You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves.  We deny it; and what is your proof’?  Harper’s Ferry!  John Brown!!  John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.  If any member of our party is guilty in that matter you know it or you do not know it.  If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact.  If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof.  You need not be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true is simply malicious slander.

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 to 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 favor.  Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied with a continued 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 any thing 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.