her children. Compared with these, what is
wealth? what is grandeur? what even are power
and glory? These—riches and greatness, power
and renown—are the possessions of the Old World;
yet what have they availed her? Look around that
ancient hemisphere, and tell me
where among its
blood-stained battle-fields!
where under its polluted
palaces!
where in its haunts of the despot and
the slave! you can find the love of liberty, the love
of law, the love of order, the love of justice, that
give permanence to the institutions they adorn, and,
like the laurel crown of the Cesars, guard from the
thunderbolt the temples they bind in the wreath of
honour? Look for them in the Old World, but
look in vain. The mighty Colossus of Christendom,
once vital with virtue, lifts its decrepit bulk
beyond the verge of the Atlantic, a vast and mournful
monument of decay! Age and the shocks of
the elements, the wash of the tempest and the lightning-stroke,
have ploughed its marble forehead with
wrinkles; mosses hang from its brows, and the
dust of its own ruin—dust animated only by insects
and reptiles, the offspring of corruption—moulders
over its buried feet! The virtues that once distinguished—that
almost deified—the immortal Colossus,
have fled from the old, to find their home in
the New World. I look for them only in the bosoms
of Americans!”
Here the orator, who had pronounced this sublime
exordium with prodigious earnestness and effect,
paused, while the welkin rung with the shouts
of rapture its complimentary close was so well fitted
to inspire. As for me, I felt a doleful skepticism
as to the justness of the compliment, having
the very best reason to distrust that love of liberty,
law, order, and justice, which was about to consign
me to ropes and flames, without asking the permission
of a judge and jury. Moreover, I could not
exactly see how Mr. Hampden Jones's remarks
on the old and new world had any thing to do with
the subject of abolition, which he had risen to discuss;
and, indeed, this difficulty seemed to have
beset others as well as myself, several crying out
with great enthusiasm, “Let's have something on
abolition; and then to the Lynching!” while others
exclaimed, “Let's have the Lynching first, and
the speech afterward.”
“Abolition, my fellow-citizens!” said the orator,
“it is my intention to address you on the subject of
abolition. But first let me apply what I have already
said. I have said, and I repeat, that the love
of liberty, of law, of order, of justice, belongs peculiarly
to the free sons of America. Let me counsel,
let me advise, let me entreat you, to have this noble
truth in remembrance on this present occasion.
Beware lest, in what you now intend to do, you give
occasion to the enemies of freedom to doubt your
virtue, to suspect the reality of your love of law,
order, and justice, to stigmatize you as friends only
of riot and outrage.”
These words filled me with joyful astonishment.
I began to believe the youthful Tully was about to
interfere in my favour, to rebuke the violence of his
adherents, and so save them from the sin of blood-guiltiness.
So also thought the indignant sovereigns
themselves; and many, elevating their voices,
demanded furiously, “if he meant to protect the
bloody abolitionist?”
“By no means,” said Mr. Hampden Jones, with
great emphasis; “what I have to advise is, that if
we are to do execution upon the wretch, we shall
proceed about it in an orderly and dignified way,
resolve ourselves into a great and solemn tribunal,
and so adjudge him to death with a regularity and
decorum which shall excite the admiration and win
the approbation of the whole world.”
“Hampden Jones for ever!” cried the sovereigns;
and so it appeared that all the benefit I was to derive
from his interference, was only to be despatched
in an orderly manner.
