“I am under an overwhelming conviction, that, unless the views which you express are substantially adhered to, Despotism will have gained all that Liberty won in our recent war. The Battle of Gettysburg was not more of a crisis than this. May God prosper you!”
Professor George W. Greene, scholar and author, wrote from East Greenwich, R. I.:—
“I received your Worcester speech this morning. I must write a line to say I have read it carefully and thoughtfully, and say ‘Amen’ to it all. God grant it may go into every house and every heart! I look with deep anxiety for the opening of Congress. You have yet your hardest fight to win; but it is the fight of God and Humanity, and you will win it.”
Professor Charles D. Cleveland, an ardent Abolitionist and successful teacher, recently Consul at Cardiff in Wales, wrote from Philadelphia:—
“Many, many thanks to you for your noble speech at the Worcester Convention. Oh that your words might unite with the heart of the President and bring forth appropriate fruits! For the last two or three months I have been quite desponding as to his course.”
John Penington, the scholarly bookseller, wrote from Philadelphia:—
“With its matter I fully sympathize; but I was particularly struck with the aptitude and felicity of your illustrations of the various points of your argument.”
William Goodell, the early and constant Abolitionist, author of “Slavery and Anti-Slavery,” a history also of the “American Slave Code,” wrote from Bozrahville, Connecticut, where he was then residing:—
“In my rural retreat, where I am for the present recruiting my health, a copy of the Commonwealth containing your great speech at Worcester, September 14th, providentially falls into my hands, and I cannot forbear trespassing upon your time one moment to congratulate and to thank you, which I do most heartily, upon your great achievement, and for your signal service to your country, in the hour of its greatest peril,—greatest I say, because, as I fear, so little perceived and so little understood.… If you had spent the whole summer in preparing that speech, I see not how you could have improved it, nor how your time and talents could have been more worthily or more usefully employed.… You well say, ‘We must look confidently to Congress’; to which permit me to add, that for the leadership of Congress the country must look to you, whose ‘course is fixed,’ who ‘will not hesitate,’ who ‘will not surrender.’”