Speeches of Wendell Phillips Stafford, 1913

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... ous metaphor we must call to mind the scene in Our Savior's life to which he alludes, --when the demon was cast out and tore his victim as he left him so that he fell down as one dead: What if the cast-out spirit tear The nation in his going? We who have shared the guilt must share The pang of his o'erthrowing., Kansas was the storm center in 1857 and '58. Douglas' doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty had caught the popular whim, and whether Kansas should be a free state or a slave state was to be decided by the men who should settle there. Accordingly thousands upon thousands of northern men streamed across the Mississippi Valley into the new state chanting Whittier's majestic hymn: We cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free! Well, it was bleeding Kansas in those days. The massacre of unarmed and unoffending men at the hands of border ruffians from Missouri in the Marsh of the Swan called out a lyric from Whittier unequalled perhaps even among his own for its intensity of suppressed emotion. I quote only the first stanza and the last: A blush as of roses Where rose never grew! Great drops on the bunch-grass, But not of the dew! On the lintels of Kansas That blood shall not dry; Henceforth the Bad Angel Shall harmless go by; Henceforth to the sunset, Unchecked on her way. Shall Liberty follow The march of the day. Millions were learning to listen for his call. Our debt to Whittier is that the gift of verse became in his hand not a lute but a trumpet--not a toy but a weapon. I feel more like a wild Berserker, he confessed, 'than like a carpet ministrel with my singing robes about me. He blew a blast longer, louder, more compelling than the one Roland...