New York Times, “Growing Ferocious,” May 9, 1859

    Source citation
    “Growing Ferocious,” New York Times, May 9, 1859, p. 4: 4.
    Newspaper: Publication
    New York Times
    Newspaper: Headline
    Growing Ferocious
    Newspaper: Page(s)
    4
    Newspaper: Column
    4
    Type
    Newspaper
    Date Certainty
    Exact
    Transcriber
    Don Sailer, Dickinson College
    Transcription date
    The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.

    GROWING FEROCIOUS. – The Hon. J. R. GIDDINGS reverses the ordinary rule and grows more vehement and bloodthirsty with advancing years. He has written a letter on the Oberlin rescue, which surpasses in [truculence?] anything we have recently seen even from the most ultra of the Radical Abolitionists. He thinks the persons who rescued the fugitive should have hung the slave-catcher who came in pursuit of him. This is the only point in which they failed of their duty. “Those pirates,” says Mr. GIDDINGS, “should have been delivered over to the colored men and consigned to the doom of pirates, which should have been speedily executed.” “Had the prisoners executed the slave-catchers promptly, it would have taught the Administration a lesson not soon to be forgotten.” Mr. GIDDINGS does not forget the partisan even in his philanthropy.

    Mr. GIDDINGS’ letter furnishes startling proof of the absurdities into which a man, naturally sensible, may be led, by riding one hobby and nursing one idea, all his life. He has come to regard the rescue of a fugitive slave as the chief end of man – and considers all other objects of human ambition by the side of that as mean and paltry. He evidently supposes that the whole country shares his mania on this subject, and talks complacently and confidently about the people rising in their might and overthrowing a Government, provided the State Courts of Ohio prove “unequal to the occasion.” Mr. GIDDINGS is an old man, but he will probably live long enough to become still wiser.

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