O, haste, ere he leave us! for who will ride then, For pleasure or gain, to the hunting of men ? 1835. CLERICAL OPPRESSORS. [In the report of the celebrated proslavery meeting in Charleston, S. C., on the 4th of the 9th month, 1835, published in the Courier of that city, it is stated, “The CLERGY of all denominations attended in a body, LENDING THEIR SANCTION TO THE PROCEEDINGS, and adding by their presence to the impressive character of the scene!"] JUST God! - and these are they Who minister at thine altar, God of Right! Men who their hands with prayer and blessing lay On Israel's Ark of light! What! preach and kidnap men? Give thanks, - and rob thy own afflicted poor? Talk of thy glorious liberty, and then Bolt hard the captive's door? What! servants of thy own Merciful Son, who came to seek and And must we yield to Freedom's God, As offering meet, the negro's blood? Shall tongues be mute, when deeds are wrought Which well might shame extremest hell? Shall freemen lock the indignant thought? Shall Pity's bosom cease to swell? Shall Honor bleed? - shall Truth succumb? Shall pen, and press, and soul be dumb? No; -by each spot of haunted ground, Where Freedom weeps her children's fall, By Plymouth's rock, and Bunker's mound, By Griswold's stained and shattered wall, By Warren's ghost, - by Langdon's shade, By all the memories of our dead! By their enlarging souls, which burst The bands and fetters round them set, By the free Pilgrim spirit nursed NO! No; - guided by our country's laws, For truth, and right, and suffering man, Be ours to strive in Freedom's cause, As Christians may, - as freemen can! Still pouring on unwilling ears What! shall we guard our neighbor still, While woman shrieks beneath his rod, And while he tramples down at will The image of a common God! Where the Moloch of Slavery sitteth on high, And the words which he utters, are Right onward, O speed it! Wherever the blood Of the wronged and the guiltless is crying to God; Wherever a slave in his fetters is pining; Wherever the lash of the driver is twining; Wherever from kindred, torn rudely apart, Comes the sorrowful wail of the broken of heart; Wherever the shackles of tyranny bind, In silence and darkness, the Godgiven mind; There, God speed it onward! - its truth will be felt, The bonds shall be loosened, the iron shall melt! Erect for the truth, like their ancestral band; Forgetting the feuds and the strife of past time, Counting coldness injustice, and silence a crime; Turning back from the cavil of creeds, to unite Once again for the poor in defence of the Right; Breasting calmly, but firmly, the full tide of Wrong, Overwhelmed, but not borne on its surges along; Unappalled by the danger, the shame, and the pain, And counting each trial for Truth as their gain! And that bold-hearted yeomanry, honest and true, Who, haters of fraud, give to labor its due; Whose fathers, of old, sang in concert with thine, On the banks of Swetara, the songs of the Rhine, And O, will the land where the free soul of PENN The German-born pilgrims, who first dared to brave Still lingers and breathes over mountain and glen, The scorn of the proud in the cause of the slave: Will the land where a BENEZET'S spirit went forth Will the sons of such men yield the lords of the South To the peeled, and the meted, and outcast of Earth, Where the words of the Charter of Liberty first One brow for the brand, - for the padlock one mouth? They cater to tyrants? - They rivet the chain, From the soul of the sage and the patriot burst, — Where first for the wronged and the weak of their kind, The Christian and statesman their efforts combined, Will that land of the free and the good wear a chain? Will the call to the rescue of Freedom be vain? No, RITNER! - her "Friends" at thy warning shall stand Which their fathers smote off, on the negro again? No, never! - one voice, like the sound in the cloud, When the roar of the storm waxes loud and more loud, Wherever the foot of the freeman hath pressed From the Delaware's marge to the Lake of the West, On the South-going breezes shall deepen and grow |