Todd--and all regarding my
trial as a mockery of justice." This unexpected result was one of those
accidents of history, which "have laws as fixed as planets have."
The prosecution and imprisonment of Garrison was without doubt designed
to terrorize him into silence on the subject of slavery. But his
persecutors had reckoned without a knowledge of their victim. Garrison
had the martyr's temperament and invincibility of purpose. His
earnestness burned the more intensely with the growth of opposition and
peril. Within "gloomy walls close pent," he warbled gay as a bird of a
freedom which tyrants could not touch, nor bolts confine:
"No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose,
Swifter than light, it flies from pole to pole,
And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!"
or with deep, stern gladness sang he to "The Guiltless Prisoner" how:
"A martyr's crown is richer than a king's!
Think it an honor with thy Lord to bleed,
And glory 'midst intensest sufferings;
Though beat--imprisoned--put to open shame
Time shall embalm and magnify thy name."
"Is it supposed by Judge Brice," the guiltless prisoner wrote from his
cell, "that his frowns can intimidate me, or his sentence stifle my
voice on the subject of African oppression? He does not know me. So long
as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I will not cease
to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul
reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt
of kidnappers, slave abettors, or slaveowners, wheresoever they may
reside, or however high they may be exalted.
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