MY DEAR SIR, You
must excuse me for not answering all your kind letters. I should be glad to do
so, if it were possible, especially if it would be the means of getting more;
for they are most acceptable to me.
I learn that Mr.
Webster has written home, that, if the
North will give way on the subject of slavery, THEY CAN HAVE A TARIFF IN
SIX WEEKS; and I suppose the address now to be circulated is for signatures,
calling upon the Massachusetts delegation to make “concession;” that is, to
surrender the Territories to slavery: then we may have "beneficent
legislation," by which he means a tariff.
I am also told that
the Hon. ———, a factory superintendent at Lowell, on a salary of four or five
thousand dollars a year, was on here two or three weeks ago to see if some
arrangement could not be made to barter human bodies and souls at the South for
the sake of certain percentages on imported cottons at the North; and that Mr.
Foote of Mississippi, and Mangum of North Carolina, offered to become sureties
for the arrangement: how many others, I do not know. I have no doubt of all
this, not a particle; though I communicate it to you to give you the means of
further inquiry, and of action after inquiry is made. . . .
The Whigs, with very
few exceptions, appear to stand well in the House; and I trust we shall be able
to give a good account of ourselves. How I wish the Whigs now had all the
Free-soilers in their ranks ! In great haste, yours ever and truly,
HORACE MANN.
SOURCE: Mary Tyler
Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann, p. 304
