Page:History of Delaware County (1856).djvu/327

DELAWARE COUNTY. 803 proper, however, to say, that the Governor commuted the sentences of O'Connor and Van Steenburgh to imprisonment for life. A leading journal thus comments : "It is rare that the public sentiment of all parties is so unanimous in sustaining an executive in one of the most try- ing and important exercises of constitutional power, as in this instance. The opinion seems almost universal, that the com- mutation was not only wise, but right. "We believe that this opinion is not confined to our State alone, but extends elsewhere. We have now before us a letter from a sound and able democratic member of Congress from the east, who writes from Washington : rejoice to hear that your Grovernor has commuted the sentences of Yan Steenburgh and O'Connor. It is both wise and right, and must receive the cordial approbation of the people.' In the month of December, the Governor was officially in- formed of the suppression of the insurrection, and the declara- tion "declaring the county in a state of insurrection,'^ was re- voked. The worst stages of anti-rentism had now passed, and those who had shrunk with fear before the dark clouds of po- litical discord, and faltered in their confidence in the stability of a peoples' government, now saw in the dim distance of the future, the sure triumph of those principles. So far as the principle of anti-rentism existed in its purity, as a question of right and wrong, so far as the validity of the manorial titles was brought in question, so far as legal and persuasive means would prove effectual, we have ever deemed it a privilege and a duty to raise our voice uniformly on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. But when we behold an infatuated and infuriated mob, disguised as Indians, regardless of law, determined, by force, to make all things subservient to the consummation of their own ends, without truth, reason or justice on their side, shaming, by conscious guilt, to bare their features — the impress stamp of heaven, to