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

[284] Virginia, “The man is a murderer, and ought to be hung.” Almost every lip in the State might have said it except that single lip of its Governor; and the moment he had uttered these words, in the theory of the English law, it was not possible to impanel an impartial jury in the Commonwealth of Virginia; it was not possible to get the materials and the machinery to try him, according to even the ugliest pattern of English jurisprudence. And yet the Governor does not know that he has written himself down non compos, and the Commonwealth that he governs supposes itself still a Christian polity. They have not the faintest conception of what goes to make up a government. The worst Jeffries that ever, in his most drunken hour, climbed up a lamp-post in the streets of London, would not have tried a man who could not stand on his feet. There is no such record in the blackest roll of tyranny. If Jeffries could speak, he would thank God that at last his name might be taken down from the gibbet of History, since the Virginia bench has made his worst act white, set against the blackness of this modern infamy. [Applause.] And yet the New York press daily prints the accounts of the trial. Trial! In the names of Holt and Somers, of Hale and Erskine, of Parsons, Marshall, and Jay, I protest against the name. Trial for life, in Anglo-Saxon dialect, has a proud, historic meaning. It includes indictment by impartial peers; a copy of such indictment and a list of witnesses furnished the prisoner, with ample time to scrutinize both; liberty to choose, and time to get counsel; a sound body and a sound mind to arrange one's defence; I need not add, a judge and jury impartial as the lot of humanity will admit; honored bulwarks and safeguards, each one the trophy and result of a century's struggle. Wounded, fevered, lying half unconscious on his pallet, unable to stand on his feet, the trial half finished before his first request for aid had reached his -