224 T. W. Davenport. and liberty in order to protect and extend such an exceptional institution. But this the white man of the South did con- tinually and in increasing degree. To keep the negro safely ignorant, he must be ignorant himself. He must not talk of freedom, though living in a professedly free country. The hopes and aspirations of the human soul for deliverance from degrading conditions here must be eliminated from his pray- ers. At a period of the world's history when the human mind everywhere was engaged in the investigation of the practical problems of society, he isolated himself from the civilization of the nineteenth century. And if he chafed under such degrading restrictions and availed himself of the United States mails to become acquainted with the problems which most concerned him, he was reminded by the blazing contents of rifled mail bags, or the more grating tone of brute force, that the interests of slave-holders were paramount to the Con- stitution and laws of the Federal government. The incidental necessities arising out of the relation of master and slave were above and beyond all statutes and constituted the higher law of the slave code. Wendell Phillips once exclaimed, "Commonwealth of Vir- ginia! what a misnomer; it is a chronic insurrection." And such was the fact all over the South. The courts and legis- latures of those States preserved some outward show of respect to th^^ conscientious opinions of mankind, for they did not by statute and decision formally extinguish the white man's liberty, but they did not constitute the repressive agencies by which society was dominated. The mob was everywhere present and ever supreme. For the trial of those accused of being abolitionists, the higher law applied, and the mob was the court of first and last resort, whose acts, however atroci- ous, the lawful agencies of government never attempted to contravene, much less to punish. At the time of the John Brown raid at Harper's Ferry, there was no ray of hope for any amelioration of social con- ditions in that benighted region. The moral lights of which Henry Clay and Abra,ham Lincoln delighted to speak, had
