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John
H. Rock,
Colored Counselor |
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| JOHN H. ROCK, COLORED
COUNSELOR |
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| We give on this page a portrait of John H.
Rock, the colored lawyer who was on February 2 admitted as a practitioner before the Supreme Court
of the United States, on motion of the Honorable Charles Sumner. Mr. Rock is known in Boston
as a first-class lawyer. This event, following two days after the passage by Congress of the
proposition to amend the Constitution so as to abolish slavery in the United States, will be regarded by
the future historian as a remarkable indication of the revolution which is going on in the sentiment
of a great people. Mr. Rock has never been a slave. He represents the colored freeman, as Mr. Douglass represents the freedman. This
extraordinary reversal of the Dred Scott decision is an act almost sublime. It is related of Æsop, who had
been born a slave, that the Athenians erected a statue to his memory, or as Phaedrus has it:
Servumque posuere in aeterna basi. The Supreme Court of the United States has taken
one of a race crushed down to the earth with its own most solemn sanction, has taken one who
merely by the chance of birth was not himself a slave, and has placed him not indeed in marble,
in aeterna basi, but upon "the enduring pedestal" of an honorable
citizenship. |
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