Semi-Weekly Dispatch

The first snow storm has at last come. Saturday I gathered tea roses and other flowers blooming in the open air at Hampton, but to-day the storm king has come in all his fury, and adieu to lingering summer and her sweet flowers. It is the North visiting Virginia with fearful vengeance. Well he comes to cover her stains and nakedness and shame with a pure white robe. May this North king, triumphing today so sternly but so beneficently, be but an omen and pressage of a triumph till all Southland shall be covered with a robe of righteousness and purity, and her present shame and nakedness no longer disgrace America.--Letter from Fortress Monroe.

The loyal States pay twenty millions of dollars for schools annually, and have five millions of children at school, while the disloyal do not expend one fifth of that sum, and have but six hundred thousand children in Ohio, in school, than in all of the eleven disloyal states.

What is there so hideous, so odious or so terrible in the term Abolitionist, when applied to an individual or a party, to distinguish it from another party, that induces the new editor of the Spirit to howl so terribly about it? He cackles more over it than would a pullet over her first egg. There must be something terrible in it--perhaps it does mean more than we have any idea of. An Abolitionist, judging from the manner in which the fears of the Spirit are wrought upon, cannot be anything less than a monstrous, hideous hobgoblin, the sight of which would not only frighten children into spasms, but would make ignorant men--such as the Spirit only can influence--tremble with mortal fear.

Every body pretends to know what a man means when he says he is a Whig, a Democrat, or an American; that is, every body knows how to classify a man who claims to be designated by one or other of these destinctive [sic] appellations--but to the term Abolitionist, our neighbor wishes to attach a more than ordinary degree of political sin and deformity, and whose policy, if adopted by the Government, would be the greatest monstrosity ever imposed upon any people. So delighted does that pitiable journal seem to be with the frightfulness of the term, that it has altogether dropped its former favorite epithet of Federalist, with which it used to designate all opponents, and now rolls Abolitionist, "like a sweet morsel under its tongue." It has given the term Federalist the go-by, probably, out of consideration for the feelings of the "favorite son of Pennsylvania," who, in his retirement, is now contemplating the exquisite horrors that he was mainly instrumental in permitting to obtain headway in our country, and who was such a terrible Federalist that it is said he boasted of not having even a drop of Democratic blood in his veins. We say, it may be out of respect for the feelings of James Buchanan, that prince of the Federalists, that it has dropped the one and adopted the other.

But what is an Abolitionist? According to the Spirit, an Abolitionist is a fiend! and a fiend, Webster says, is "an infernal being"--"the devil." Well, we will again refer to Webster to see what his definition of the word Abolitionist is one who favors "the immediate emancipation of slaves." A person, then, who favors the emancipation of slaves, or who wishes to carry out God's command to "let the oppressed go free," is a fiend! To comply, therefore, with God's direct command, the Spirit argues, is to become a fiend! We cannot refrain from saying, just here, that such fiends have multiplied enormously, fearfully, since the bombardment of Fort Sumpter, and among them may be enumerated such sterling Democrats as Gen. Bulter, Gen. Dickinson, Hon. John Cochran, M. C., of New York, and a host of others we might name, if it were necessary.

As a general thing, ninety-nine out of every hundred men, who profess to be Abolitionists, are the most upright, moral, pious men of the community in which they dwell, and they have naturally become Abolitionists in their endeavors to carry out Christ's injunction: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them,"--but to follow this rule, the Spirit argues, makes man a fiend, and instead of advancing his spiritual life, it tends to death!

We are not now, nor were we ever an Abolitionist; not because we believe there is anything intrinsically wrong in the doctrine, but from prudential motives. The time has passed when odium can be attached to a man for being an Abolitionist. We are for the preservation of our Constitution and Union, at all hazards, and if Slavery stands in the way of their preservation, then we are for striking down Slavery--or, in other words, we then become an Abolitionist. If it is the Jonah, to save the ship let it be thrown overboard. But it is that very thing which gives our neighbor so much grief and trouble. He does not want Jonah thrown into the sea of oblivion--and to save Jonah, he is willing to run the risk of losing the ship and cargo.

If all right-thinking men in the North are not Abolitionists, they are at least antislavery in sentiment, and it is no credit to a Free State man' head or heart to say that he is not anti-slavery in his views.

Or as John Randolph, of Va., said, in reply to a Northern dough-face who attempted to justify Slavery in a speech in Congress, "I envy neither the head or the heart of the Northern man who can stand up here and attempt to justify Slavery on principle."