s of freedom and animated by the inspiring
voice of their leaders, they would soon find that 'a day, an hour of
virtuous liberty was worth a whole eternity of bondage.'

"Hark! methinks I hear the work begun; the blacks have sought for
allies and have found them in the wilderness, and have called the
rusty savages to their assistance, and are preparing to take revenge
upon their haughty masters."

To this threatening passage the orator has appended a note, in which
he says: "This was thrown out as a conjecture of what possibly might
happen; and the insurrections of San Domingo tend to prove this danger
to be more considerable than has generally been supposed, and
sufficient to alarm the inhabitants of these states."

The contingency, which he thought might possibly happen, did actually
occur thirty-nine years later, when an insurrection broke out, August,
1830, in Southampton county, Virginia, under the lead of Nat Turner, a
fanatical negro preacher, in which sixty-one white men, women, and
children were murdered before it was suppressed.

He recommends immediate emancipation; and if this can not be done,
"then," he says, "let the children be liberated at a certain age, and
in less than half a century the plague will be totally rooted out from
among you; thousands of good citizens will be added to your number,
and gratitude will induce them to become your friends."

This remarkable oration suggests some interesting questions of
historical inquiry. How far do these opinions represent the current
sentiments of that time on the subject of slavery? It will be seen
that they are of the most radical type. I am not aware that Wendell
Phillips or Wm. Lloyd Garrison ever claimed that the negro race was
equal in its capacity for improvement to the white race. While its
rhetoric was more chaste, they certainly never denounced the system in
more vigorous and condemnatory terms.

Forty-four years later (October 21, 1835), Mr. Garrison was waited
upon, in open day, by a mob of most respectable citizens, while
attending a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, dragged
through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and locked
up in jail by the Mayor of that sedate city to protect him from his
assailants. On the 4th of July, 1834, a meeting of the American
Anti-Slavery Society was broken up in New York, and the house of Lewis
Tappan was sacked by mob violence. A month later, in the city of
Philadelphia a m