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of the Abolitionists was assailed and its press thrown down.
The discipline proved effective.
No Democratic journal issued in that city has since ventured to speak a word for Freedom or Humanity.
The Abolitionists, at Gerrit Smith's invitation, adjourned to his home at Peterborough, Madison County, and there completed their organization.
At the South, there was but one mode of dealing with Abolitionists — that described by Henry A. Wise as made up of “Dupont's best [Gunpowder], and cold steel.”
“Let your emissaries cross the Potomac,” writes the Rev. T. S. Witherspoon from Alabama to The Emancipator, “and I can promise you that your fate will be no less than Haman's.”
1 Says the Rev. William Plummer, D. D., of Richmond, Virginia, in response (July, 1835) to a call for a meeting of the clergy to take action on the exciting topic, “Let the Abolitionists understand that they will be caught if they come among us, and they will take good care to stay away.”
2 The calculation was a tolerably sound one; yet it did not save quite a number of persons — mainly of Northern birth — who were seized at various points throughout the South on suspicion of being anti-Slavery, and very summarily put to death — some with, and some without, a mob trial.
Had there been any proof3 against them, they would doubtless have been left to the operation of the laws for such cases made and provided; for these were certainly harsh enough to satisfy even Wise himself.
At Charleston, S. C., July 29, 1835, it was noised about that the mails just arrived from the North contained a quantity of Abolition periodicals and documents.
A public meeting was thereupon called, which the Reverend Clergy of the
1 At a public meeting convened in the church in the town of Clinton, Mississippi, September 5, 1835, it was
Resolved, That it is our decided opinion, that any individual who dares to circulate, with a view to effectuate the designs of the Abolitionists, any of the incendiary tracts or newspapers now in the course of transmission to this country, is justly worthy, in the sight of God and man, of immediate death: and we doubt not that such would be the punishment of any such offender, in any part of the State of Mississippi where he may be found.
2 “The cry of the whole South should be death — instant death — to the abolitionist, wherever he is caught.” --Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle.
We can assure the Bostonians, one and all, who have embarked in the nefarious scheme of abolishing Slavery at the South, that lashes will hereafter be spared the backs of their emissaries. Let them send out their men to Louisiana; they will never return to tell their sufferings, but they shall expiate the crime of interfering with our domestic institutions, by being burned at the stake. --New Orleans True American.
Abolition editors in Slave States will not dare to avow their opinions. It would be instant death to them. --Missouri Argus.And Mr. Preston, of South Carolina, who once delivered a speech at Columbia in reference to a proposed railroad, in which he despondingly drew a forcible contrast between the energy, enterprise, knowledge, and happiness of the North, and the inertia, indigence, and decay of the South, in the U. S. Senate afterward declared:
Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina, if we can catch we will try him, and, notwithstanding all the interference of all the governments of the earth, including the Federal Government, we will hang him. --See N. Y. Journal of Commerce, June 6, 1838.
3 In 1835, a suspicion was aroused in Madison County, Mississippi, that a conspiracy for a slave insurrection existed. Five negroes were first hung; then five white men. The pamphlet put forth by their mob-murderers shows that there was no real evidence against any of them — that their lives were sacrificed to a cowardly panic, which would not be appeased without blood-shed. The whites were hung at an hour's notice, protesting their innocence to the last. And this is but one case out of many such. In a panic of this kind, every non-slaveholder who ever said a kind word or did a humane act for a negro is a doomed man.
Hartford. Published by O. D. Chase and Company. 1866.
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