CORRESPONDENCE.
Numerous letters, from various persons and quarters, attest the general interest, marked in many cases by feeling and personal gratitude seeking to express itself. Brief extracts from a portion only are given.
Theodore Tilton, editor of the New York Independent, wrote just before the speech:—
“I protested with all my heart against the Amendment offered by the Committee of Fifteen. It don’t execute justice. It leaves the negro to the decision of the Rebel. It proves that a republic is ungrateful.
“I am glad to notice by the Tribune of this morning that you are to move an Amendment, or rather a substitute for that Amendment.”
[FROM MASSACHUSETTS.]
William Lloyd Garrison, the early Abolitionist, always persistent against Slavery, wrote from Boston:—
“I have perused your eloquent and unanswerable speech on the Suffrage question, and need not say that it contains the noblest sentiments, to which all the faculties and powers which God has given me thrillingly respond. It will doubtless be more efficacious out of the Senate than in it, as it will help to educate the popular mind up to the point of abolishing all complexional distinctions before the law, North and South.… Your speech, based as it is upon absolute justice and eternal right, is an admirable elementary treatise, and I trust will have the widest circulation.…
“What assiduity and perseverance, what courage and determination, what devotion and inflexible purpose you have shown, through fiery trials and at the risk of martyrdom, ‘in season and out of season,’ to effect the downfall of the atrocious slave system, and thereby elevate and save the Republic! If to this extent the year of jubilee has come, you have done much towards ushering it in, and have a right to be specially glad and grateful that Heaven has been pleased to make you so potential an instrumentality in bringing about its beneficent designs.”