the city treated with the grossest indignity, and
subjected, in some instances, to shameful personal outrage. It was
emphatically a "Reign of Terror." The press of both political parties
and of the leading religious sects, by appeals to prejudice and passion,
and by studied misrepresentation of the designs and measures of the
Abolitionists, fanned the flame of excitement, until the fury of demons
possessed the misguided populace. To advocate emancipation, or defend
those who did so, in New York, at that period, was like preaching
democracy in Constantinople or religious toleration in Paris on the eve
of St. Bartholomew. Law was prostrated 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