The Trial of Theodore Parker

his "jury," to indict and try me. Try me! No, Gentlemen, it is you, your wives and your children, who are up for swift condemnation this day. Will you wait, will you add sin to sin, till God shall rain fire and brimstone on your heads, and a Dead Sea shall cover the place once so green and blossoming with American Liberty? Decide your own fate. When the Judges are false let the Juries be faithful, and we have "a crowning mercy" without cannon, and the cause of Justice is secure. For "when wicked men seem nearest to their hopes, the godly man is furthest from his fears."

You know my "offence," Gentlemen. I have confessed more than the government could prove. You are the "Country:" the Nation by twelve Delegates is present here to-day. In the name of America, of mankind, you are to judge of the Law, the Fact, and the Application of the Law to the Fact. You are to decide whether you will spread Slavery and the Consequences of Slavery all over the North; whether Boston, New England, all the North, shall kidnap other Ellen Crafts, other Thomas Sims, other Anthony Burns, whether Sharkey and Grier, and Kane and Curtis, shall be Tyrants over you forbidding all Freedom of Speech: or whether Right and Justice, the Christian Religion, the natural service of the Infinite God shall bless our wide land with the numberless Beatitudes of Humanity. Should you command me to be fined and go to jail, I should take it very cheerfully, counting it more honor to be inside of a jail in the austere silence of my dungeon, rather than outside of it, with a faithless Jury, guilty of such treason to their Country and their God. But, forgive me! you cannot commit such a crime against Humanity. Pardon the monstrous figure of my speech, it is only conceivable, not also possible. These Judges could do it-their speeches, their actions, that Charge, this Indictment, proves all that—but you cannot; - not you. You are the Representatives of the People, the Country, not idiotic in Conscience and the Affections.

Gentlemen, I am a minister of Religion. It is my function to teach what is absolutely true and absolutely right. I am the servant of no sect, — how old soever, venerable and widely spread. I claim the same religious Rights with Luther and Calvin, with Budha and Mohammed; yes, with Moses and Jesus, — the unalienable Right to serve the God of Nature in my own way. I preach the Religion which belongs to Human Nature, as I understand it, which the Infinite God imperishably writes thereon,- Natural Piety, love of the infinitely perfect God, Natural Morality, the keeping of every law He has written on the body and in the soul of man, especially by loving and serving his creatures. Many wrong things I doubtless do, for which I must ask the forgiveness of mankind. But do you suppose I can keep the fugitive slave bill, obey these Judges, and kidnap my

own Parishioners? It is no part of my "Christianity " to "send the mother that bore me into eternal bondage." Do you think I can suffer Commissioner Curtis and Commissioner Loring to steal my friends, out of my meeting-house? Gentlemen, when God bids. me do right and this Court bids me do wrong, I shall not pretend to "obey both." I am willing enough to suffer all that you will ever lay on me. But I will not do such a wrong, nor allow such wickedness to be done so help me God! How could I teach Truth, Justice, Piety, if I stole men; if I allowed Saunders, Jeffreys, Scroggs, or Sharkey, Grier, Kane, or in one word, Curtis, to steal them? I love my Country, my kindred of Humanity; I love my God, Father and Mother of the white man and the black; and am I to suffer the Liberty of America to be trod under the hoof of Slaveholders, Slavedrivers; yes, of the judicial slaves of slaveholders' slave-drivers? I was neither born nor bred for that. I drew my first breath in a little town not far off, a poor little town where the farmers and mechanics first unsheathed that Revolutionary sword which, after eight years of hewing, clove asunder the Gordian knot that bound America to the British yoke. One raw morning in spring—it will be eighty years the 19th of this month - Hancock and Adams, the Moses and Aaron of that Great Deliverance, were both at Lexington; they also had "obstructed an officer" with brave words. British soldiers, a thousand strong, came to seize them and carry them over sea for trial, and so nip the bud of Freedom auspiciously opening in that early spring. The town militia came together before daylight "for training." A great, tall man, with a large head and a high, wide brow, their Captain, one who "had seen service," - marshalled them into line, numbering but seventy, and bad "every man load his piece with powder and ball." "I will order the first man shot that runs away," said he, when some faltered; "Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they want to have a war, let it begin here." Gentlemen, you know what followed: those farmers and mechanics "fired the shot heard round the world." A little monument covers the bones of such as before had pledged their fortune and their sacred honor to the Freedom of America, and that day gave it also their lives. I was born in that little town, and bred up amid the memories of that day. When a boy my mother lifted me up, one Sunday, in her religious, patriotic arms, and held me while I read the first monumental line I ever

saw:

"SACRED TO LIBERTY AND THE RIGHTS OF MANKIND."

Since then I have studied the memorial marbles of Greece and Rome in many an ancient town; nay, on Egyptian Obelisks have read what was written before the Eternal roused up Moses to lead

Israel out of Egypt, but no chiselled stone has ever stirred me to such emotions as those rustic names of men who fell

“IN THE SACRED CAUSE Of God and tHEIR COUNTRY."

Gentlemen, the Spirit of Liberty, the Love of Justice, was early fanned into a flame in my boyish heart. That monument covers the bones of my own kinsfolk; it was their blood which reddened the long, green grass at Lexington. It is my own name which stands. chiselled on that stone; the tall Captain who marshalled his fellow farmers and mechanics into stern array and spoke such brave and dangerous words as opened the War of American Independence, the last to leave the field, was my father's father. I learned to read out of his Bible, and with a musket he that day captured from the foe, I learned also another religious lesson, that

"REBELLION TO TYRANTS IS OBEDIENCE TO GOD."

I keep them both, "Sacred to Liberty and the Rights of Mankind," to use them both "In the Sacred Cause of God and my Country."

Gentlemen of the Jury, and you my fellow-countrymen of the North, I leave the matter with you. Say "Guilty!" You cannot do it. "Not Guilty." I know you will, for you remember there is another Court, not of fugitive slave bill law, where we shall all be tried by the Justice of the Infinite God. Hearken to the last verdict, "INASMUCH AS YE HAVE DONE IT UNTO ONE OF THE LEAST OF THESE MY BRETHREN, YE HAVE DONE IT UNTO ME."

END.