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The common sense, the "large roundabout common sense" of the people, slowly, and somewhat reluctantly, came up to the demands of the occasion. The sophistries and fallacies of the Northern defenders of the pretensions of the slave-holding sectional minority were gradually exposed, and were repudiated in the lump.

"The great object that we have in contemplation is to excite a rebellion among the negroes throughout the slave-holding states. Our plan is to manage so as to have it commence everywhere at the same hour. We have set on the 25th of December, 1835, for the time to commence our operations.

If the Government would inquire into the present condition of these classes, and still more, into what has become of these women and their children of the past, I believe that it will be found that in the great majority of cases the women have sunk into misery, and that of the children the girls that have survived have been sold to the profession of their mothers, and that, if boys, they have been lost sight of or have sunk into the condition of the mean whites of the late slave-holding states of America.

From it came also Thomas Jefferson, the hero of American democracy; and to it was added Patrick Henry, not by lineage or slave-holding, but by virtue of his brilliant abilities, and because he, too, was an aristocrat by the immutable division of race. It was this aristocracy into which Washington was born, and amid which he was brought up.

Did the harangues of Louis the Sixteenth's tormentors convince him of the ethical standards of universal justice, or John Brown's sacrifice the representatives of a slave-holding population?

Howells has called Hannibal "a loafing, out-at-elbows, down-at-the-heels, slave-holding Mississippi town"; and the elder Clemens was himself a slave-owner, who silently abhorred slavery. When the future author was but twelve his father died, and the son had to get his education as best he could.

Let me forsake it, and I am like Paul's ship when it was driving up and down in Adria, and neither sun nor stars appeared. My impulses were not given me as my guide. They are to be compared with the divine will. Many questions may be asked which I cannot answer, and many difficulties encompass this subject of slave-holding which I cannot solve.

But it was altogether different with the assembled ministers. Lundy, as was his wont on such occasions, desired and urged the formation of an anti-slavery society, but these sons of Eli of that generation were not willing to offend their slave-holding brethren in the South.

And what better market could have been sought for murderers and cowards and assassins, and intense haters of negroes than Georgia? In ante-bellum days Georgia outdid all other slave-holding States in cruelty to its slave population. The North Carolina master could subdue the most unruly slave by threatening to sell him or her into Georgia.

Charles Sumner, the real grand central figure of that noble struggle, was at that moment thundering in Congress against the iniquitous extension of the slave-holding area, and was employing all his magnificent powers to assail the abominable Fugitive Slave Bill, for the return of runaway negroes, who escaped north, into the hands of their angry masters.