feelings of the people should
cool, or before they, who were thus interested, should poison the minds
by calculations of loss and gain. The silence of the former president
was already attributed to the intrigues of the planters' committee. No
time therefore was to be lost. The letter was accordingly written, but
as no answer was ever returned to it, they attributed this second
omission to the same cause.

I do not really know whether interested persons ever did, as was
suspected, intercept the letters of the committee to the two presidents
as now surmised; or whether they ever dissuaded them from introducing so
important a question for discussion, when the nation was in such a
heated state; but certain it is, that we had many, and I believe
barbarous, enemies to encounter. At the very next meeting of the
committee, Claviere produced anonymous letters which he had received,
and in which it was stated that, if the society of the Friends of the
Negroes did not dissolve itself, he and the rest of them would be
stabbed. It was said that no less than three hundred persons had
associated themselves for this purpose. I had received similar letters
myself; and on producing mine, and comparing the handwriting in both it
appeared that the same persons had written.

In a few days after this, the public prints were filled with the most
malicious representations of the views of the committee. One of them
was, that they were going to send twelve thousand muskets to the Negroes
in St. Domingo, in order to promote an insurrection there. This
declaration was so industriously circulated, that a guard of soldiers
was sent to search the committee-room; but these were soon satisfied
when they found only two or three books and some waste paper. Reports
equally unfounded and wicked were spread also in the same papers
relative to myself. My name was mentioned at full length, and the place
of my abode hinted at. It was stated at one time, that I had proposed
such wild and mischievous plans to the committee in London relative to
the abolition of the Slave Trade, that they had cast me out of their own
body, and that I had taken refuge in Paris, where I now tried to impose
equally on the French nation. It was stated at another, that I was
employed by the British government as a spy, and that it was my object
to try to undermine the noble constitution which was then forming for
France. This latter report, at this particular time, when the passions