in any measures it may adopt for the purpose aforesaid.” Meanwhile the fever raged in Charleston. The agent of Massachusetts was first accosted in the streets by a person unknown to him, who, flourishing a bludgeon in his hand,--the bludgeon always shows itself where Slavery is in question,--cried out: “You had better be travelling, and the sooner the better for you, I can tell you; if you stay here until to-morrow morning, you will feel something you will not like, I’m thinking.” Next came threats of attack during the following night on the hotel where he was lodged; then a request from the landlord that he should quit, in order to preserve the hotel from the impending danger of an infuriate mob; then a committee of Slave-Masters, who politely proposed to conduct him to the boat. Thus arrested in his simple errand of good-will, this venerable public servant, whose appearance alone, like that of the “grave and pious man” mentioned by Virgil, would have softened any mob not inspired by Slavery, yielded to the ejectment proposed, precisely as the prisoner yields to the officers of the law, and left Charleston, while a person in the crowd was heard to declare that he “had offered himself as a leader of a tar-and-feather gang, to have been called into the service of the city on the occasion.” Nor is this all. The Legislature a second time caught the fever, and, yielding to its influence, passed a statute, forbidding, under severe penalties, any person within the State from accepting a commission to befriend these colored mariners, and, under penalties severer still, extending even to unlimited imprisonment, prohibiting any person, “on his own behalf, or under color or in virtue of any commission or authority from any State or public authority of any State in this Union, or of any foreign power,” to come into South Carolina for this purpose; and then, to complete its work, by still another statute took away the writ of _Habeas Corpus_ from all such mariners.[101] Such is a simple narrative, founded on authentic documents. I do not adduce it for present criticism, but simply to enroll it in all its stages--beginning with the earliest pretension of South Carolina, continuing in violence, and ending in yet other pretensions--among the special instances where the Barbarism of Slavery stands confessed even in official conduct. And yet this transaction, which may well give to South Carolina the character of a shore “where shipwrecked mariners dread to land,” was openly vindicated in all its details, from beginning to end, by both the Senators from that State, while one of them [Mr. HAMMOND], in the same breath, bore testimony from personal knowledge to the character of the public agent thus maltreated, saying, “He was a pleasant, kind old gentleman, well informed, and I had a sort of friendship for him during the short time that I sat near him in Congress.”[102]