Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[217] and regard to the weakness of public authority and the reckless excitement of the public,--the Mayor himself, in utter violation of official decorum and personal honor, accepted the chair of the public meeting assembled in Faneuil Hall, and presided over that assembly,--an assembly which many intended should rouse a mob against the Abolitionists, and which none but the weak or wilfully blind could avoid seeing must lead to that result. In his opening speech to that factious meeting, the Mayor, under oath at that moment to protect every citizen in his rights, and doubly bound just then by private assurances to these very Abolitionists, forgot all his duty, all his pledges, so far as to publicly warn them of the danger of their meeting, --a warning or threat, the memory of which might well make him tremblingly anxious to save Garrison's life, since of any blood shed that day, every law, divine and human, would have held the Mayor guilty.

Such was the temper of those times. The ignorant were not aware, and the wise were too corrupt to confess, that the most precious of human rights, free thought, was at stake. These women knew it, felt the momentous character of the issue, and consented to stand in the gap. Those were trial hours. I never think of them without my shame for my native city being swallowed up in gratitude to those who stood so bravely for the right. Let us not consent to be ashamed of the Boston of 1835. Those howling wolves in the streets were not Boston. These brave men and women were Boston. We will remember no other.

I never open the statute-book of Massachusetts with out thanking Ellis Gray Loring and Samuel J. May. Charles Follen and Samuel E. Sewall, and those around me who stood with them, for preventing Edward Everett from blackening it with a law making free speech an indictable offence. And we owe it to fifty or sixty women,