given to the public--it seems that a Committee, composed of members of
the mob, and constituted by the mob, suggested before reaching the house
that if we were still unmarried there should be no violence done, as
they intended to carry off the lady. A portion of this Committee also
made it their duty to gain access to the apartment where our company
were sitting, and to inform us of the intentions of the assembled
multitude below, while the remainder of the Committee endeavoured by
speeches and reasoning to quiet the mob spirit, which soon after the
assembling, began to reach its climax.

This Committee was composed of some of the most "respectable" men of
Fulton--lawyers, merchants, and others of like position. The reader will
doubtless think it strange that such men should be members of a mob; and
so it would be, if prejudice against color were not the saddest of all
comments upon the meanness of human depravity. In this, more than in
anything else did the malignant character of this American feeling
evince itself--that to drive me off or kill me, if need be, the
"respectable" and the base were commingled, like--

"Kindred elements into one."

Men who, under other circumstances, would have been regarded as beneath
contempt, the vulgar minded and vulgar hearted--with these, even
Christians (so called) did not hesitate to affiliate themselves in order
to crush a man who was guilty of no crime save that, having a colored
skin, he was supposed to be about to marry a lady a few shades lighter
than himself. O, the length and breadth, the height and depth, the
cruelty and the irony of a prejudice which can so belittle human nature.

But to the Committee again. This Committee declared themselves to us to
be a self-constituted body. But whether self-constituted or otherwise,
it matters not, since they were to all intents and purposes members of
the mob--if not in _deed_, still in spirit and in heart. They meant no
more than to save the honor of their village by preventing, if possible,
bloodshed and death. They were not men of better principles than the
rabble--they were only men of better breeding. I do them no injustice.
The tenor of their discourse to us at the house of Mr. Porter, the
spirit of an article published by one of their number a few days after
in the "_Oswego Daily Times_," and the statements of the mob-leader,
clearly satisfy me that had we been married, they (the Committee)
deeming that our marriage would