imbibed prejudices against the institution,—a curious expression, indeed, and one which must be interpreted to mean a very mild and inoffensive phase of anti-slavery feeling. For we must remember that he was by natural endowment a deliberate, cautious, conservative,[1] time-serving, law-abiding individual, whose altruistic sentiments were not sufficiently strong to carry him out of his party to which he clung, despite its becoming an abject tool of the slave power, until its dissolution in the year 1861. He was by temperament and feeling unfitted to be an agitator, educator or a radical in the cause of human progression. He was not even a protester against the errors and perverse tendencies of his party, though he had the intellectual ability and oratorical force, if he had been of more heroic mould, to have exerted a modifying influence favorable to republican institutions.
Hence, he was not a strong and guiding partisan, the undeviating one whose services as an advocate were frequently employed to promote a partisan victory.
He must have believed slavery to be a great evil, moral, social and political; but he never publicly declared such a belief, thus ranking behind Webster, who did.
Still, this can be said in mitigation of Judge Williams' subserviency,—his party would not brook the freedom of speech that was tolerated by the whigs. But is it not discouraging to common humanity to see the great and powerful of the earth submitting themselves, like Sampsons, bound to neutral service which they knew to be detrimental to the public welfare? With what sadness of heart I look back to the time when the great New Englander, essaying to stem the tide of anti-slavery sentiment then voiced by Phillips, Sumner and other conscience whigs, make this declaration in the famous cradle of Liberty: "Fellow Citizens, I am a whig, a Fanueil Hall whig, a liberty-loving, Union-loving whig, and if you kill the whig party where shall I go?" At that time Lincoln
- ↑ This word is used to indicate a kind of caution and adaptation to circumstances or conditions which is akin to sagacity.
