"For while the well-disposed and faithful servants of kind masters will suffer and die with the whites in a general insurrection, the lawless and vicious will have in their power to massacre men, women and children in their sleep. This is my apology for feeling and expressing the deepest indignation against the man who dares to throw the fire-brand into the powder magazine while all are asleep and stands himself at a distance to see the mangled victims of his barbarous fury. I pray you, dear sir, in the strength of your benevolence to conceive the state of families living remote from assistance in the country. Suppose, as I have often witnessed, an alarm of insurrection; think of the mother of a family startled from her sleep by some unusual noise and seized with a horrid apprehension of the scene which may await her in a few moments."[[257]]
VIEWS OF ADAMS
Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited Virginia and the South in 1854, published the results of his observations, from which we take the following extracts.
After describing the activities of the Northern Anti-slavery Societies in scattering among the Southern negroes publications and pictures tending to stimulate slave insurrections and to inculcate ideas of racial equality, Dr. Adams writes:
"When these amalgamation pictures were discovered, husbands and fathers at the South felt that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defense, the protection of their households against servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office and seized and burned abolition papers; indeed no excesses are surprising in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed."[[258]]
Again he writes: "They seem to be living in a state of self-defense, of self-preservation against the North."[[259]]
"As Northern zeal has promulgated bolder sentiments with regard to the right and duty of slaves to steal, burn, and kill, in effecting their liberty, the South has intrenched itself by more vigorous laws and customs.... Nothing forces itself more constantly upon the thoughts of a Northerner at the South who looks into the history and present state of slavery, than the vast injury which has resulted from Northern interference."[[260]]
In his message to Congress, December, 1860, President Buchanan writes:
"The incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question through the North for the last quarter of a century has at last produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehension of servile insurrection. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning."
VIEWS OF LUNT