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TENDERLY SENSITIVE
The Black Republicans of this State pretend to repudiate the doings of the insurgents at Harper’s Ferry, and would make the people believe that BROWN is a deranged man, and that the Republican party should not be held responsible for his acts! How like our opponents! No wonder they are so tenderly sensitive just now! A party that changes its name every year, and professes one thing to-day and another to-morrow, are too cowardly to stand up and sustain manfully those who have the nerve to put into practice the principles they (the leaders) advocate. BROWN was not afraid to carry out the doctrines preached by Republican orators and editors, and it was pusillanimous in them not to fly to his standard when he struck the first blow at Harper’s Ferry. Had he succeeded in his designs – had he cut the throat of every slaveholder in Virginia, and freed every slave – would the Republicans dared to have condemned him? No, indeed! It is only because old BROWN and his deluded followers failed in their undertaking that the Republicans now speak of him as a “crazy man.”
BROWN and those who acted with him are to be pitied – pitied because they were the dupes of an unprincipled and treacherous party – a party that preaches up sedition and treason, but has not the courage to sustain those who put their preaching into practice. We say it boldly that the Republicans, as a party, are responsible for the murders and treason at Harper’s Ferry; and, say what they please, they cannot shirk the responsibility of those horrid transactions. This deplorable outbreak and treason was just as surely the logical sequence of the teachings and inflammatory bitterness of anti-Slavery agitators, as were the riots and church-burnings in Philadelphia, in 1844, the immediate and inevitable result of the fierce and sanguinary harangues made against Catholics and foreigners by Lewis C. Levin, Charles Naylor and Peter Skenn Smith, anterior to that memorable event.
As long as denunciations of our Southern bretheren, and anathemas of the “slave power” were restricted to a few crazy fanatics like Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Charles Burleigh, Henry C. Wright, Lucretia Mott and Abbey Kelley, who professed to put down the “peculiar institution” by moral suasion, the agitation was comparatively harmless, and a fit subject for laughter and ridicule; but when it assumed a thorough political character, and dangerous and ambitious men made it their Shibboleth in partizan contests, and advertised their claims to fill the high places of the nation by a direct war upon the rights of sovereign States, the question assumed a different and more formidable phase, well calculated to make conservative and Union-loving men pause and tremble for the consequences. When loyal and intrepid men in the North, who were disposed to stand by the rights of the South, and to secure to the people of that section all their constitutional guarantees, were arraigned as “doe faces,” and stricken down by an abolitionized and demoralized public sentiment, and when the President of the United States, true to his oath of office, was derided and spit upon and calumniated for endeavoring to execute the laws without prejudice to any part of the confederacy, - it was easy to see where it would all end.
Below, we subjoin a few of the sayings of the distinguished lights of the many-hued Republican Party, omitting those of the crazy men and women who are ranked as distinctive Aboltionists – the Garrisons, the Douglasses, and the Abbey Kelleys. Read the record:
Gen. James Watson Webb – a Republican leader, said, in the Philadelphia Convention:
“If we (meaning the Abolitionists) fail there, (at the ballot box) what then? We will drive it (slavery) back sword in hand, and so help me God! believing that to be right, I am with them.”
Horace Greeley, a Republican:
“I have no doubt but the free and slave States ought to be separated. The Union is not worth supporting in connection with the South.”
Josiah Quincy – Republican of Boston:
“The obligation incumbent on the free States to deliver up fugitive slaves is that burden, and it must be obliterated from the Constitution at every hazard.”
Mr. Banks, present Republican Governor of Massachusetts:
“I am not one of those men who cry for the perpetuation of the Union, though I am willing, in a certain state of circumstances, to let it slide.”
Mr. Burlingame – A Republican Congressman:
“When we shall have elected a President, as we will, who will not be the President of a party, nor of a section, but the Tribune of a people, and after we have exterminated a few more miserable doughfaces from the North, then, if the Slave Senate will not give way, we will grind it between the upper and nether millstones of our power.”
Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois – a leading Republican of the West:
“I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States – old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Senator Wilson, Republican, of Massachusetts:
“Let us remember that more than three million of bondmen, groaning under nameless woes, demand that we shall cease to reprove each other, and that we labor for their deliverance.
“I tell you here to-night, that the agitation of this question of human slavery will continue while the foot of a slave presses the soil of the American republic.
“We shall change the Supreme Court of the United States, and place men in that Court who believe with its pure and immaculate Chief Justice, John Jay, that our prayers will be impious to Heaven, while we sustain and support human slavery.”
Benjamin F. Wade, U.S. Senator from Ohio, Republican leader:
“There is really no union now between the North and the South, and he believed that no two nations upon the earth entertained feelings of more bitter rancor towards each other than these two nations of the Republic. The only salvation of the Union, therefore, was to be found in divesting it entirely of all taint of Slavery.”
Senator Sumner, November 1855:
“Not that I love the Union but freedom more, do I now, in pleading this great cause, insist that freedom, at all hazards, shall be preserved. God forbid that for the sake of the Union.”
John P. Hale, a Delegate to the Republican Convention, June 17th 1856:
“Congratulated the Convention upon the spirit of unanimity with which it had done its work. I believe this is not so much a Convention to change the administration of the Government, as to say whether there shall be any government to be administered. ***** Some men pretend to be astonished at the events which are occurring around us; but I am not more surprised than I shall be at this autumn to see the fruits following the buds and blossoms.”
Dennison, Governor elect of Ohio, said the following on the canvass:
“If I am elected Governor of Ohio – and I expect to be – I will not let any slaves be returned to Kentucky or any other slave State; and if I cannot prevent it in any other way, as commander in chief of the military of the State, I will employ the bayonet – so help me God!”
Henry Ward Beecher, in a lecture on the subject of disunion, delivered in New York, January 16th, 1853, said:
“Two great powers that will not live together, are in our midst, and tugging at each others’ throats. They will search each other out, though you separate them a hundred times; and if by an insane blindness you shall contrive to put off the issue, and send this unsettled dispute down to your children, it will go gathering volume and strength at every step, to waste and desolate their heritage. Let it be settled now. Clear the place. Bring in the champions. Let them put their lances in rest for the charge. Sound the trumpet and God save the right !”
Rev. Andrew F. Ross, of New Hampshire, at a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, New York, May 13th, 1857:
“***** It would not have been no more wrong for George the Third to put chains on George Washington, than it was for George Washington to put chains on the limbs of his slaves. *****
Where Slavery and Freedom are put in the one nation there must be a fight – there must be an explosion, just as if fire and powder were brought together. There never was an hour when this blasphemous and infamous government should be made, and now the hour was to be prayed for when that disgrace to humanity should be dashed to pieces for ever.”
