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[489] jacobinism for religion, and blood-guiltiness for innocence? The accursed system of slavery! To sustain that system, there is a general willingness to destroy the liberty of speech and of the Press, and to mob or murder all who oppose it. In the popular fury against the advocates of bleeding humanity, every principle of justice, every axiom of liberty, every feeling of humanity—all the fundamental doctrines of a republican government, are derided and violated without remorse and with fatal success. . . .

The newspapers are crowded with allegations against the abolitionists. These allegations are diabolically false—they are lies of the hugest dimensions, of the most malicious aspect, and of the most murderous tendency. We have never sent any pamphlet or paper to any slave; we have never, in any document, advocated the right of physical resistance on the part of the oppressed; we have never maintained that Congress is empowered to legislate upon the subject of slavery in slaveholding States; we have never asked that the slaves may be “turned loose” ; we have never returned evil for evil. The head and front of our offending is, that we hold slavery to be a blot upon our national escutcheon, a libel upon the Declaration of Independence, A sin against God which exposes us to his tremendous judgments, and which ought to be immediately repented of and forsaken. We use precisely the same measures, and wield exclusively the same weapons, that have been used in the cause of Temperance and of Peace. It is simply by “the foolishness of preaching” that we expect to triumph. . . .

Finally, . . . we tell the South that we regard its threats and warnings with supreme contempt and utter scorn; that our course is still onward, right onward; that we shall never desist from our practice of publishing “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” respecting its thievish and murderous acts, while life remains, or a slave pines in bondage; for truth is against the South—humanity is against it— and God is against it.

In the same number of the Liberator Mr. Garrison had this flying word for the approaching Faneuil Hall meeting:

The old Cradle of Liberty, it seems, is to be 1 desecrated by a meeting of the friends of slavery and slaveholders! Better that the lightning of heaven should smite and devour the building—better that the winds should scatter it in fragments

1 Lib. 5.131 (August 15, 1835).

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