He would not stop now to consider the declarations said to have been made before the magistrate. Nothing could be more unsatisfactory and uncertain evidence than these examinations. The very fact that a man is accused throws him off his guard, and he may say what he does not intend, or which, if he did, in the midst of excitement the witnesses might not properly understand or correctly remember. It was said there were contradictions in his statements, but that supposition arose entirely from a mistake of one of the justices. The other understood it differently and saw no mistake at all. It respected the manner in which he brought on the books—one understood him to say that they were all given to him in New York, and that he brought them here, and they were all in the jail but about a dozen; and then, at another time, he said that he had some of them a long time. The other justice understood him to say that all that he brought into the District were there, and that they were all he brought from New York, except about a dozen, which he supposed he had left by the way. Neither of these suppositions were right. When he said they were all of them, he meant to say all he brought from New York; that he had distributed none, for even the one he loaned to Mr. King was taken by the prisoner from Linthicum's shop, and was then in Mr. Key's possession, though they supposed it was lost; and when he referred to about a dozen, he meant that he brought them all with him except about a dozen, which came in a box by water. It had been said that he admitted he had circulated a dozen; and yet the United States' witnesses prove that he denied having circulated any, and from the first disapproved of putting them in circulation. When the learned counsel asked why the persons were not brought, to whom he had given the dozen, to show that they were respectable men, he should have remembered that the testimony was all against such an idea; and that, if he had distributed any, the zeal and perseverance of the District Attorney and the officers would have discovered evidence of it.
It was also asked why the person who gave the bundle to him in New York was not brought to testify in his favor? as if the criminal wretch who had palmed off these incendiary papers upon an innocent man, without his knowledge, could be brought here to testify, when he was beyond the jurisdiction of the court, and had declared that he was afraid to come. He had requested the Attorney to have a deposition taken, but he refused; and when he was spoken to, he threatened a prosecution, and said he should like to see him; he wished he could get him. The Attorney now says he would be safe; perhaps so from him; but there are here, as elsewhere, hundreds of base cowardly scoundrels, who are willing in mobs to hunt down any one against whom they conceive a prejudice; men who dare not face a man alone, but who, backed by a mob, are willing to assail an individual without knowing any thing of his guilt or innocence.
Mr. B. then commented upon the character of the libel charged, and read the first count. The first paragraph, he argued, contained no incendiary language, unless it was to call slavery a crying abomination. He had not known before that those words were calculated to stir up insurrection. People were in the habit of hearing them daily from the pulpit, and he never
knew that they became seditious on account of it. The whole of the matter was a controversy between the Anti-Slavery Society and the Colonization Society, in relation to the expediency of their different measures; and if any body could make any thing libellous, he must have intellectual spectacles stronger than those with which Newton looked at the stars. In the next paragraph slavery is called "unrighteous," which was the great offence charged there. If this was a libel, he should show that Arthur Tappan & Co. were not singular in the guilt of libelling; for that fathers of the church in a slave state had called slavery unrighteous too, and that some of the most eminent of our patriotic Southern politicians had used far stronger and more exciting language.
This was all a controversy whether it was proper that provision should be made that no slave should be emancipated unless provision was made for sending him out of the country; and the writer contends that to make sending a man out of this country, where he was born, a condition of releasing him from bondage, in which he was forcibly held was a moral absurdity; and to say so might be libellous, but he could not understand how it should be so. Some of the jury would recollect when a discussion of this topic took place in the Legislature of Maryland upon a proposed law to the same effect, and they would remember that similar arguments were used there.
The next passage was an extract showing the treatment of slaves in another country, different from ours, where they have no law to protect the persons of slaves; and could not apply to the condition of any portion of our people. It could not be libellous to have the book giving the original journal of the traveller, and, if it were not, he did not see how any evil or excitement could be produced by this extract.
He came next to the passage in the second count, which was an extract of a speech, in which the orator tried to say something grand; but it amounted to no more than had been said by slaveholders themselves; and though the Attorney said it with an amusing emphasis, yet he would show stronger language, to the same purport, in the writings of Mr. Jefferson and of Mr. Archer, of Virginia, which had been approved by all who heard or read them.
The whole argument used in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, he contended, was mild and temperate, more so than could be expected, when the different habits and modes of thought of the people from whence they came were considered—a people who, from infancy upward, had heard nothing but the accents of freedom, and had never lived in a country where they could actually know the practical effects of our system of slavery. The example was set them by the ablest writers here, and if we publish and send to them similar writings, is it to be considered wonderful that, in their discussions, they should adopt it. Their argument is, that slavery may increase to be an evil which, by and by, cannot be remedied without violence and bloodshed; and it is addressed to men who have the power and the influence to apply a remedy now. The same arguments were published here by the Colonization Society, which does honor to human nature, and were founded on extreme necessity.
He read numerous extracts of books to show that similar expressions to those in the libels charged, were not considered blameable if uttered or published
at the South; and denied the right of the District Attorney to take particular words, here and there, and hold them up to fix the character of the paper, without regard to the connexion in which they were used; and he said that if Crandall was indictable for the language and meaning of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, then every member of the Colonization Society were liable to indictment.