The party
was contemned on account of the character of its leaders, and the more
odious because chief among them was an Englishman, one Thompson, who was
supposed to be an emissary, whose mission was to prepare the way for a
dissolution of the Union. Let us hope that it was reverence for the
obligations of the Constitution as the soul of the Union that suggested
lurking danger, and rendered the supposed emissary for its destruction
so odious that he was driven from a Massachusetts hall where he
attempted to lecture. But bodies in motion will overcome bodies at rest,
and the unreflecting too often are led by captivating names far from the
principles they revere.
Thus, by the activity of the propagandists of abolitionism, and the
misuse of the sacred word Liberty, they recruited from the ardent
worshipers of that goddess such numbers as gave them in many Northern
States the balance of power between the two great political forces that
stood arrayed against each other; then and there they came to be courted
by both of the great parties, especially by the Whigs, who had become
the weaker party of the two. Fanaticism, to which is usually accorded
sincerity as an extenuation of its mischievous tenets, affords the best
excuse to be offered for the original abolitionists, but that can not be
conceded to the political associates who joined them for the purpose of
acquiring power; with them it was but hypocritical cant, intended to
deceive.
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