‘Though a —— born and bred, I now consider the Anti-Slavery cause as a just and holy one. Deep reflection, the reading of your excellent publications, and—years of travel in Europe, have made me, what I am now proud to call myself, an abolitionist.
‘For the present, accept the assurances of my unswerving devotion to the cause of liberty and justice. Any letter from yourself will always give me sincere pleasure, and whenever I go to New York, I shall call upon you, sans ceremonie, as I would upon an old friend.’
A short time since, J. G. Birney received a donation of $20 for the Anti-Slavery Society, from an individual residing in a slave State, accompanied with a request that his name might not be mentioned.
About the time of the robbery of the U. S. Mail, and the burning of Abolition papers by the infatuated citizens of my own city, the Editor of the Charleston Courier made the following remarks in his paper, which plainly reveal the cowering of the spirit of slavery, under the searching scrutiny occasioned by the Anti-Slavery discussions in the free States.
‘Mart for Negroes.—We understand that a proposition is before the city council, relative to the establishment of a mart for the sale of negroes in this city, in a place more remote from observation, and less offensive to the public eye, than the one now used for that purpose. We doubt not that the proposition before the council will be acceptable to the community, and that it may be so matured as to promote public decency, without prejudice to the interest of individuals.’
Hear, too, the acknowledgement of the Southern Literary Review, published at Charleston, South Carolina, which was got up in 1837, to sustain the system of Slavery.
‘There are many good men even among us, who have begun to grow timid. They think that what the virtuous and high-minded men of the North look upon as a crime and a plague-spot, cannot be perfectly innocent or quite harmless in a slaveholding community. … Some timid men among us, whose ears have been long assailed with outcries of tyranny and oppression, wafted over the ocean and land from North to South, begin to look fearfully around them.’
A correspondent of the Pittsburgh Witness, detailing the particulars of an Anti-Slavery meeting in Washington co. Pennsylvania, says:—
‘After Dr. Lemoyne, the President of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, had finished his address, in which the principles and measures of the Anti-Slavery Society were fully exhibited, the Rev. Charles Stewart, of Kentucky, a slaveholding clergyman of the Presbyterian church, who was casually present, rose and addressed the audience, and instead of opposing our principles as might have been expected, fully endorsed every thing that had been said, declaring his conviction that such a speech would have been well received by the truly religious part of the community in which he resided, and would have been opposed only by those who were actuated by party politics alone, or those who ‘neither feared God nor regarded man.’
I give thee now a letter from a gentleman in a South Western slaveholding State, to J. G. Birney.