Numerous letters describe the surrender to which Mr. Alley alludes. The following from R.H. Dana, Jr., under date of June 5, gives details.
"Judging from present appearances, there are few Compromise men left in Boston. I firmly believe that in the providence of God it has been decreed that one cup more should be put to our lips, and that it should not pass away until we had drained it to the dregs. To this end, a folly has been put in their counsel and a madness in their hearts, that they might do the things that should work in the end the utmost good. The delays, the doubts as to the propriety of the decision (more than doubts even with the moderate), the military indignities and violence, the noonday procession, the refusal to sell, the Presidential intervention, all have tended to the desired effect. Poor Burns himself looked with terror to a renewal of slavery. Not that Colonel Suttle was cruel. He has never lived with Suttle, but he is intelligent, reads and writes, is weak in his injured head, and therefore of little value, and liable to be sold and abused.
"Batchelder was not a deputy-marshal. He is only a man who has volunteered, this third time, against advice, to help catch and keep a fugitive slave. You observe the marshal only calls him one of his 'guards.' This guard were a precious set of murderers, thieves, bullies, blacklegs,—with a very few men who went into it from party bias, old Hunker Democratic truckmen. Batchelder was a truckman, I am told, and may be personally respectable for aught I know. I can give you no advice as to the pension. They ought to know what Batchelder was. It seems to me unconstitutional and unprecedented. If it can be defeated without your stir, it would be better, no doubt. I do not find there is any feeling for his case here. He volunteered for the duty, and met the consequences. He voluntarily risked his life for pay, in an odious and dangerous business, and lost it."
George Livermore, always a decided Whig, who had written under date of June 3, wrote again, under date of June 13:—
"I am, as I always have been, a Conservative Whig, but I am ready to fraternize with anybody who will do the most for Freedom; and if one who has heretofore been called a Democrat or a Free-Soiler will do more for this cause than a candidate who has been called a Whig, he shall have my vote, and my hearty coöperation in every way in my power."
A merchant of Boston wrote at the same time:—
"I rejoice that a man of your sympathies and sensibilities is not here to see the Court-House again in chains, and justice administered behind bayonets. The only retaliation at present proposed is a petition to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act, now in the News-Room, on its second day, with several thousand names attached. But what is the use of petition, or polished sentences and rounded periods, in a contest with the pirate honor of Slavery? It is like an attempt to hew down a mountain of granite with a glass pick-axe."
The sentiments of the people, and particularly of the clergy, are sketched by Rev. George C. Beckwith, Secretary of the Peace Society, in a letter dated June 2, from which an extract is given.
"You will have learned ere this that the deed is done.—the deed of shame and degradation to our good old State. I witnessed the scene from an insurance office on State Street, and never before felt such a sense of degradation. I am glad that so many seemed to share it with me: for I observed a sort of funereal sadness on the vast masses before and around me. There were groans and hisses at even our own troops, the militia, that had come out at the call of our mayor; but every effort to get up any counter applause proved a failure.