There is another man; to have him named by me would only be an accolade of distinction in his circle. Actually he is not a man but only a type. He does not aspire to be a man but merely a president. He would be before the people continually. No place is too mean, if only public. No failure disconcerts him. No fall abates his desire to rise. He knows no higher law above his own ambition, for which all means seem just. He often speaks of the flag with tears in his eyes, but does not know what the flag represents. His voice is a demagogue’s. Ignorant men are evermore his tools. Not many days must we go back for learning how he uses them. And ignorant he begs them to remain so that he and his kind can control the state and laugh at the folly of the cheering masses upon whose necks he rides to power and fame.
Although another name came irresistibly to my mind when I read this passage (as I’m sure it does yours), the devastating and remarkably prescient portrait is of Benjamin Hallett, a Boston politico who was the first ever chairman of the Democratic National Committee and an ardent defender of the slavocracy. The speaker—the preacher rather, the Rev. Theodore Parker, is addressing a 1854 mass meeting of Massachusetts abolitionists prepared to storm the courthouse and free Anthony Burns, being held for return to Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act
Parker’s sermon, incorporating some of his own writing was channeled by author Truman Nelson in his first book, The Sin of the Prophet, about Parker and the battle over Anthony Burns, published in 1952. (Nelson’s writings, too little remembered today, won him high praise from radical Black leaders like WEB Du Bois, Elizabeth Catlett and Conrad Lynn.)