To JOHN MUNROE, B. G. WAINWRIGHT, ELLIOT C. COWDIN, Esqrs.,
and others, American merchants at Paris.
The vigilant spirit of Slavery did not fail to note this
correspondence. Immediately upon its appearance, a well-known
Virginian, the reputed owner of large plantations in right of
his wife, and long resident in Paris, addressed a letter to
_Galignani’s Messenger_, in which he undertook to set forth
what he called Mr. Sumner’s mission in Europe. Here is a
specimen.
“That mission, certainly ‘without any diplomatic
privilege,’ but peradventure not without perquisites, is
to initiate, and, if the exigencies of the cotton market
and manufacture do not forbid it, to organize, a systematic
agitation in this and the British capital against the
Southern States of the Confederacy, and that ‘peculiar
institution’ of theirs, so tenderly nursed of yore, and
transmitted to them by dear Old Mother England, and which
in very modern times has been not less cherished and
sustained by the ‘enterprise and activity’ on the coast
of Africa of some of her Puritanical progeny in the New
World. Under these circumstances can any such subdolous
plea as that put forward excuse these ‘American merchants’
from lending themselves to such agencies and influences? If
they were sordid and self-seeking adventurers, in pursuit
of _political_ capital, rather than the honorable rewards
of a liberal and enlightened trade, one could understand,
or rather would not marvel at, this pseudo-patriotic
partisanship, this unfraternal display of their _sectional_
colors in a foreign land.”
Thus was the invalid in search of health pursued by the same
malign spirit from which he had originally suffered.