AND THE SENTIMENT OF UNION 405 



pers first came to Boston, . . . when Ellen Craft fled 

 to my house for shelter and for succour, and for the 

 first time in all my life I armed this hand. ... I 

 mourned when the court-house was hung in chains ; 

 when Thomas Sims, from his dungeon, sent out his 

 petition for prayers, and the churches did not dare 

 to pray. I mourned when that poor outcast in yonder 

 dungeon sent for me to visit him, and when I took 

 him by the hand which Daniel Webster was chaining 

 in that hour. I mourned for Webster when we prayed 

 our prayer and sang our psalm on Long Wharf in the 

 morning's gray. I mourned then ; I shall not cease 

 to mourn. The flags will be removed from the streets, 

 the cannon will sound their other notes of joy; but for 

 me, I shall go mourning all my days. I shall refuse 

 to be comforted. O Webster! Webster! would God 

 that I had died for thee ! " 



There is no sense in which these words of the great 

 scholar and preacher find a ready response in the 

 hearts of all of us to-day. When we look only at the 

 .simple fact that the demon of slavery had conjured 

 American politics into such a hopeless coil that a head 

 so clear and a heart so kind as Daniel Webster's could 

 for a moment be beguiled into making terms with it, 

 our feeling is likely to be that which Parker expressed 

 with such intensity. But is such a feeling really just 

 to Webster? Is it the kind of feeling which the his- 

 torian ought to entertain toward him ? I think not. 

 When Mr. Parker published his sermon, a few months 

 afterward, he said in his preface that he was not so 

 vain as to fancy that he had never been mistaken in 

 his judgments upon Mr. Webster's actions or motives; 

 the next generation would be better able to judge that 



