Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results.  We do not believe it.  We know we hold no doctrine, and make no declaration, which were not held to and made by “our fathers who framed the government under which we live.”  You never dealt fairly by us in relation to this affair.  When it occurred, some important State elections were near at hand, and you were in evident glee with the belief that, by charging the blame upon us, you could get an advantage of us in those elections.  The elections came, and your expectations were not quite fulfilled.  Every Republican man knew that, as to himself at least, your charge was a slander, and he was not much inclined by it to cast his vote in your favour.  Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves.  Surely this does not encourage them to revolt.  True, we do, in common with “our fathers who framed the government under which we live,” declare our belief that slavery is wrong; but the slaves do not hear us declare even this.  For anything we say or do, the slaves would scarcely know there is a Republican party.  I believe they would not, in fact, generally know it but for your misrepresentations of us in their hearing.  In your political contests among yourselves, each faction charges the other with sympathy with Black Republicanism; and then, to give point to the charge, defines Black Republicanism to simply be insurrection, blood, and thunder among the slaves.

Slave insurrections are no more common now than they were before the Republican party was organized.  What induced the Southampton insurrection, twenty-eight years ago, in which at least three times as many lives were lost as at Harper’s Ferry?  You can scarcely stretch your very elastic fancy to the conclusion that Southampton was “got up by Black Republicanism.”  In the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive, slave insurrection is possible.  The indispensable concert of action cannot be attained.  The slaves have no means of rapid communication; nor can incendiary freemen, black or white, supply it.  The explosive materials are everywhere in parcels; but there neither are, nor can be supplied, the indispensable connecting trains.

Much is said by Southern people about the affection of slaves for their masters and mistresses; and a part of it, at least, is true.  A plot for an uprising could scarcely be devised and communicated to twenty individuals before some one of them, to save the life of a favourite master or mistress, would divulge it.  This is the rule; and the slave revolution in Haiti was not an exception to it, but a case occurring under peculiar circumstances.  The Gunpowder Plot of British history, though not connected with slaves,