give. "Time was," said Mr. Fletcher in Boston, (in 1835, at a great meeting
in that city,) "when such sentiments and such language would not have been
breathed in this community. And here, on this hallowed spot, of all places
on earth, should they be met and rebuked. Time was, when the British
Parliament having declared 'that they had a right to bind us in all cases
whatsoever,' and were attempting to bind our infant limbs in fetters, when
a voice of resistance and notes of defiance had gone forth from this hall,
then, when Massachusetts, standing for her liberty and life, was alone
breasting the whole power of Britain, the generous and gallant Southerners
came to our aid, and our fathers refused not to hold communion with
slaveholders. When the blood of our citizens, shed by a British soldiery,
had stained our streets and flowed upon the heights that surround us, and
sunk into the earth upon the plains of Lexington and Concord, then when he,
whose name can never be pronounced by American lips without the strongest
emotion of gratitude and love to every American heart,--when he, that
slaveholder, (pointing to a full-length portrait of Washington,) who, from
this canvass, smiles upon his children with paternal benignity, came with
other slaveholders to drive the British myrmidons from this city, and in
this hall our fathers did not refuse to hold communion with them.

"With slaveholders they formed the confederation, neither asking nor
receiving any right to interfere in their domestic relations: with them,
they made the Declaration of Independence."

To England, not to the United States, belongs whatever odium may be
attached to the introduction of slavery into our country. Our fathers
abolished the slave-trade, but permitted the continuation of domestic
slavery.

Slavery, authorized by God, permitted by Jesus Christ, sanctioned by the