States, in which it now exists, SHALL BE
RECEIVED BY THE HOUSE, OR ENTERTAINED IN ANY WAY WHATEVER."
Thus has the RIGHT OF PETITION been immolated in the very Temple of
Liberty, and offered up, a propitiatory sacrifice to the demon of
slavery. Never before has an outrage so unblushingly profligate been
perpetrated upon the Federal Constitution. Yet, while we mourn the
degeneracy which this transaction evinces, we behold, in its
attending circumstances, joyful omens of the triumph which awaits
our struggle with the hateful power that now perverts the General
Government into an engine of cruelty and loathsome oppression.
Before we congratulate you on these omens, let us recall to your
recollection the steps by which the enemies of human rights have
advanced to their present rash and insolent defiance of moral and
constitutional obligation.
In 1831, a newspaper was established in Boston, for the purpose of
disseminating facts and arguments in favor of the duty and policy of
immediate emancipation. The Legislature of Georgia, with all the
recklessness of despotism, passed a law, offering a reward of $5000,
for the abduction of the Editor, and his delivery in Georgia. As
there was no law, by which a citizen of Massachusetts could be tried
in Georgia, for expressing his opinions in the capital of his own
State, this reward was intended as the price of BLOOD. Do you start
at the suggestion? Remember the several sums of $25,000, of $50,000,
and of $100,000, offered in Southern papers for kidnapping certain
abolitionists. Remember the horrible inflictions by Southern Lynch
clubs. Remember the declaration, in the United States Senate, by the
brazen-fronted Preston, that, should an abolitionist be caught in
Carolina, he would be HANGED. But, as the Slaveholders could not
destroy the lives of the Abolitionists, they determined to murder
their characters. Hence, the President of the United States was
induced, in his Message of 1835, to Congress, to charge them with
plotting the massacre of the Southern planters; and even to stultify
himself, by affirming that, for this purpose, they were engaged in
sending, by _mail_, inflammatory appeals to the _slaves_--sending
papers to men who could not read them, and by a conveyance through
which they could not receive them! He well knew that the papers
alluded to were appeals on the immorality of converting men, women,
and children, into beasts of burden, and were sent to the masters,
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