  SUGGESTED BY THE WORKING OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT, AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE CASE OF REV. DOCTOR PENNINGTON. BY THE WORK-SHOP BARD. Bring out the handcuffs, clank the rusted gyves; Rain down your curses on the doomed race; Hang out a terror that shall haunt their lives, In every place. Unloose the bloodhounds from oppression’s den; Arm every brigand in the name of law, And triple shield of pulpit, press, and pen, Around them draw. Ho! politicians, orators, divines! Ho! cotton-mongers of the North and South! Strike now for slavery, or our Union’s shrines Are gone forsooth! Down from their glory into chaos hurled, Your thirty States in shivered fragments go, Like the seared leaves by autumn tempests whirled To depths below. Closed be each ear, let every tongue be dumb; Nor one sad pitying tear o’er man be shed, Though fainting at your threshold he should come, And ask for bread. Though woman, fleeing from the cruel grip Of foul oppression, scarred and stained with blood, Where from the severed veins the driver’s whip Hath drank its flood. Though helpless childhood ask—O pitying Heaven!— The merest crumb which falls upon the floor, Tho’ faint and famished, bread must not be given, Bolt fast the door. And must it be, thou just and holy God! That in our midst thy peeled and stricken poor Shall kneel and plead amid their tears and blood, For evermore? Shall those whom thou hast sent baptized from heaven, To preach the Gospel the wide world around, To teach the erring they may be forgiven, Be seized and bound? Placed on the auction-block, with chattels sold, Driven like beasts of burden day by day, The flock be scattered from the shepherd’s fold, The spoiler’s prey? How long—thy people cry—O Lord, how long! Shall not thine arm “shake down the bolted fire!” Can deeds like these of God-defying wrongs, Escape His ire? Must judgments,—such as swept with fearful tread O’er Egypt when she made thy people slaves, Where thy hand strewed with their unburied dead The Red Sea waves? Must fire and hail from heaven upon us fall, Our first-born perish ’neath the Avenger’s brand, And sevenfold darkness, like a funeral pall O’erspread the land? We kneel before thy footstool, gracious God, Spare thou our nation, in thy mercy spare; We perish quickly ’neath thy lifted rod And arm made bare. J. M. Eells.
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