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act accordingly if elected.
Van Buren, with characteristic two-facedness, admitted the power, but said the objections to its exercise, against the will of the South, were so ‘imperative in their nature and obligations’ as to amount to a want of constitutional power; and gave the same pledge as his rival.
He went further1 on this side, anticipating the repression of agitation, and that ‘for some time, at least, we shall have no more foreign agents to enlighten us on the subject,’ as the foreign public will take heed of ‘recent results here.’2
This optimistic view was not shared by his Southern auditors.
They knew, in fact, as Senator Preston declared, that ‘in England and in France the 3 developments of popular sentiment are all against us.4 The denunciations heard there reverberate throughout our own country.’
The Liberator, indeed, for 1836 is one long reverberation of Thompson's triumphant tour through5 England and Scotland, rehearsing in assembly rooms and chapels his American experience, setting forth the aims and character of the abolitionists and the relations of parties in the United States, exposing the Texas conspiracy, and fanning to a fresh heat a zeal which already he was preparing to turn against the apprenticeship system in6
2 It was of this manifesto that Mr. Garrison wrote to G. W. Benson, April 10, 1836 (Ms.): ‘Political abolitionists are now placed in an awkward predicament. What an outrageous letter Martin Van Buren has written to certain political rascals in North Carolina, respecting slavery in the District of Columbia! No consistent abolitionist can now vote for him. It seems that our alternative must now be between Webster or Harrison. I should prefer the former. Van Buren, you will observe, covers the Society of Friends with the slime of his panegyric, and draws a broad line of distinction between them and the abolitionists. Why? Simply because the Friends in North Carolina are numerous, and their votes are wanted to turn the scales in favor of the “ Magician.” ’
4 The French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, through its secretary, Count Alexandre de Laborde, apprised Mr. Garrison, by letter of July 23, 1836, of his having been elected a corresponding member. A similar honor had been bestowed by Scotland. ‘A powerful union,’ he says (Lib. 6.159), ‘is now formed between the abolitionists of England, France and America, for the extirpation of slavery and the slave trade from the face of the whole earth.’
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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