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Show 132 single member of this body. A few individuals at the South have, indeed, been tortured or murdered by enraged multitudes, on the charge of stirring up revolt; but their guilt and their connexion with the abolitionists were not, and from the circumstances and the nature of the case could not be, established by those deliberate and regular modes of investigation, which are necessary to an impartial judgment. Crimes, detected and hastily punished by the multitude in a moment of feverish suspicion and wild alarm, are generally creatures of fear and passion. The act which caused the present explosion of popular feeling was the sending of pamphlets by the Abolitionists into the slave-holding States. In so doing, they acted weakly and without decorum; but they must have been insane, had they intended to stir up a servile war; for the pamphlets ·were sent, not by stealth, but by the public mail ; and not to the slaves, but to the masters; to men in public life, to men of the greatest influence and distinction. Strange incendiaries these ! They flourished their firebrands about at noon-day ; and, still more, put them into the hands of the very men whom it is said they wished to destroy. They are accused, indeed, of having sent some of the pamphlets to the free colored people, and if so, they acted with great and culpable rashness. But the publicity of the whole transaction absolves them of corrupt design. 133 The charge of corrupt design, so vehemently brought against the abolitionists, is groundless. The charge of fanaticism I have no desire to repel. But in the present age it will not do to deal harshly with the characters of fanatics. They form the mass of the people. Religion and Politics, Philanthropy and Temperance, Nullification and Antimasonry, the Levelling Spirit of the working man, and the Speculating Spirit or the man of business, all run into fanaticism. This is the type of all our epidemics. A sober man who can find? The abolitionists have but caught the fever of the day. That they should have escaped it would have been a moral miracle.- I offer these remarks simply from a sense of justice. Had not a persecution, without parallel in our country, broken forth against this society, I should not have spoken a word in their defence. But whilst I have power I owe it to the Persecuted. If they have laid themselves open to the laws, let them suffer. Fm· all their errors and sins let the tribunal of public opinion inflict the full measure of rebuke which they deserve. I ask no favor for them. But they shall not be stripped of the rights of man, of rights guarantied by the laws and Constitution, without one voice, at least, being raised in their defence. The abolitionists have done wrong, I believe; nor is their wrong to be winked at, because done |
