Vii.
In a letter to the New England Society of New York, December 21st, 1863, Mr. Sumner said: ‘Amid all the sorrows of a conflict without precedent, let us hold fast to the consolation that it is in simple obedience to the spirit in which New England was founded, that we are now resisting the bloody efforts to raise a wicked power on the corner-stone of Human Slavery, and that as New Englanders we could not do otherwise. If such [468] a wicked power can be raised on this continent, the Mayflower traversed its wintry sea in vain.’ ‘We remember too that another ship crossed at the same time, buffeting the same sea. It was a Dutch ship with twenty slaves, who were landed at Jamestown, in Virginia, and became the fatal seed of that Slavery which has threatened to overshadow the land. Thus the same ocean, in the same year, bore to the Western Continent the Pilgrim Fathers, consecrated to Human Liberty, and also a cargo of slaves. In the holds of those two ships were the germs of the present direful war; and the simple question now is between the Mayflower and the slave ship. Who that has not forgotten God can doubt the result? The Mayflower must prevail.’
