Page:Narrative of Henry Box Brown.pdf/86

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84
CURE FOR SLAVERY.

Parliament allowed the opposers of the American War. In Boston, on the day which ushered the famous stamp act into existence, the bells were tolled, and a funeral procession passed through the streets, bearing a coffin, on which the word Liberty was inscribed. "During the movement of the procession, minute guns were fired, and an oration was pronounced in favor of the deceased. Similar expressions of grief-and indignation occurred in many parts of the land;" but, friends, no funeral procession passed through our streets when Liberty died the second time — no muffled bells sounded their melancholy peals in the ears of a mourning people; no liberty-loving orator was found to pronounce a requiem for the departed goddess; and yet she was slain — and slain too, not by foreign hands, nor by the natural allies of human oppressors, but, shall I tell the sad and dismal tale? by those, who twenty-five years before, had shrouded their faces in mantles of mourning, and rent the air with their expressions of grief, at the destruction of one of liberty's little fingers, by the passage of the stamp act; but when Liberty lay a full length corpse, on the floors of that Congress, which sold her to the South, as Judas betrayed the Son of God, and for almost as small a boon, viz.: "the carrying trade" of the South; not only were there no lamentations made over her complete departure, but she was taken by night and buried hastily; while

"Not a drum was heard nor a funeral note."

as her corpse was deposited without a "winding sheet," or even "a soldier's cloak" to wrap around her bleeding form, Clandestinely was she hurried out of the sight of the men who murdered her; and instead of