Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/264

 Connecticut, had set up a school to which she admitted colored children on terms of equality with her white pupils, would not appear in itself so alarming a matter, since a number of the most pious and distinguished gentlemen of her state and neighborhood, including a judge of the United States court, had taken an early opportunity to break up her school and to send her out of the town. I was assured, in fact, that this was not all. This Boston female society and Connecticut school were only small items. I was told of a grand plot formed by the abolitionists, tending to the most alarming results; no less than the cutting the throats of all the white men throughout the south, horrible indignities upon all the white women, the ruin of northern trade and commerce, the destruction of the south, and the dissolution of the Union. It was admitted by some of the more charitable persons with whom [I conversed, that possibly the abolitionists themselves did not distinctly contemplate all these ends. But they asked for the immediate abolition of slavery — a thing which could end in nothing but in the above-mentioned disasters and horrors.

I had a great curiosity to know who these formidable plotters, objects of so much alarm and terror, might be. I was not ignorant of affairs in America, but of these terrible abolitionists I had never heard; indeed, it would seem as if they had all at once started suddenly out of the ground. I learnt, upon inquiry, that within a short time past there had sprung up, in New England and elsewhere, several societies, delegates from which had lately met at New York, to the number of twelve men, where they had formed a national society. It was the fundamental principle of those societies, that to hold men in forced bondage was politically a wrong, socially a crime, and theologically a sin; disqualifying those guilty of it to be esteemed either good democrats, good men, or good Christians; and that, nationally and individually, this wrong, crime, and sin ought to be at once