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on his way to the Canadas, ‘and said amen to the prayer.’
‘Why, that,’ said
Mr. Commissioner Hallett,
1 of course partly in jest, ‘is aiding and abetting the fugitive.’
‘Well,
Theodore Parker prayed for him publicly,’ said James.
Oh, that nothing,
J. N. Buffum. replied
Hallett; ‘the
Lord would not answer his prayers’!
When we told Theodore, he said: ‘Well, then, the
2 Government is in this category: the prayers which the
Lord will endorse and answer are
illegal; those he will not answer are
legal.’
The case of Shadrach was one of four which, preeminently, in the year 1851, revealed to the
North the real meaning of the
Fugitive Slave Law as a precursor of disunion and civil war.
3 The war—or, more properly, then as in 1861, the pro-slavery invasion—in fact began with the execution of the law, as was first made clear when, on February
4 15, 1851, pending a postponement of Shadrach's case before
Commissioner George T. Curtis, in
Boston, the prisoner was lost to view in the crowd of his own color that filled the court-room.
This simple incident, which would scarcely have furnished the press with a police item had a pickpocket been thus spirited away, created a prodigious uproar at
Washington.
‘The head and front of the offending,’ in this instance— what is it?
5 asked
Mr. Garrison a week later.
A sudden rush of a score or two of unarmed friends of equal liberty—an uninjurious deliverance of the oppressed out of the hands of the oppressor—the quiet transportation of a slave out of this slavery ruled land to the free soil of Upper Canada!
Nobody injured, nobody wronged, but simply a chattel transformed into a man, and conducted to a spot whereon he can glorify God in his body and spirit, which are his!
