Letter from W. O. Duvall.
Friend Douglass:—
Will you allow a running comment on a few things pertinent to the anti-slavery cause? If yea, here's at you.
1st. A habit which obtains among government officials of giving to the most enormous evils the sanction of their office. Your Judge Conkling, without the little preliminary of wiping his mouth, steps aside from his path, duty and dignity, and insolently lectures men, vastly his superiors in everything pertaining to truth, liberty and genuine manhood. - Washington Hunt devotes a large portion of his message to the lying and internal doctrines of African Colonization, whose society now, through the influence of political and ecclesiastical dough-faces, controls not only the action of the Federal Government, but also that of many of the States: hence those accursed acts of the nominally free States against the free colored people, and the fugitive slave law of 1850. This, then, is the order of the day. By persecution from the haggard, traitorous Webster, and all his pampered political menials, these suffering people are to be driven to the pestilential shores of Africa, or the ports of Canada, there to starvingly meditate upon the beauties of christianity as exemplified in the stealing and enslaving their ancestors by the very fathers of the villains now waging this exterminating war. May the whole litter of these be blasted and accursed!
2d. The Christiana affair. I see it stated in the papers that the lives of those kidnappers were save by Hannaway and his white companions. I trust this is not true—but if true, the white men deserve to be convicted of Treason. Had the worthless carcasses of all those hell hounds been left dead upon the field, it would have cost neither individuals nor the State one farthing more. Slavery has done her best, and I deeply regret that Liberty has deprived her of but one man.—As to this official insolence of sanctioning crimes and abuses, the offenders should be stunned by one thundering peal of indignant rebuke from the united voice of all good men. Simultaneously with the fugitive slave law, does Webster become Vice President of the Colonization Society? "Think of that, master Brook."
W. O. Duvall.
Hayti, Jan. 25, 1852.