Regarding slavery and race

"Reading Mrs Stowe or Redpath's John Brown,* one feels utterly confounded at the atrocity of African slavery. We look upon the miserable black race as crushed to earth, habitually knocked down, as John Brown says, 'by an iron shovel or anything that comes handy.' At home we see them, the idlest, laziest, fattest, most comfortably contented peasantry that ever cumbered the earth—and we forget there is anything wrong in slavery at all.
I daresay the truth lies between the two extremes."

*The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860) by antislavery journalist James Redpath.

25 December 1861 Camden, South Carolina

"The negroes who murdered Mrs Witherspoon were tried by the law of the land and were hung. A man named Wingate, with a John Brown spirit—namely that negroes were bound to rise up and kill women, and his philanthropy taking that turn, he made himself devil's counsel and stood by the negroes clear through. At the hanging he denounced John Witherspoon bitterly. And had high words, too, with George Williams.*
Afterward George Williams, having raised a company, was made captain of it. The men were actually on board the train, and Captain Williams was sitting in a chair, near at hand, ready to jump on when the whistle blew. Wingate came behind him, rested his gun on the back of the chair, and shot him dead. There—before the very faces of his soldiers. It was very hard to rescue Wingate from the hands of George's men, who wanted to shoot him instantly—no wonder. (The people who laud and magnify John Brown's philanthropy must adore Wingate.)"

*George Frederick Williams was Elizabeth "Betsey" Witherspoon's grandson.