repented of and abandoned. These fanatical persons had rapidly increased in numbers. Several wealthy merchants, several zealous and eloquent divines, had joined them. A good deal of money, as much as forty or fifty thousand dollars, had been contributed and expended in the dissemination of this startling creed, partly by agents and missionaries sent forth for that purpose, partly by the publication of newspapers, of which there were already two or three devoted to the cause, and especially by the printing of tracts, setting forth the cruelties and injustice of slavery, which had been sent by mail into all parts of the country, even into the southern states.
It was these tracts that Had thrown the whole south, planters, politicians, merchants, lawyers, divines into an agony of terror, a terror with which even the people of the north so far sympathized as to be ready to trample under foot, for the extinction of these horrible innovators, every safeguard of liberty hitherto esteemed the most sacred. Free speaking and free writing were not to be any longer tolerated. Throughout the United States, so far as related to the subject of slavery, they were to be suppressed by mob violence.
A few hundred men and women, hitherto mostly obscure and unknown, by the holding of a few public meetings and the publication of a few tracts, had thrown a whole country into commotion. Not John the Baptist, when he preached that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, had more terribly alarmed king’ Herod, the scribes and the Pharisees; and now, as then, the murder of the innocents seemed to be thought the most feasible way of staving off the apprehended catastrophe.
As there are glens among the mountains where the faintest spoken words come back in thunder from a thousand echoes, so there are times and seasons when. human hearts respond in like manner to the faintest uttered truth, testifying to the force of it, sometimes,
