piration, and in all the
fervor of Christian love, she put forth a book which arrested the
attention of the WORLD. A miracle of authorship, this book attained,
within twelve months, a circulation without a parallel in the history
of printing. In that brief space, about two millions of volumes
proclaimed, in the languages of civilization, the wrongs of the slave
and the atrocities of the AMERICAN FUGITIVE LAW. The gaze of mankind
is now turned upon the slaveholders and their northern auxiliaries,
both clerical and lay. The subjects of European despotisms console
themselves with the grateful conviction, that however harsh may be
their own governments, they make no approach to the baseness or to the
cruelty and tyranny of the "peculiar institution" of the Model
Republic.[4]

One slaveholder, together with the cotton men of the north, fretted
and vexed by their sudden and unenviable notoriety, foolishly
attempted to obviate the impressions made by the book, by denouncing
it as a lying fiction. Nay, one of the most affecting illustrations of
pure and undefiled Christianity that ever proceeded from an uninspired
pen, was gravely declared, by an organ of cotton divinity, to be an
ANTI-CHRISTIAN book.[5] Truly, indeed, the wisdom of man is
foolishness with God. "He disappointeth the devices of the crafty."

Branded with falsehood and impiety, the author was happily put on her
trial before the civilized world. She collected, arranged, and gave to
the press, a mass of unimpeachable documents, consisting of laws,
judicial decisions, trials, confessions of slaveholders,
advertisements from southern papers, and testimonies of eye-witnesses.
The proof was conclusive and overwhelming that the picture she had
drawn of American slavery was unfaithful, only because the coloring
was faint, and wanted the crimson dye of the original. A verdict of
not guilty of exaggeration has been rendered by acclamation.

It has long been the standing refuge of the slaveholders, that
northern men and Europeans, in condemning slavery, were passing
judgment against an institution of which they were ignorant. The
"peculiar institution" was represented as some great _mystery_ which
could not be understood beyond the slave region. Thanks to the
fugitive law, it has led to the construction of a "_key_," which has
unlocked our Republican bastile, thrown open to the sunlight its
hideous dungeons, and exposed the various instruments of torture for
subjecting