Page:The Barbarism of Slavery.djvu/58

 Owing to the sensibility of the people in that State, this agent declined to render this simple service. Massachusetts next selected one of her own sons, a venerable citizen, who had already served with honor in the other House of Congress, and who was of admitted eminence as a lawyer, the Hon. Samuel Hoar, of Concord, to visit Charleston, and to do what the agent first appointed had shrunk from doing. This excellent gentleman, beloved by all who knew him, gentle in manners as he was firm in character, and with a countenance that was in itself a letter of recommendation, arrived at Charleston, accompanied only by his daughter. Straightway all South-Carolina was convulsed. According to a story in Boswell's Johnson, all the inhabitants at St. Kilda, a remote island of the Hebrides, on the approach of a stranger, “catch cold;" but in South-Carolina it is a fever that they “catch." The Governor at the time, who was none other than one of her present Senators, [,] made his arrival the subject of a special message to the Legislature, which I now have before me; the Legislature all “caught" the fever, and swiftly adopted resolutions calling upon “his Excellency the Governor to expel from its territory the said agent, after due notice to depart," and promising “to sustain the Executive authority in any measures it may adopt for the purposes aforesaid."

Meanwhile the fever raged in Charleston. The agent of Massachusetts was first accosted in the streets by a person unknown to him, who, flourishing a bludgeon in his hand — the bludgeon always shows itself where Slavery is in question — cried out: “You had better be traveling, and the sooner the better for you, I can tell you; if you stay here until to-morrow morning, you will feel something you will not like, I'm thinking." Next came threats of an attack during the following night on the hotel in which he was lodged; then a request from the landlord that he should quit, in order to preserve the hotel itself from the impending danger of an infuriated mob; then a committee of Slave-masters, who politely proposed to conduct him to the boat. Thus arrested in his simple errand of goodwill, this venerable public servant, whose appearance alone — like that of the “grave and pious man" mentioned by Virgil — would have softened any mob not inspired by Slavery, yielded to the ejectment proposed — precisely as the prisoner yields