There are, Heaven knows, vicious and
tyrannical institutions in ample abundance on the earth. But this
institution is the only one of them all which requires, to keep it
going, that human beings should be burnt alive. The calm and
dispassionate Mr. Olmsted affirms that there has not been a single
year, for many years past, in which this horror is not known to have
been perpetrated in some part or other of the South. And not upon
negroes only; the _Edinburgh Review_, in a recent number, gave the
hideous details of the burning alive of an unfortunate Northern
huckster by Lynch law, on mere suspicion of having aided in the escape
of a slave. What must American slavery be, if deeds like these are
necessary under it?--and if they are not necessary and are yet done,
is not the evidence against slavery still more damning? The South are
in rebellion not for simple slavery; they are in rebellion for the
right of burning human creatures alive.
But we are told, by a strange misapplication of a true principle, that
the South had a _right_ to separate; that their separation ought to
have been consented to, the moment they showed themselves ready to
fight for it; and that the North, in resisting it, are committing the
same error and wrong which England committed in opposing the original
separation of the thirteen colonies.
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