AC dBooks

An
inside view would have revealed a perpetual murmur of discontent. The
Territorial Legislature was now in session, and doing its work, and
copies of the laws they had enacted were coming into circulation. No
legislature in America had ever been elected as they had been, and we
have already learned what a thrill of horror and pain this caused in
the hearts of the squatters. It would have been a dictate of the most
obvious common sense that a body of men whose claim to be a Territorial
Legislature rested on such a basis should proceed with the utmost
moderation. But they were intoxicated with success. It is an old and a
wise saw, that whom the gods wish to destroy they first deprive of their
reason, and these men were smitten with judicial blindness. No slave
State had ever enacted such savage and bloody laws--laws of such
barbarous and inhuman severity, for the protection of slave property.
And now the people were reading copies of these laws, and nothing could
long suppress the evidences of discontent.


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