And in another letter:—
“I could not take the hazard of advising you to make it, though I told you in your circumstances I should; but now you’ve done it, I can say it was wise and well,—your duty to the country, to the hour, yourself, the slave,—to your fame as a statesman, and your duty as leader.”
Lewis Tappan, the Abolitionist, wrote from New York:—
“‘Union and Peace,—how they shall be restored.’ You have shown the way, and the only way. We may have peace on other terms, but no union and peace. The Free States must choose between peace, temporary peace, renewed war, and peace founded upon righteousness, justice, and equity.”
Hon. Amasa Walker, the able writer on Political Economy, afterwards Representative in Congress, wrote from North Brookfield:—
“You never made a nobler, braver, or more opportune utterance than at Worcester on the first instant. But all Hunkerdom is down upon you for it, as I expected. No matter,—the people, I trust in God, will sustain you. Your words meet a most hearty response in the hearts of all true men, you may rest assured. If your positions are not sustained by the country, the great contest now going on will end in failure, and ought to end so.”
David Lee Child, the sincere and lifelong Abolitionist, once a journalist and lawyer, and always a writer, wrote for himself and his wife from Wayland, Massachusetts:—
“I was, and my wife was, refreshed and strengthened by your voice from Worcester. When you gave us the ‘Barbarism of Slavery,’ the grandest, the most comprehensive, complete, compact, and conclusive of all your noble utterances against ‘the sum of all villanies,’ I did not write, though never before so much moved to do so. We read it the night that it reached us, and were so exalted by it that we sat up two hours beyond our time, talking about it and rejoicing over it. The foes of justice and freedom accuse you of accelerating the crisis and precipitating civil war by that speech. I think they are right for once. The revived victim of frustrate assassins, the calm and undaunted bearing, the inflexible purpose, the overwhelming force of facts, argument, and illustration, struck more terror to the soul of Richard than could the substance of ten thousand soldiers armed in proof.
“I fully intended to address you as soon as the overflow of my heart became somewhat proportionate to the capacity of the pen, and to repeat that quotation from Tully which Junius aptly uses, though less aptly than it applied then: ‘Quod si quis existimat me aut voluntate esse mutata, aut debilitata virtute, aut animo fracto, vehementer errat.’[202] But my dear wife wrote you our joint offering of admiration and gratitude better than I could do it for myself.”