In due time came the "Union meeting," on the twentysixth
day of November, 1850, in Faneuil Hall, in front of
the pictures of Samuel Adams and John Hancock,—in the
hall which once rocked to the patriotism of James Otis,
thundering against Acts of Trade and Writs of Assistance,
"more eloquent than Chatham or Burke." The Union meeting was held in the face and eyes of George Washington.
You remember the meeting. It was rather a remarkable platform; uniformly "Hunker," but decidedly heterogeneous. Yet sin abolishes all historical and personal distinctions. Kidnapping, like misery, "makes strange bed-fellows." Three things all the speakers on that occasion developed in common: A hearty abhorrence of the right; a uniform contempt for the eternal law of God; a common desire to kidnap a man. After all, the platform did not exhibit so strange a medley as it seemed at first: the difference in the speakers was chiefly cutaneous, only skin-deep. The reading and the speaking, the whining and the thundering, were all to the same tune. Pirates, who have just quarrelled about dividing the spoil, are of one heart when it comes to plundering and killing a man. That was a meeting for the encouragement of kidnapping; not from the love of kidnapping in itself, but for the recompense of reward. I will not insult the common sense of respectable men with supposing that the talk about the "dissolution of the Union," and the cry, "The Union is in peril this hour," was anything more than a stage-trick, which the managers doubtless thought was "well got up." So it was; but, I take it, the spectators who applauded, as well as the actors who grimaced, knew that the "lion" was no beast, but only "Simon Snug the joiner." Indeed, the lion himself often told us so. However, I did know two very "respectable" men of Boston, who actually believed the Union was in danger; only two,—but they are men of such incomprehensible exiguity of intellect, that their names would break to pieces if spoken loud.
Well, the meeting, in substance, told this truth: "Boston is willing; you may come here, and kidnap any black man you choose. We will lend you the marshal, the commissioner, the tools of perjury, supple courts of law, clergymen to bless the transaction, and editors to defend it!"
