other description of our fellow-citizens, in the exemplariness of their demeanor, nor do they appreciate less highly than others the happiness which springs from its endear ments. As church members.-Notwithstanding the violent denunciations to which they have been subjected, even from their fellow-christians, because of their uncompromising advocacy of the cause of liberty as immediately connected with the poor, and perishing, and neglected among us; no instance, so far as it is known, is to be found where they have been brought under the discipline of their churches for unchristian and disorderly conduct. As citizens.-They are not identified with any of the political parties into which the country is divided. So far from it, these parties seem desirous of commending themselves to popular favor, each by outstripping its adversaries in their abuse, misrepresentation, and persecution of abolitionists. In elections, they vote by no party mandate, but as they individually believe to be most expedient. In every point of contact with government, they have shown themselves obedient to the laws, and faithful in the discharge of their civil duties. They allege, and it is believed, truly, that in the prosecution of their object-the emancipation of the enslaved of this land, they have neith er violated, nor intended to violate, any provision of the Constitution of the United States, or of the constitution or laws of any of the states. Of their yet having done so, or of their having written, up to this time, a single sentence which, even if the slaves of the South could read and had access to their writings, has any legitimate tendency to excite an insurgent spirit among the oppressed, they utterly deny, and demand other proof of it than is to be found in the furious clamor of slaveholders, who will not read their productions, or in the terror of mobs summon ed to the work of bloodshed and demolition by the dough faces of the North-panders to slaveholding avarice and passion-traitors to the wounded and almost expiring cause of liberty among themselves. Last spring, I attended the Ohio Anti-Slavery Convention-was present at the several meetings of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, and at the Anti-Slavery Convention held in Boston. On these several occasions, I became acquainted, and deliberated with, it may be, not less than one thousand persons, who may be fairly set down as among the most intelligent of the abolitionists. Subjects on which the most diverse opinions were entertained, and which to ambitious and untrained minds would be agitating and dissentious in the extreme, were discussed with the most calm and unruffled composure. And whilst some of the leading journals were teeming with the foulest and the falsest charges of moral and political turpitude, whilst there were produced in their assemblies, placards, calling on the mob for appropriate deeds, and designating the time and place of holding their meetings, that its violence might know at what point it might most effectually spend itself; yet not elsewhere have I seen so much of sedate deliberation, of sober conclusion, of dignified moderation, sanctified by earnest prayer to God, not only for the oppressed, but for the oppressor of his fellow; not only for such as they loved, but for their slanderers, and persecutors, and enemies. The above is a fair account, so far as my knowledge enables me to speak, of the character of those whom you are pleased to describe as a band of fanatical abolition *This word is not used in any malice, but as the received and most convenient designation of that class of persons who, residing in free states, yet are the defenders of slavery. ists.' Light and rash minds, unaccustomed to penetrate to the real causes of great revolutions in public sentiment, will, of course, think and speak contemptuously of them, whilst the philosophic observer clearly sees that such antagonists of error, armed with so powerful a weapon as the truth, must at all times be invincible, and that in the end they will be triumphant. 2. Their object is the abolition of slavery in the United States. This is expressed in the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and is generally reiterated in the constitutions of auxiliary societies. I safely hazard the assertion, that in the multiplied publications of the American Anti-Slavery Society-in all the speeches, and addresses, and discussions of its agents and intelligent advocates, no other object is proposed, and this only through the power of the truth applied to the understandings and consciences of slaveholders, to persuade them to do their duty. Now, of me and the other gentlemen you have associated with me, you have published to the world that our 'sole object' is to sow the seed of discord, rapine, and murder among the slaves of the south,' and you affirm, as witnesses who know the truth, that we have so 'AVOWED' it. Knowing, as I do, that at the time you gave this testimony, there were no facts in existence to verify it, what now shall I say to you, as honorable men and as Christians, of your course? I will not retort the language of abuse and vilification; it is torn from my vocabulary. Can anything be said in extenuation more favorable, than that passion had usurped the seat of reason-banished memory from its station, and left you to the undisputed sway of a disordered imagination, busy in the creation of her guilty figments? or that you are disciples of the reigning system of ethics, which makes a false statement less criminal when it is asserted of many than of few-of those we call our enemies, than of our friends, or of those who are persecuted, than of those who are popular? Elect your own scheme of palliation; still, as gentlemen and Christians, you owe it to the claims of honor and truth to furnish the evidence of your accusation, or with the magnanimity becoming both characters, acknowledge with contrition your shame for having preferred it. The object, then, of the abolitionists, is to bring slavery in the United States to a termination. Now, by itself, independently of the means to be used,-which we will consider bye and bye,-it is a good object-one which I would not do you the injustice, for a moment, to suppose you would not heartily approve. I will not attribute to gentlemen of your respectability and intelligence, the slightest approximation to that bruitism which could delight-because of its fitness and propriety-in seeing one race of men, year after year, generation after generation, century after century, increasing from tens to hundreds, from hundreds to thousands, from thousands to millions, performing unrequited toil, suffering bodily outrages and torments, and consigned to mental darkness and spiritual hopelessness, merely that another race might live in ease and indolence, and enjoy all the pleasures of despotic sway. Nor, will I suppose, if two strangers were to meet in a wilderness, and the stronger to reduce the weaker to the condition of a southern slave, that you would refuse to unite even with the veriest fanatic' in the land, in raising against such violence and abuse, the loudest note of condemnation; nor that any right claimed by the oppressor could receive the least confirmation, or the wrong of the sufferer be at all mitigated, by the wrong-doer's pleading the habits of domination, and cruelty, and indulgence into which he and his family had fallen, from the long continuance of the relation his own outrage had set up. No, gentlemen in such a case, you would decide at once, and correctly too, that every moment's denial of the right was a continuance of the wrong, adding only aggravation to its intensity, and furnishing fresh reason for its termination. Nor, do I believe, hateful as is the very name of abolitionists to slaveholders, that you would refuse to mingle your sympathies with theirs, for the oppressed of other lands. In all our south, the tyrant Nicholas had not a friend, while he was drenching his hands in the blood of his Polish subjects, goaded by oppression to revolt. No: the faintest ray of hope for their success in vindicating their liberty, warmed your every heart; the clang of the Polish falchion on the invader's casque, made music delightful to your ears; whilst for every blade that was raised by an arm that struck for liberty, your silent orisons went up, that it might descend with resistless energy upon the strongest of the oppressor's bands. Your prayers ascended not for the staying of the pestilence, that was sweeping off the thousands of the foe-and when, at last, after the struggle of despair, the son of Poland's hope went down in tears of blood, it was followed by your tears of sorrow-whilst in mournful sympathy with the poet, you exclaimed Hope for a season bids the world farewell, But stay-not so fast: Is it not 'fanatical,' thus to suffer the honest feelings of your nature to go out for the oppressed and is it not 'incendiary' for you here, to reprobate the cruelty of the tyrant, or to commiserate the afflictions of such contemptible disturbers of the peace?' There are two sides to every question. You have not yet heard the high-souled and chivalrous Emperor's account of this matter. You have not heard from his own lips of |