"Oh you know it is! You know I would cut off my right hand, before I would aid in capturing a fugitive."
"Then why do you counsel others to do it?"
"Oh you know better! and Rev. Riddle, he and his friends are distressed about it. You do not know what you have done! I have already had three letters from the South, asking me to aid in returning fugitives, and he, too, has had similar applications. Oh it is too humiliating, too bad. You must set it right!"
I agreed to do so, and the Visiter explained that it had been mistaken in saying that both or either of the two Riddles would aid in returning fugitives. They both scorned the business, and Robt. M., would cut off his right hand, rather than engage in it. He only meant that other people should do what would degrade him. He was not a good citizen, and did not intend to be. As for his Reverence, he would shirk his Christian duties; would not pray by that lamppost, or any other lamp-post, for the success of slave-catchers. He had turned his back upon Paul, and had fallen from grace since preaching his famous sermon. The gentlemen had been accredited with a patriotism and piety of which they were incapable, and a retraction was necessary; but if any other more patriotic politician or divine, further advanced in sanctification would send their names to the Visiter, it would notify the South.
In answering Bible arguments, as to the righteousness of the Fugitive Slave Bill, the main dependence of the Visiter was Deuteronomy xxiii: 15 and 16:
"Thou shalt not deliver unto his master, the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.
"He shall dwell with thee, even among you, in that place where he shall choose, in one of thy gates, where it liketh him best, thou shalt not oppress him."
That old Bible, in spite of pro-slavery interpreters, proved to be the great bulwark of human liberty.
In 1852, Slavery and Democracy formed that alliance to which we owe the Great Rebellion. The South became solid, and Whigs had no longer any motive for catching slaves.