If my esteemed neighbor, the State's
ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question
of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened
with the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of
Massachusetts, that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of
slavery upon her sister- though at present she can discover only an
act of inhospitality to be the ground of a quarrel with her- the
Legislature would not wholly waive the subject the following winter.
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place
for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only
place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less
desponding spirits, is in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of
the State by her own act, as they have already put themselves out by
their principles. It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican
prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his
race should find them; on that separate, but more free and
honorable, ground, where the State places those who are not with
her, but against her- the only house in a slave State in which a
free man can abide with honor.
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