make a track on the Blue Ridge in a
trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer,
If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from
abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and
finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die
by suicide.

I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something
of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which
pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild
and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the
worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This
disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists
in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a
violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. Accounts
of outrages committed by mobs form the every-day news of the times.
They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana;--they are
neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning
suns of the latter; they are not the creature of climate, neither are
they confined to the slave-holding or the non-slave-holding states.
Alike they spring up among the pleasure-hunting masters of Southern
slaves, and the order-loving citizens of the land of steady
habits.--Whatever, then, their cause may be, it is common to the whole
country.

It would be tedious as well as useless to recount the horrors of all of
them. Those, happening in the State of Mississippi and at St. Louis
are, perhaps, the most dangerous in example and revolting to humanity.
In the Mississippi case they first commenced by hanging the regular
gamblers--a set of men certainly not following for a livelihood a very
useful or very honest occupation; but one which, so far from being
forbidden by the laws, was actually licensed by an act of the
Legislature passed but a single year before. Next negroes suspected of
conspiring to raise an insurrection were caught up and hanged in all
parts of the State; then, white men supposed to be leagued with the
negroes; and finally, strangers from neighboring States, going thither
on business, were, in many instances, subjected to the same fate. Thus
went on this process of hanging, from gamblers to negroes, from negroes
to white citizens, and from these to strangers, till dead men were seen
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