Page:Andrew Erwin - Gen. Jackson's Negro Speculations (1828).djvu/14



I have remained silent for some time, in order to afford you an ample opportunity to display your boasted candor and scorn for concealment, by coming out in your own name, with a full statement of facts in relation to your negro speculations. You have not done so, but have furnished such of your private papers as suited your purpose to the printers of your favorite newspaper, and have permitted to go forth, in that paper, uncontradicted, statements, professedly founded on competent authority, not only of your actions, but of your intentions and desires in relation to your dealing in slaves. You have justly been held responsible for those statements, inasmuch as they were clearly intended to be regarded by the community as your own representation of the case; and indeed, the information could not have been derived from any other source but yourself. You cannot now shrink from this responsibility, because, although it is not supposed that you wrote the articles in question, it is clear you must have furnished the statements therein contained, and by permitting them to pass uncontradicted, you have given them the sanction of your approbation. To suffer them to go forth through the official organ of your party as your defence and to remain sub silentia, while you know them to contain palpable falsehoods, would be an act of imposition on the public, as gross and as outrageous as if they had been issued under your own signature. I shall continue to regard them therefore, as coming from yourself, and shall use them accordingly. You know, Sir, that I have not come forward as your voluntary and unprovoked accuser. If your too-ready vindicators had permitted me to remain unmolested, I should have pursued my ordinary avocation on the farm on which I reside in Bedford county, without interfering with you or your ambitious projects; but 1 was called forth by a slanderous attack upon my own character, and in self-vindication, I felt it due to myself to throw back in the teeth of my accusers the charge of negro trading as applicable to you, their leader and idol. As an excuse for attacking me, it was falsely asserted that I was the writer of the numbers signed "A Tennessean," published, so much to your annoyance, in the Kentucky Reporter, That matter is effectually put at rest, the real author is known, and has received as the reward of his presumption, not only the growling of the 'sick lion,' and the 'indignant flushing of his eye,' but the inefficient ravings of his Jackalls, and the still more serious assaults of his subservient bullies. It seems, Sir, from this scandalous outrage, that if your are muzzled and pinioned down by the strong arm of public opinion, your followers, who partake of the spirit so well described by your friend Col. Benton, are not restrained by the same power, but are perhaps too ready to resort to the