Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

112 LETTERS.
It was the legitimate consequence of the continual
and constantly-increasing aggressions of the slave
power. The slave States, in their desperate efforts
to sustain a bad and dangerous institution, have encroached more and more upon the liberties of the
free States. Our inherent love of law and order,
and our superstitious attachment to the Union, you
have mistaken for cowardice; and rarely have you
let slip any opportunity to add insult to aggression.
The manifested opposition to slavery began with
the lectures and pamphlets of a few disinterested
men and women, who based their movements upon
purely moral and religious grounds; but their expostulations were met with a storm of rage, with tar
atnd feathers, brickbats, demolished houses, and other
applications of lynch law. When the dust of the
conflict began to subside a little, their numbers were
found to be greatly increased by the efforts to exterminate them. They had become an influence in the
State too important to be overlooked by shrewd calculators. Political economists began to look at the
subject from a lower point of view. They used their
abilities to demonstrate that slavery was a wasteful
system, and that the free States were taxed to an
enormous extent to sustain an institution which, at
heart, two thirds of them abhorred. The forty millions, or more, of dollars expended in hunting fugitive
slaves in Florida, under the name of the Seminole
War, were adduced, as one item of proof, to which
many more were added. At last politicians were
compelled to take some action on the subject. It
soon became known to all the people that the slave
States had always managed to hold in their hands
the political power of the Union, and that while they