er-general formally avow that, though he could not
license this cut-purse protection of the peculiar institution, the
perpetrators of this highway robbery must justify themselves by the
plea of necessity? And has the pillory or the penitentiary been the
reward of that Postmaster-general? Have we not seen
printing-presses destroyed; halls erected for the promotion of
human freedom levelled with the dust, and consumed by fire; and
wanton, unprovoked murder perpetrated with impunity, by
slave-mongers? Have we not seen human beings, made in the likeness
of God, and endowed with immortal souls, burnt at the stake, not
for their offences, but for their color? Are not the journals of
our Senate disgraced by resolutions calling for _war_, to indemnify
the slave-pirates of the Enterprise and the Creole for the
self-emancipation of their slaves; and to inflict vengeance, by a
death of torture, upon the heroic self-deliverance of Madison
Washington? Have we not been fifteen years plotting rebellion
against our neighbor republic of Mexico, for abolishing slavery
throughout all her provinces? Have we not aided and abetted one of
her provinces in insurrection against her for that cause? And have
we not invaded openly, and sword in hand, another of her provinces,
and all to effect her dismemberment, and to add ten more slave
states to our confederacy? Has not the cry of war for the conquest
of Mexico, for the expansion of reinstituted slavery, for the
robbery of priests, and the plunder of religious establishments,
yet subsided? Have the pettifogging, hair-splitting, nonsensical,
and yet inflammatory bickerings about the right of search,
pandering to the thirst for revenge in France, panting for war to
prostrate the disputed title of her king--has the sound of this
war-trumpet yet faded away upon our ears? Has the supreme and
unparalleled absurdity of stipulating by treaty to keep a squadron
of eighty guns for five years without intermission upon the coast
of Africa, to suppress the African slave-trade, and at the same
time denying, at the point of the bayonet, the right of that
squadron to board or examine any slaver all but sinking under a
cargo of victims, if she but hoist a foreign flag--has this
diplomatic bone been yet picked clean? Or is our _indirect_
participation in the African slave-