THURSDAY AFTERNoon, OCT. 22, 1835.
MY BELovED BRothER
GARRISON: The news has reached me of yesterday’s proceedings in Boston.
I rejoice that you have escaped the jaws of the lion, and are yet among the
living — the living to praise God. To Him let us render our humble
acknowledgements. May you be sustained under your present afflictions, and
survive to behold the triumph of those principles which you have for some years
lived only to advocate! I sympathise with you, and every sufferer in our holy
cause, and could almost envy you the honor of having been assailed by a
blood-thirsty multitude. Put your trust in that Being who smiles at the wrath
of men, and will cause it to advance his glory. After all, what have our
enemies done? what have their tar and feathers, their demolitions, their
lacerations, scourgings and hangings effected? Have they extinguished the
truth? No. Have they shaken our principles? No. Have they proved wrong
to be right; falsehood, truth; cruelty, kindness; or slavery,
liberty? No. Have they shaken the throne of the Eternal Have they stopped
the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, that the cry of the slave cannot enter? No!
None of these things have occurred. Our principles live, and are
triumphing in every direction. The God of the American slave sits high on his
throne, counting the sighs and groans of his people, and will come down to
deliver. Abolitionists live, and multiply, and daily wax stronger and stronger
in the work of mercy they have laid hold upon, nor can any scourges our enemies
can plait, nor any gibbets they can erect, be aught but the emblem of their own
infatuation and madness.
I think I see the end of these outbreakings. The opposers of
this cause have themselves a bitter lesson to learn. They will rouse a spirit
which will speedily turn and rend them, when it is too late to prevent it. Let
them make mob-law paramount to all other law, and those respectable instigators
will at no distant day be destroyed by the recoil of their own weapons. Our
cause advances rapidly, majestically, and gloriously — who can stay its course?
I have not time to write more. My heart is with you. As the soul of Jonathan
was knit to the soul of David, so is my soul to your soul. Your joys, sorrows,
perils, persecutions, friends and foes, are mine. May God direct us in this
crisis, and enable us with meekness and wisdom to do his perfect will, and
cheerfully suffer every thing which awaits us.
Your unalterably
attached friend and brother,
GEO. THOMPSON.
SOURCE: Isaac Knapp, Publisher, Letters and Addresses by G. Thompson [on American Negro Slavery] During
His Mission in the United States, From Oct. 1st, 1834, to Nov. 27, 1835, p.
xii
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