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right to interfere in their domestic relations; with them they made the Declaration of Independence, coming from the pen of that other slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, a name dear to every friend of human rights.
And in the original draft of that Declaration was contained a most eloquent passage upon this very topic of negro slavery, which was stricken out in deference to the wishes of members from the South.
There is something about this language so far removed from good sense that it gives us pause.
That
something is the influence of terror.
Mr. Harrison Gray Otis, who moved on a still higher social plane than
Sprague, nay, who stood very near the gods in the imagination of Bostonians, spoke as follows:
I deny that any body of men can lawfully associate for the purpose of undermining, more than for overthrowing, the government of our sister States.
There may be no statute to make such combinations penal, because the offense is of a new complexion.
Mr. Otis found an even stronger objection to the Society in “its evident direction towards becoming a political association, whose object it will be, and whose tendency ”
