You, too, publish your
declaration of freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the
broad lands which the Constitution of the United States overshadows,
there is no single spot,--however narrow or desolate,--where a fugitive
slave can plant himself and say, "I am safe." The whole armory of
Northern Law has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your
place, I should throw the MS. into the fire.
You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as you are to so
many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to
the service of others. But it will be owing only to your labors, and the
fearless efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution of
the country under their feet, are determined that they will "hide the
outcast," and that their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an asylum
for the oppressed, if, some time or other, the humblest may stand in our
streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which he
has been the victim.
Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome
your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating
contrary to the "statute in such case made and provided." Go on, my dear
friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as by
fire, from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free,
illegal pulses into statutes; and New England, cutting loose from a
blood-stained Union, shall glory in being the house of refuge for the
oppressed,--till we no longer merely "_hide_ the outcast," or make
a merit of standing idly by while he is hunted in our midst; but,
consecrating anew the soil of the Pilgrims as an asylum for the
oppressed, proclaim our WELCOME to the slave so loudly, that the tones
shall reach every hut in the Carolinas, and make the broken-hearted
bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.
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