Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/263

 a participator in the outrages going on around him, had very nearly destroyed, at least for the time, his weight and influence at home.

Washington, I found in the greatest state of excitement. An unfortunate botanist, who had been gathering plants in the neighborhood, had, from some cause or other, fallen under suspicion, as being an abolitionist. His person, room, and trunks had been searched. He was found to have in possession a pile of newspapers, which was made to serve the purpose of an herbarium, in which to dry, press, and preserve his plants. This pile of papers, on being carefully scrutinized, was found to contain some articles bearing strongly to abolition sentiments. The whole District of Columbia was at once in commotion. The unfortunate botanist had been immediately arrested, on the charge of having in his possession an incendiary publication. The alarm had reached a very high pitch; but when it was known that this botanical incendiary, this fellow who sought to entice the flowers and the herbage into a bloody conspiracy, was safely locked up in jail, and all bail refused, the city of Washington, especially the southern members of Congress, once more breathed freely, as if delivered from impending destruction.

The high degree of excitement, alarm, and terror which I found thus prevailing wherever I went, and which, according to all accounts, overspread, at this moment, the whole United States, was much of a puzzle tome. I doubt very much whether the Stamp Act itself had caused half so much commotion. Even the sacking of Washington by the British could hardly have produced more alarm than I found prevailing in that city and neighborhood. The mere fact that a few women of Boston had formed a society to pray for the abolition of slavery, or that a file of abolition newspapers had found its way to the District of Columbia, did not seem sufficient to account for so great an alarm. Even the circumstance that a Miss Prudence Crandall, somewhere in