enforced; and he confidently anticipated that the opposition to it in the North would cease. What was the reason of his solicitude concerning that law?
“The necessity [he wrote] of maintaining and enforcing that law must be admitted by the impartial judgment of all candid men. Many of the slave-holding states, and many public meetings of the people in them, have deliberately declared that their adherence to the Union depended upon the preservation of that law, and that its abandonment would be the signal of the dissolution of the Union. I know that the abolitionists (some of whom openly avow a desire to produce that calamitous event) and their partisans deride and deny the existence of any such danger; but men who will not perceive and own it, must be blind to the signs of the times, to the sectional strife which has unhappily arisen, to the embittered feelings which have been excited, as well as to the solemn resolutions of deliberative assemblies unanimously adopted. Their disregard of the danger, I am apprehensive, proceeds more from their desire to continue agitation than from their love of the Union itself.”
Of the “resolutions and addresses adopted at conventions lately assembled,” which had so much disturbed the gentlemen inviting him, he had only to say that “we must make some allowance for human frailty and inordinate pride of opinion;” that “many persons at the North had avowed an invincible hostility to the fugitive-slave law;” that they might become gradually convinced of the necessity of accepting it for the sake of the Union,
