Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[39] who had hitherto been friendly to them. In the light of history nothing could have been more futile than the course of their boasted statesmen. Even Boston could hardly stand the sight of a fugitive slave marching down to the wharf between files of soldiers to be returned to the questionable mercies of his master. Webster besought his State to “conquer her own prejudices,” and declared that “anyone can perform an agreeable duty; it is not every man who can perform a disagreeable duty,” a remark which measures the depth of Northern hypocrisy, and shows that on the whole the North was more contemptible, if not more wicked, than the South throughout these wretched years. President Fillmore disgraced his State, New York, by signing the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850, although, if he had vetoed it, there was a chance of defeating it on its second passage. Six thousand Negroes at once fled from the miscalled free States across the border into Canada and found freedom on British soil. When Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker addressed a mass-meeting at Faneuil Hall to protest against the return of a captured slave, Judge B. R. Curtis, who hoped to obtain the post of chief justice from the slave power, and was in fact one of the greatest of living jurists, urged the grand jury to indict them as “obstructing the process of the ”