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Mr. Chairman, Friends, and Fellow Citizens:

In coming before you to speak a few words, bearing on the great question of human freedom, and having some relation to the sublime event which has brought us together, I am cheered by your numbers, and deeply gratified by the cordial, generous, and earnest reception with which you have been pleased to greet me. I sincerely thank you for this manifestation of your kindly feeling, and if I had as many voices and hearts as you have, I would give as many evidences of my pleasure in meeting you as you have given me, of your pleasure at my appearance before you today. As it is I can only say, I sincerely rejoice to be here, and am exceedingly glad to meet you. No man who loves the cause of human freedom, can be other than happy when beholding a multitude of freedom-loving, human faces like that I now see before me.

Sir, it is just ten years and three days ago, when it was my high privilege to address a vast concourse of the friends of Liberty in this same beautiful town, on an occasion similar to the one which now brings us here. I look back to that meeting--I may say, that great meeting--with most grateful emotions. That meeting was great in its numbers, great in the spirit that pervaded it, and great, in the truths enunciated by some of the speakers on that occasion.

Sir, that meeting seems to me a thing of yesterday. The time between then and now seems but a speck, and it is hard to realize that ten long years, crowded with striking events, have rolled away: yet such is the solemn fact. Mighty changes, great transactions, have taken place since the first of August, 1847. Territory has been acquired from Mexico; political parties in the country have assumed a more open and shameless subserviency to slavery; the fugitive slave bill has been passed; ancient landmarks of freedom have been overthrown; the government has entered upon a new and dreadful career in favor of slavery; the slave power has become more aggressive; freedom of speech has been beaten down by ruffian and murderous blows; innocent and freedom-loving men have been murdered by scores on the soil of Kansas, and the end is not yet. Of these things, however, I will not speak now; indeed I may leave them entirely to others who are to follow me.

Mr. President, I am deeply affected by the thought that many who were with us ten years ago, and who bore an honorable part in the joyous exercises of that occasion, are now numbered with the silent dead. Sir, I miss one such from this platform. Soon after that memorable meeting, our well beloved friend, Chas. Van Loon, was cut down, in the midst of his years and his usefulness, and transfered to that undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns. Many who now hear me, will remember how nobly he bore himself on the occasion of our celebration. You remember how he despised, disregarded and trampled upon the mean spirit of color caste, which was then so rampant and bitter in the country, and his cordial and practical recognition of the great truths of human brotherhood. Some of you will never forget, as I shall never forget, his glorious, towering spontaneous, copious, truthful, and fountain-like out-gushing eloquence. I never think of that meeting without thinking of Chas. Van Loon. He was a true man, a genuine friend of liberty, and of liberty for all men, without the least regard for any, of the wicked distinctions, arbitrarily set up by the pride and depravity of the wealthy and strong, against the rights of the humble and weak. My friends, we should cherish the memory of Chas. Van Loon as a precious treasure, for it is not often that a people like ours, has such a memory to cherish. The poor have but few friends, and we, the colored people are emphatically and peculiary, the poor of this land.

Sir, I believe Chas. Van Loon is the only one of those who addressed us at that time, who has been removed from us by the hand of death. Many of the five thousand of the rank and file, have doubtless gone the way of all the earth. We shall see their faces and hear their voices no more, save as we recall them to the mind's eye and ear, by the aid of memory. Some of the marshalls who ordered our procession on that occasion, are no more, and very few of the glorious choir, which filled your grove with songs of joyous freedom, are with us today. What death, the common destroyer of all, has not done towards thinning our ranks, the fugitive slave bill has done, and done with terrible effect. It came upon us like a wolf upon the fold, and left our ranks thinned and trembling. The first six months after this whirlwind and pestilence set in, were six of the gloomiest months I ever experienced. It did seem that the infernal regions were broken up, and that devils, not men, had taken possession of our government and our church. The most shocking feature of those times was, that the infernal business of hunting men and women went on under the sanction of heaven as well as earth. Kidnapping proclamations, and kidnapping sermons, the one backed up by the terrors of the gallows, and the others by the terrors of hell, were promulgated at the same time. Our leading divines, had no higher law for the poor, the needy, the hunted, and helpless; their God was with the slaveholder, and the brutal and savage man hunter, carried his warrant from Millard Fillmore, in one pocket, and a sermon from Doctor Lord in the other. I say, sir, these were gloomy days for me. Our people fled in darkening trains from this country, to Canada. There seemed no place for the free black man, in this Republic. It appeared that we were to be driven out of the country by a system of cruelty and violence as murderous and as hellish as that which snatched us from our homes in our fatherland, and planted us here, as the white man's slaves.

Sir, the many changes, vicissitudes, and deaths, which have occurred within the range of our knowledge, during this decade, afford matter for serious thought. I cannot now dwell upon them. Perhaps the occasion does not require that I should dwell upon them, yet I must say, what we all more or less feel, and that is that the flight of the last ten years, with its experience of trial and death, admonish us that we are all hastening down the tide of time, and that our places in the world's activities are soon to be occupied by other generations. They remind us that the present only is ours, and that what our hands now find to do, we should do quickly, and with all our might.

Sir, I have thought much on this subject of the present, and the future, the seen, and the unseen, and about what things should engage our thoughts, and energies while here, and I have come to the conclusion that from no work would I rather go to meet my Eternal Father, than from the work of breaking the fetters from the limbs of his suffering children.

Mr. President, [Austin Steward] I am happy to see here today many faces that were here ten years ago. I am especially glad to see you here, and to hear your voice. Sir, you have grown venerable in the service of your enslaved people, and I am glad to find that you are not weary in this department of well doing. Time has dealt gently with you this last ten years, and you seem as vigorous now as when I saw you then. You presided on that occasion, you preside now; and notwithstanding the gloomy aspect of the times, I am not without hope, that you will live to preside over a grander celebration than this; a celebration of the American jubilee, in which four million of our countrymen shall rejoice in freedom. That jubilee will come. You and I may, or we [may not live to see it; but whether we do, or do not, God reigns, and Slavery must yet fall; unless the devil is more potent than the Almighty; unless sin is stronger than righteousness, Slavery must perish, and that not very long hence.

Here, too, I am most happy to meet again my loved, and honored and much respected friend, Henry Highland Garnet. He was here with us, and spoke to us ten years ago. He has traveled much and labored much since that time. England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, have listened to his eloquent advocacy of our cause since then. While in the old world, it was his privilege to associate with refined and cultivated people; and I venture to say that no man from among us, visiting the old country, has left in his pathway a better impression for himself and people than H. H. Garnet. We need a thousand such representative men at home and abroad, to meet and repel the floods of slander of our race, which two thousand millions of dollars invested in our people, as property, constantly provoke. The American government does not need a minister at the court of St. James to look after American interests, more than we need in England a representative of our people against whom all manner of lies are told.