H. N. Gilbert to Frederick Douglass, May 28, 1860

[For Frederick Douglass' Paper.]

ECHOES OF HARPERS FERRY.

ECHOES OF HARPER'S FERRY, by James Redpath. Boston: Published by Thayer & Eldridge. One volume, 12 mo., 514 pp.

MR. EDITOR:— I have given this volume of Freedom's Echoes a careful perusal, and can but believe that it will find more enthusiastic readers than did even the Life of John Brown. Mr. Redpath has done good service to the anti-slavery cause in thus collecting all those living, burning and eloquent words of Philippe, Cleever, Emerson, Parker, &c., together with all the correspondence of that noble martyr, John Brown. The buyer will also be amply paid in the careful reading of the 'Appendix' alone. I believe that Dr. Cheever's argument, commenced on page 162, on the unconstitutionality of slavery, is one of the strongest and most convincing of any yet published.—He deals out the hot shot as follows:—"The bare imagination of having such wickedness accomplished by such circumlocution of honest language, so hypocritical and lying as that of "service due"—the bare imagination of Christian and civilized men, so divesting themselves of all remnants of truth and justice, as to take God's gift of honest speech, and work out of it such a contrivance of villany, such an infinite fraud, or an nature so terrible, so assassinating, so comprehensive—a cruelty to attach to millions yet unborn so dreadful a penalty as that of being born slaves and consigned to slavery, by an indictment of malignity that mentions only "service due"—this is so horrible an outrage against God and man, an insult to the Almighty so defiant, and to a whole race an injustice at once so exquisite and atrocious, that it is a wonder that the bolt of heaven does not come down shattering and consuming the iniquity and its supporters in one common vengence.' The readers of this book will thank Dr. Cheever for this sermon, and will be inspired by this, and many of the other bold utterances to renew the warfare now being waged against the demon slavery.

H. N. GILBERT.

FULTON, N. Y., May 28.