With regard to others, are there any limits to their anger
and denunciations? You may, without difficulty, imagine how this
appears to the Southerner, who knows the truthfulness of the
representations which excite this passionate resentment, and how much
the character of the North for ordinary candor falls in his esteem, and
how little disposed he is to heed their admonitions, and how absurd
their demands upon his ecclesiastical bodies to suffer their
remonstrances, appear, together with their subsequent withdrawal of
fellowship for the reason publicly assigned; namely, that the South will
not let them admonish her "in the Lord." Indeed, whatever may be true of
slavery, the South looks on the great body of zealous anti-slavery
people as being in as false and unnatural a state of excitement as the
Massachusetts people were in the times of witchcraft. A great delusion
is over the minds of many at the North, like one of our eastern
sea-fogs. It always makes a Southerner merry, when listening, in New
York or Boston, for example, to a lecture, if the speaker concludes a
sentence with some allusion to "freedom," and the people clap and stamp.
That the blood should tingle in our veins at so slight a cause, makes
him think that we are certainly in need of something worthy of our great
excitability, and that we are thankful for small favors in that way.
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