Page:The Barbarism of Slavery - Sumner - 1863.pdf/53

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47 delivered in the Senate have been stopped at the Post-Office who had received them have been mobbed, and on

booksellers

at least one occasion the speeches

against

All this quent with tution,

have been solemnly proceeded

by a Grand Jury. tyranny is condemned to be conseProclaim Slavery to be a permanent instiinstead of a temporary Barbarism, soon to pass away, is

natural, for

itself.

and then, by the unhesitating logic of self-preservation, all things must yield to its support. The safety of Slavery becomes the supreme law. And since Slavery is endangered by liberty in any form, therefore all liberty must be restrained. Such is the philosophy of this seeming paradox in a Republic. And our Slave-masters show themselves apt in this work. Violence their ready instruments, quickened always by the wakefulness of suspicion, and perhaps often by the restless-

and brutality are

ness of uneasy conscience. Lion's

Everywhere

in the Slave States the

Mouth of

nounced,

is

Venice, where citizens were anonymously deopen nor are the gloomy prisons and the Bridge

of Sighs wanting.

This

«

has recently shown

with such intensity and activity as to constitute what has been properly termed a reign of terror. Northern men, unless they happen to be delegates to a Democratic Convention, are exposed in their travels, whether spirit

itself

They are

of business or health, to the operation of this system.

watched and dogged, as if in a land of Despotism they are treated with the meanness of a disgusting tyranny, and live in peril always of personal indignity, and often of life and limb. Complaint has sometimes been made of the wrongs to American citizens in Mexico but during the last year, more outrages on American citizens have been perpetrated in the Slave States than in Mexico. Here, again, I have no time for details, which have been already presented in other quarters. But the instances are from all conditions of life. In Missouri, a Methodist clergyman, suspected of being an Abolitionist, was taken to prison, amidst threats of tar and feathers. In Arkansas, a schoolmaster was driven from the State. In Kentucky, a plain citizen from Indiana, on a visit to his friends, was threatened with death by the rope. In Alabama, a simple person from Connecticut, peddling books, was thrust into prison, amidst cries of " Shoot him hang him !" In Virginia, a Shaker, from



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