[282] what is the spirit that is at work, and that, under the plausible guise of friendship for the abolition cause, the design is, if possible, to subvert the Liberator, and drive me from the ranks. The Lord will make all things manifest in due time. Lucinda Otis called to see Helen yesterday—the first time1 since you left; said she had been very busy respecting the new Free Church, and had concluded to attend Colver's meeting.2 (By the way, he is coarse in his language, and bitter in his feelings, against non-resistance, and says he is ready to shoulder a musket any day: he hates the pacific character of the Son of God most cordially, and sneers like an infidel at the doctrine of holiness.) . . . Mrs. Chapman is writing a letter to Henry Clay, in reply to his speech,3 for publication. It will be keen and powerful, I doubt not. Oliver Johnson is expected home from Vermont on Tuesday.4 If I can arrange matters with him, I shall go to Providence soon, and also to other places, for the purpose of lecturing, etc. . . .The division of the anti-slavery household was real, but it was not yet complete. Confusion, rather than
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3 This speech, delivered in the U. S. Senate on Feb. 7, 1839, apropos of the petitions for abolition in the District, was Clay's bid for the Presidency, and as such was the most notable political event of the year. It destroyed the last shred of his anti-slavery reputation at the North, except among the Friends, whom he was cunning enough to flatter, and it also cost him his nomination by the Whig party in December (Lib. 10.31). It was a medley of the stale charges against the abolitionists—of unconstitutional aims and measures, of endangering an immense invested capital (1200 million dollars, as he estimated), of having retarded emancipation by half a century, etc., etc. He taxed them, further, with now having abandoned moral suasion for the ballot-box, with the bayonet as their next resource, and held up the old bogey of disunion and civil war. Against such a consummation he invoked the interposition of the clergy, drawing out a reply from Channing characterized by his usual blowing hot and cold (Lib. 9: 57, 61). Mr. Garrison said of it: ‘It “separates the subject from personalities”—i. e., it shoots at nothing, and hits it. “To me,” says Dr. Channing, “the slaveholder is very much an abstraction.” No doubt of it: the Dr. is safe from the thumb-screw, the cart-whip, and the brandingiron. . . . To the slave, “the slaveholder is very much” a reality-a dreadful reality’ (Lib. 9.59). Clay's speech was printed in full in the Liberator (9: 26). One sentence of it was destined to be reproduced many times against the author. To the moralist who objected that man could not hold property in man, Clay asserted—‘That is property which the law declares to be property.’ This aphorism might fitly have found a place among the legal mottoes of the Massachusetts Abolitionist.
4 Mar. 5.1839.
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