trated in the dust; to be suspected of
abolitionism was to incur a liability to an indefinite degree of insult
and indignity; and the few and hunted friends of the slave who in those
nights of terror laid their heads upon the pillow did so with the prayer
of the Psalmist on their lips, "Defend me from them that rise up against
me; save me from bloody men."

At this period the New York Evening Post spoke out strongly in
condemnation of the mob. William Leggett was not then an Abolitionist;
he had known nothing of the proscribed class, save through the cruel
misrepresentations of their enemies; but, true to his democratic faith,
he maintained the right to discuss the question of slavery. The
infection of cowardly fear, which at that time sealed the lips of
multitudes who deplored the excesses of the mob and sympathized with its
victims, never reached him. Boldly, indignantly, he demanded that the
mob should be put down at once by the civil authorities. He declared the
Abolitionists, even if guilty of all that had been charged upon them,
fully entitled to the privileges and immunities of American citizens. He
sternly reprimanded the board of aldermen of the city for rejecting with
contempt the memorial of the Abolitionists to that body, explanatory of
their principles and the measures by which they had sought to disseminate
them. Referring to the determination, expressed by the memorialists in
the rejected document, not to recant or relinquish any principle which
they had adopted, but to live and die by their faith, he said: "In this,
however mistaken, however mad, we may consider their opinions in relation
to the blacks, what honest, independent mind can blame them? Where is
the man so poor of soul, so white-livered, so base, that he would do less
in relation to any important doctrine in which he religiously believed?
Where is the man who would have his tenets drubbed into him by the clubs
of ruffians, or hold his conscience at the dictation of a mob?"

In the summer of 1835, a mob of excited citizens broke open the post-
office at Charleston, South Carolina, and burnt in the street such papers
and pamphlets as they judged to be "incendiary;" in other words, such as
advocated the application of the democratic principle to the condition of
the slaves of the South. These papers were addressed, not to the slave,
but to the master. They contained nothing which had not been said and
written by Southern men themselves,