on did a South
Carolina gentleman make on the floor of congress, respecting the
inconsiderable person who is addressing you);--and, if your professing
Christians, not excepting ministers of the gospel, thirst for the blood
of abolitionists[A], as I will abundantly show, if you require
proof;--if, in a gospel land, all this be so, then I put it to your
candor, whether it can reasonably be supposed that the Apostles would
have been allowed to attack slavery in the midst of heathen
slaveholders. Why it is that slaveholders will not allow a word to be
breathed against slavery, I cannot, perhaps, correctly judge.
Abolitionists think that this unwillingness denotes that man is unfit
for absolute power over his fellow men. They think as unfavorably of the
influence of this power on the slaveholder, as your own Jefferson did.
They think that it tends to make him impatient of contradiction,
self-willed, supercilious, cruel, murderous, devilish; and they think
that they can establish this opinion, not by the soundest philosophy
only, but by the pages of many of your own writers, and by those daily
scenes of horrid brutality which make the Southern States, in the sight
both of God and man, one of the most frightful and loathsome portions of
the world--of the whole world--barbarous as well as civilized.

[Footnote A: I will relate an incident, to show what a fiend even woman,
gentle, lovely woman, may become, after she has fallen under the sway of
the demon of slavery. Said a lady of Savannah, on a visit in the city of
New York, "I wish he (Rev. Dr. Samuel H. Cox) would come to Savannah. I
should love to see him tarred and feathered, and his head cut off and
carried on a pole around Savannah." This lady is a professing Christian.
Her language stirs me up to retaliate upon her, and to express the wish
that she would come to the town, and even to the dwelling, in which Dr.
Cox resides. She would find that man of God--that man of sanctified
genius--as glad to get his enemies into his hands, as she would be to
get him into the hands of his enemies:--not, however, for the purpose of
disgracing and decapitating them, but, that he might pour out upon them
the forgiveness and love of his generous and _abolitionized_ heart. In
the city of New York there are thousands of whole-souled abolitionists.
What a striking testimony is it, in behalf of their meekness and
forbearance, when a southern fury is perfectly secure, in belching out
such word