Before we congratulate you on these omens, let us recall to your recollection the steps by which the enemies of human rights have advanced to their present rash and insolent defiance of moral and constitutional obligation.

In 1831, a newspaper was established in Boston, for the purpose of disseminating facts and arguments in favor of the duty and policy of immediate emancipation.  The Legislature of Georgia, with all the recklessness of despotism, passed a law, offering a reward of $5000, for the abduction of the Editor, and his delivery in Georgia.  As there was no law, by which a citizen of Massachusetts could be tried in Georgia, for expressing his opinions in the capital of his own State, this reward was intended as the price of BLOOD.  Do you start at the suggestion?  Remember the several sums of $25,000, of $50,000, and of $100,000, offered in Southern papers for kidnapping certain abolitionists.  Remember the horrible inflictions by Southern Lynch clubs.  Remember the declaration, in the United States Senate, by the brazen-fronted Preston, that, should an abolitionist be caught in Carolina, he would be HANGED. But, as the Slaveholders could not destroy the lives of the Abolitionists, they determined to murder their characters.  Hence, the President of the United States was induced, in his Message of 1835, to Congress, to charge them with plotting the massacre of the Southern planters; and even to stultify himself, by affirming that, for this purpose, they were engaged in sending, by mail, inflammatory appeals to the slaves—­sending papers to men who could not read them, and by a conveyance through which they could not receive them!  He well knew that the papers alluded to were appeals on the immorality of converting men, women, and children, into beasts of burden, and were sent to the masters, for their consideration.  The masters in Charleston, dreading the moral influence of these appeals on the conscience of the slaveholding community, forced the Post Office, and made a bonfire of the papers.  The Post Master General, with the sanction of the President, also hastened to their relief, and, in violation of oaths, and laws, and the constitution, established ten thousand censors of the press, each one of whom was authorized to abstract from the mail every paper which he might think too favorable to the rights of man.

For more than twenty years, petitions have been presented to Congress, for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.  The right to present them, and the power of Congress to grant their prayer, were, until recently, unquestioned.  But the rapid multiplication of these petitions alarmed the slaveholders, and, knowing that they tended to keep alive at the North, an interest in the slave, they deemed it good policy to discourage and, if possible, suppress all such applications.  Hence Mr. Pinckney’s famous resolution, in 1836, declaring, “that all petitions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatever to the subject of slavery, shall, without being printed or referred, be laid on the table; and no further action, whatever shall be had thereon!”