“I answer, if ever it reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad.
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.
“As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.
“I hope I am not over-wary; but, if I am not, there is even now something of ill-omen amongst us.
“I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country, the disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts, and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice.
“This disposition is awfully fearful in any community, and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit it, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to deny.
“Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.
“They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former, nor the burning sun of the latter.
“They are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slave-holding or non-slave-holding States.
“Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting Southerners and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady habits.