At the next meeting it was resolved, that a letter should be written to the new president for the same purpose as the former.  This, it was said, was now rendered essentially necessary; for the merchants, planters, and others interested in the continuance of the Slave Trade, were so alarmed at the enthusiasm of the French people in favour of the new order of things, and of any change recommended to them, which had the appearance of prompting the cause of liberty, that they held daily committees to watch and to thwart the motions of the friends of the Negroes.  It was therefore thought proper, that the appeal to the Assembly should be immediate on this subject, before the feelings of the people should cool, or before they, who were thus interested, should poison the minds by calculations of loss and gain.  The silence of the former president was already attributed to the intrigues of the planters’ committee.  No time therefore was to be lost.  The letter was accordingly written, but as no answer was ever returned to it, they attributed this second omission to the same cause.

I do not really know whether interested persons ever did, as was suspected, intercept the letters of the committee to the two presidents as now surmised; or whether they ever dissuaded them from introducing so important a question for discussion, when the nation was in such a heated state; but certain it is, that we had many, and I believe barbarous, enemies to encounter.  At the very next meeting of the committee, Claviere produced anonymous letters which he had received, and in which it was stated that, if the society of the Friends of the Negroes did not dissolve itself, he and the rest of them would be stabbed.  It was said that no less than three hundred persons had associated themselves for this purpose.  I had received similar letters myself; and on producing mine, and comparing the handwriting in both it appeared that the same persons had written.

In a few days after this, the public prints were filled with the most malicious representations of the views of the committee.  One of them was, that they were going to send twelve thousand muskets to the Negroes in St. Domingo, in order to promote an insurrection there.  This declaration was so industriously circulated, that a guard of soldiers was sent to search the committee-room; but these were soon satisfied when they found only two or three books and some waste paper.  Reports equally unfounded and wicked were spread also in the same papers relative to myself.  My name was mentioned at full length, and the place of my abode hinted at.  It was stated at one time, that I had proposed such wild and mischievous plans to the committee in London relative to the abolition of the Slave Trade, that they had cast me out of their own body, and that I had taken refuge in Paris, where I now tried to impose equally on the French nation.  It was stated at another, that I was employed by the British government as a spy, and that it was my object