d, to
break down a passage, and read only half a sentence, passing over the
other half because it would not answer the purpose of the reader; in
fact, because it would alter the sense of the passage altogether. He
charged Mr. T. with having been guilty of this in the last quotation
which he had made, and, in order to show the true meaning of the
garbled passage, he would read it as it stood: [See the passage as it
appears in Mr. T.'s speech.] He had read this the more particularly,
in order to show the consistency of his present opinions with those
which he had held and uttered two years ago. They would now perceive,
he said, that when the sentence was given entire, he said, that
setting the slaves free without reference to consequences, constituted
a material and an omitted part of that procedure, which he had
characterized as reckless wickedness, whereas by breaking it up in the
middle, he was made to say, that to permit voluntary amalgamation,
after instant abolition, was by itself to be so considered. He was now
ready to defend this statement as he had at first made it.
The next thing he would refer to, was the report of a speech which he
[Mr. B.] had delivered at an annual meeting of the American
Colonization Society. And with regard to it, if he was in America, he
would say, decidedly, that it was not a fair report: that it was an
unfair report, got up by Mr. Leavitt, the editor of the New York
Evangelist, to serve a special purpose. He would not deny that he had
said something which might give a pretext for the report. He had
charged the parent society with having been guilty of a gross
dereliction of duty to the colony and the cause, in sending away two
ships' cargoes of negroes to Liberia, who were not fit for that place,
and he believed that those two expeditions had done much to injure
the colony itself, as well as to impair public confidence in the
firmness and judiciousness of the parent board. They were emigrants
unfit to be sent out--the refuse of the counties around South Hampton
in Virginia; who were hurried out by the violent state of public
sentiment in that region, after the insurrection and massacre there.
Like a man conscious of rectitude, he had gone to the very parties
concerned, and declared his grounds of complaint; a line of conduct he
could not too often commend to Mr. Thompson, and no proof could be
more conclusive than this anecdote afforded, that the active friends
of colonization in Ame
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