Crisis at Hand

Letter to Christian Advocate Newspaper from R. S. Finley of Rusk

“The designs of the abolitionists are no longer matters of doubt—they are lettered poison, fire, and blood—and visible from Maine to Mexico: and he who fails to read them is either to be pitied or censured; and he who, in the coming election, aids by his suffrage to place in the hands of an abolitionist the reigns of his government, gives his approval not only to this fiendish warfare, but to a dissolution of the Union; as certainly no one but a madman can bring himself to the belief that the South embracing fifteen States, will doggedly submit to a continuation of these thieving, murderous insults, and repeated attempts to invade her territory, to disfranchise her of her rights, and deluge her in blood and flame. It is no longer safe to tolerate any one, in Southern society, who in any wise affiliates with the Abolitionists. A people who would lie supinely upon their backs until their enemies had burned down their towns and houses, murdered by poison or abolition pikes and spears, their wives and children, and force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck negroes for wives, and plead the absence of a protective law . . . deserve to be enslaved.”¹