How long is this system of terrorism to continue?  This utter disregard of law and the sanctity of human life?  Among the questions to be settled by this war, are not these important?  Shall an American citizen be allowed in safety to travel or reside anywhere in his own land?  Shall there be any freedom of opinion and speech upon the question of slavery?

If it be said that the institution of slavery can not tolerate freedom of thought and speech with safety to the master, then the system is barbarous, and can not exist in a free land.  Let it be admitted that there are difficulties connected with the institution; that John Brown raids, and incendiary emissaries, are wicked; that unlicensed denunciations of all implicated in the system, are grossly wrong.  Still, can there be no calm and considerate discussion of the rightfulness or sinfulness of the laws which define and regulate slavery?  Must all the cruelties and iniquities which accompany its existence be left unchallenged, and their authors uncondemned?  Then is the whole system to be swept away as a curse and enormity, which neither the civilization of the nineteenth century nor a just God will longer tolerate?

The blood of hundreds of American citizens, shed on Southern plains with dreadful tortures, cries from the ground, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” Has not the day of avenging already commenced?

The intensity of my emotions for three hours had exhausted me, and now the temporary escape from imminent peril allowed me to sink down almost to fainting, scarcely able for a time to keep my seat in the saddle.  A feeling of loneliness and utter desertion, such as I have never else experienced, came over me, and I longed once more to be in the free North, and at the home of my affectionate parents.

But as the day broke, I aroused myself to the realities before me, and after procuring breakfast at a private house, rode into Helena, in time to take the Memphis boat, which left at ten o’clock, A.M.  This boat, the St. Francis, No. 3, left Jeffersonville (where I was tried and released) at seven o’clock in the morning, on its way down the St. Francis river, thence to Helena, and thence up to Memphis.  As it left Jeffersonville four hours after my escape from that place, the report that “an abolitionist had been tried that night and ran off,” had reached the boat at the wharf.  When I took the same boat at Helena at ten o’clock, I heard the excited crowds detailing the incidents in which I had been so deeply interested a few hours before.