the very Word of God ! In- furiated mobs murdering the peaceful minister of Christ, for the purpose of extinguishing the light of a printing press, and burning with unhallowed fire, the hall of freedom, the orphan school, and the Church devoted to the worship of God ! and last of all, both Houses of Con- gress turning a deaf ear to hundreds of thousands of pe- titioners, and quibbling away their duty to read and listen and consider in doubtful disputations whether they shall receivf-, or, receiving, refuse to read or hear the complaints of their fellow-citizens and fellow-men !" In a letter to the people of the United States, he avowed his humiliation in beholding " the ignominious transformation of the peo- ple who had commenced their career by the Declaration of Independence, into a nation of slaveholders, and slave- breeders."
Addressing the slaveholders on the floor of Congress, he said, " I know well that the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence, that ' all men are born free and equal,' is held at the South as incendiary doctrine, and deserves lynching—that the Declaration itself is a farago of abstrac- tions. I know all this perfectly, and that is the very reason I want to put my foot upon such doctrine, that I want to drive it back to its fountain—its corrupt fountain—and pur- sue it, until it is made to disappear from this land, and from the world. Sir, this philosophy of the South, has done more to blacken the character of this country in Europe, than all other causes put together. They point to us as a nation of liars and hypocrites, who publish to the world that all men are born free and equal, and then hold a large portion of our own population in bondage." Again, "As its (slavery) basis rests exclusively upon physical force, to physical force will it resort, not only to sustain its own institutions, but to encroach upon the institutions of freedom elsewhere. This disposition is already manifested in many ways, in the brutal treatment experienced by citizens of the free States, if but suspected of favoring abolition in the slaveholding jurisdictions, in the insolent demands upon the free States to deliver up their citizens for alleged offences against the slave laws—in the conspiring of Ame- rican slaveholders in a foreign land against the life