The Spirit Of The Age

See prospectus of Warland's Boston Daily American, in another column.

The following article we copy from the N. Y. Evening Post. It gives an account and comments upon it, of a transaction in which J. H. Pleasants, recently editor of "The Independent," at Washington, now defunct, bore a conspicuous part, in company with other equally worthy and respectable characters. We adopt the language of the Post:

PLAN FOR KIDNAPPING MR. VAN BUREN.

Nothing can more strongly illustrate the extreme demoralization of the party which raised Gen. Harrison to the Presidency in 1840, than the letter of Mr. Pleasants, formerly editor of the Richmond Whig, which we publish in our columns. Mr. Pleasants was a leading member of that party in Virginia, a man active in all its arrangements and movements, and looked up to by it as an experienced counselor, and a persuasive public writer. In November, 1840, this person, with several others, as appears by his own account, formed a project, in case the election then pending should not result satisfactorily, to seize Mr. Van Buren's person, carry him off to a certain district of North Carolina, and keep him in custody until a new election could be ordered, and until this act of revolutionary violence should be fitly crowned by the election of a whig candidate in his place.

Of course such an attempt must have signally failed, notwithstanding that Mr. Pleasants even now, with a vain-glorious complacency, expresses his belief, that it would have been carried into effect. We place his letter on record, however, as an example of the utter disregard of the propriety of the means they employed, which prevailed in the whig party. That they who strove to carry an election by these disgraceful expedients of frauds and debauchery, on which we need not now dwell, should have been ready to resort to violence, if that should become necessary to compass their object, does not surprise us in the least degree. The timid and the bold, equally profligate, would be apt to think of different means; the timid and cunning would prefer raising excitements on false issues, and cramming the ballot boxes with spurious votes; the bold and reckless would incline to such measures as that proposed by Mr. Pleasants. Heated as the whig party were with the methods taken to keep them in an extraordinary state of animal excitement, and rushing forward to their purpose with a drunken fury never known before in any of our elections, we should not have been surprised, if they had been defeated, to see them venting their rage and disappointment in acts of lawless violence.

It really surprises us, however, to see one of the oracles of the whig party so lost to all prudence, as to avow the premeditation of this act of villany, and to glory in it. His confession now forms a part of the history of the last presidential election, and it is full of instruction.