tism; he who could so well appeal to the
judgment and the reason of his readers too often only roused their
passions by invective and vehement declamation. Moderate men were
startled and pained by the fierce energy of his language; and he not
unfrequently made implacable enemies of opponents whom he might have
conciliated and won over by mild expostulation and patient explanation.
It must be urged in extenuation, that, as the champion of unpopular
truths, he was assailed unfairly on all sides, and indecently
misrepresented and calumniated to a degree, as his friend Sedgwick justly
remarks, unprecedented even in the annals of the American press; and that
his errors in this respect were, in the main, errors of retaliation.

In the Plaindealer, in common with the leading moral and political
subjects of the day, that of slavery was freely discussed in all its
bearings. It is difficult, in a single extract, to convey an adequate
idea of the character of the editorial columns of a paper, where terse
and concentrated irony and sarcasm alternate with eloquent appeal and
diffuse commentary and labored argument. We can only offer at random the
following passages from a long review of a speech of John C. Calhoun, in
which that extraordinary man, whose giant intellect has been shut out of
its appropriate field of exercise by the very slavery of which he is the
champion, undertook to maintain, in reply to a Virginia senator, that
chattel slavery was not an evil, but "a great good."

"We have Mr. Calhoun's own warrant for attacking his position with all
the fervor which a high sense of duty can give, for we do hold, from the
bottom of our soul, that slavery is an evil,--a deep, detestable,
damnable evil; evil in all its aspects to the blacks, and a greater evil
to the whites; an evil moral, social, and political; an evil which shows
itself in the languishing condition of agriculture where it exists, in
paralyzed commerce, and in the prostration of the mechanic arts; an evil
which stares you in the face from uncultivated fields, and howls in your
ears through tangled swamps and morasses. Slavery is such an evil that
it withers what it touches. Where it is once securely established the
land becomes desolate, as the tree inevitably perishes which the sea-hawk
chooses for its nest; while freedom, on the contrary, flourishes like the
tannen, 'on the loftiest and least sheltered rocks,' and clothes with its
refreshing verdure what, wi