lected. Everything
was done that practiced demagogues could contrive to stimulate
the South into a frenzy and to put down at once and forever
all opposition to slavery. The clergy and the religious bodies
were summoned to the patriotic duty of committing themselves
on the side of 'southern institutions.' Just then it was, if
we mistake not, that their apostasy began. They dared not say
that slavery as an institution in the State is essentially an
organized injustice, and that, though the Scriptures rightly
and wisely enjoin justice and the recognition of the slaves'
brotherhood upon masters, and conscientious meekness upon
slaves, the organized injustice of the institution ought to be
abolished by the shortest process consistent with the public
safety and the welfare of the enslaved. They dared not even
keep silence under the plea that the institution is political
and therefore not to be meddled with by religious bodies or
religious persons. They yielded to the demand. They were
carried along in the current of the popular frenzy; they
joined in the clamor, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians;' they
denounced the fanaticism of abolition and permitted
themselves to be understood as certifying, in the name of
religion and of Christ, that the entire institution of slavery
'as it exists' is chargeable with no injustice and is
warranted by the word of God."[281:1]

There is no good reason to question the genuineness and sincerity of the
fears expressed by the slave-holding population as a justification of
their violent measures for the suppression of free speech in relation to
slavery; nor of their belief that the papers and prints actively
disseminated from the antislavery press in Boston were fitted, if not
distinctly intended, to kindle bloody insurrections. These terrors were
powerfully pleaded in the great debate in the Virginia legislature as an
argument for the abolition of slavery.[281:2] This failing, they became
throughout the South a constraining power for the suppression of free
speech, not only on the part of outsiders, but among the southern people
themselves. The regime thus introduced was, in the strictest sense of
the phrase, "a reign of terror." The universal lockjaw which thenceforth
forbade the utterance of what had so recently and suddenly ceased to be
the unanimous religious conviction of the