And may God have mercy on your soul!
No event in the history of the anti-slavery struggle so stirred the two
hemispheres as did this dreadful sentence. A cry of horror was heard
from Europe. In the British House of Lords, Brougham and Denman spoke of
it with mingled pathos and indignation. Thirteen hundred clergymen and
church officers in Great Britain addressed a memorial to the churches of
South Carolina against the atrocity. Indeed, so strong was the pressure
of the sentiment of abhorrence and disgust that South Carolina yielded
to it, and the sentence was commuted to scourging and banishment.
Ho! thou who seekest late and long
A License from the Holy Book
For brutal lust and fiendish wrong,
Man of the Pulpit, look!
Lift up those cold and atheist eyes,
This ripe fruit of thy teaching see;
And tell us how to heaven will rise
The incense of this sacrifice--
This blossom of the gallows tree!
Search out for slavery's hour of need
Some fitting text of sacred writ;
Give heaven the credit of a deed
Which shames the nether pit.
Kneel, smooth blasphemer, unto Him
Whose truth is on thy lips a lie;
Ask that His bright winged cherubim
May bend around that scaffold grim
To guard and bless and sanctify.
O champion of the people's cause
Suspend thy loud and vain rebuke
Of foreign wrong and Old World's laws,
Man of the Senate, look!
Was this the promise of the free,
The great hope of our early time,
That slavery's poison vine should be
Upborne by Freedom's prayer-nursed tree
O'erclustered with such fruits of crime?
Send out the summons East and West,
And South and North, let all be there
Where he who pitied the oppressed
Swings out in sun and air.
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