caped the vengeance of the government,
do we not know too much of the deadly wrath of slaveholders, to believe
that he could have also escaped the summary process of Lynch law? If it
be at the peril of his life that a Northern man travels in the Southern
States,--and that, too, whether he do or do not say a word about
slavery, or even whether he be or be not an abolitionist;--if your
leading men publicly declare, that it is your religious duty to put to
an immediate death, whenever they come within your power, those who
presume to say that slavery is sin (and such a declaration did a South
Carolina gentleman make on the floor of congress, respecting the
inconsiderable person who is addressing you);--and, if your professing
Christians, not excepting ministers of the gospel, thirst for the blood
of abolitionists[A], as I will abundantly show, if you require
proof;--if, in a gospel land, all this be so, then I put it to your
candor, whether it can reasonably be supposed that the Apostles would
have been allowed to attack slavery in the midst of heathen
slaveholders. Why it is that slaveholders will not allow a word to be
breathed against slavery, I cannot, perhaps, correctly judge.
Abolitionists think that this unwillingness denotes that man is unfit
for absolute power over his fellow men. They think as unfavorably of the
influence of this power on the slaveholder, as your own Jefferson did.
They think that it tends to make him impatient of contradiction,
self-willed, supercilious, cruel, murderous, devilish; and they think
that they can establish this opinion, not by the soundest philosophy
only, but by the pages of many of your own writers, and by those daily
scenes of horrid brutality which make the Southern States, in the sight
both of God and man, one of the most frightful and loathsome portions of
the world--of the whole world--barbarous as well as civilized.

[Footnote A: I will relate an incident, to show what a fiend even woman,
gentle, lovely woman, may become, after she has fallen under the sway of
the demon of slavery. Said a lady of Savannah, on a visit in the city of
New York, "I wish he (Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox) would come to Savannah. I
should love to see him tarred and feathered, and his head cut off and
carried on a pole around Savannah." This lady is a professing Christian.
Her language stirs me up to retaliate upon her, and to express the wish
that she would come to the town, and even to the dwelling, in