George Barrell Cheever: Deacon Giles' distillery (1844)

In view of these truths, is any mind at a loss for a motive to the composition of the article for which I have been prosecuted with such unrelenting energy? Can any man believe that I have turned aside from my proper path of duty in such an effort, or that, with so great an object before me, I can have stooped to the degradation of making it the vehicle of personal enmity, or individual slander? I abhor the thought. It is inconsistent with my whole tonvictions of propriety and duty—opposed both to the dictates of conscience and Christianity. You have before you an article written in entire freedom from all malicious feelings, designed to benefit society in staying the ravages of intemperance; you have before you an exigency that demanded such an effort, and I think you have the motive plain upon the face of it Its peculiar character gives you no evidence of malice, is no indication against its integrity of purpose, and no proof of unfitness for the exigency which called it into being.

Your honor is aware that the causes of intemperance are so deeprooted, that it requires strong and sharp instruments to come at them. The old ways are worn out. Addresses cease to have power. Tracts fly with the wind, thick as the autumnal leaves, but in many cases they do not touch the seat of the evil. These men continue to sell ardent spirit. Nothing seems to reach them. Amidst the common light upon their sin, they persist in it. They are protected by law, and the state of the community here is such, that the man who exposes their wickedness may be reviled and prosecuted with the utmost energy, while the iniquity itself is shielded from reproach. It is manifestly a sin so sustained and entrenched, that mild measures and common ones have little power. You must resort to bold and vigorous enterprises—you must wake up the slumbering conscience, and arrest attention. Before you condemn such means as I have employed, let the nature of the evil we wish to conquer be remembered, and let not individual energy be despised, or condemned as imprudent, because it does not travel in the beaten path of temperance addresses and temperance conventions. My language may be deemed rough by those unaccustomed to plainness; but I do not believe that any man, who has thought much upon the consequences in time and eternity of the use of ardent spirits, can be greatly troubled because hell and damnation have been written as its title.

In mitigation of judgment at this time, I need scarcely remind your honor more particularly of the course taken by the Attorney General in the discharge of two of the individuals engaged in the assault upon my person, without even the form of trial. Whether it be a greater offence in the judgment of this court to describe a distiller's occupation as I have done in the Landmark, or with personal violence to attack an unarmed citizen as they did in the street, the sentence which may be declared will go far to determine. I know not by what rule of justice the latter criminals, with proof clear, full, and conclusive against them, were suffered to depart triumphant in their violation of the law, while the former alleged offence has been prosecuted with such undeviating fixedness of purpose. It seems to me a singularly unjust proceeding.