THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY

 POLITICS AND REFORM

 THE INNER LIFE

 CRITICISM

 BY

 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

CONTENTS:

THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY THE ABOLITIONISTS; THEIR SENTIMENTS AND OBJECTS LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL JOHN QUINCY ADAMS THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY WHAT IS SLAVERY DEMOCRAT AND SLAVERY THE TWO PROCESSIONS A CHAPTER OF HISTORY THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE QUESTION FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE DEPARTMENT THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872 THE CENSURE OF SUMNER THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833 KANSAS WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY RESPONSE TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY

REFORM AND POLITICS. UTOPIAN SCHEMES AND POLITICAL THEORISTS PECULIAR INSTITUTIONS OF MASSACHUSETTS LORD ASHLEY AND THE THIEVES WOMAN SUFFRAGE ITALIAN UNITY INDIAN CIVILIZATION READING FOR THE BLIND THE INDIAN QUESTION THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OUR DUMB RELATIONS INTERNATIONAL ARBITRATION SUFFRAGE FOR WOMEN

THE INNER LIFE. THE AGENCY OF EVIL HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES SWEDENBORG THE BETTER LAND DORA GREENWELL THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDS JOHN WOOLMAN'S JOURNAL THE OLD WAY HAVERFORD COLLEGE

CRITICISM. EVANGELINE MIRTH AND MEDICINE FAME AND GLORY FANATICISM THE POETRY OF THE NORTH

 THE CONFLICT WITH SLAVERY

 JUSTICE AND EXPEDIENCY

OR, SLAVERY CONSIDERED WITH A VIEW TO ITS RIGHTFUL AND EFFECTUAL REMEDY, ABOLITION. 

 [1833. ]

 "There is a law above all the enactments of human codes, the same throughout the world, the same in all time, --such as it was before the daring genius of Columbus pierced the night of ages, and opened to one world the sources of wealth and power and knowledge, to another all unutterable woes; such as it is at this day: it is the law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man; and by that law, unchangeable and eternal while men despise fraud, and loathe rapine, and abhor blood, they shall reject with indignation the wild and guilty fantasy that man can hold property in man. " --LORD BROUGHAM. 

IT may be inquired of me why I seek to agitate the subject of Slavery inNew England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil. Because such anacknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than theslave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found, " says James Monroe, in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that thisevil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has beenprejudicial to all the states in which it has existed. " All the statesin their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made asimilar statement. And what has been the consequence of this generalbelief in the evil of human servitude? Has it sapped the foundations ofthe infamous system? No. Has it decreased the number of its victims?Quite the contrary. Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has beenin a moral point of view worthless, a thing without vitality, sightless, soulless, dead. 

But it may be said that the miserable victims of the system have oursympathies. Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, lookingon, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering. Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessingof those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lashfrom the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul arebecoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sickof the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers ofsentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It iswhite-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. Itis scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festeringgrave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and alluncleanness, " the pollution and loathsomeness below. 

No! let the truth on this subject, undisguised, naked, terrible as it is, stand out before us. Let us no longer seek to cover it; let us no longerstrive to forget it; let us no more dare to palliate it. It is better tomeet it here with repentance than at the bar of God. The cry of theoppressed, of the millions who have perished among us as the bruteperisheth, shut out from the glad tidings of salvation, has gone therebefore us, to Him who as a father pitieth all His children. Their bloodis upon us as a nation; woe unto us, if we repent not, as a nation, indust and ashes. Woe unto us if we say in our hearts, "The Lord shall notsee, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it. He that planted the ear, shall He not hear? He who formed the eye, shall He not see?"

But it may be urged that New England has no participation in slavery, andis not responsible for its wickedness. 

Why are we thus willing to believe a lie? New England not responsible!Bound by the United States constitution to protect the slave-holder inhis sins, and yet not responsible! Joining hands with crime, covenantingwith oppression, leaguing with pollution, and yet not responsible!Palliating the evil, hiding the evil, voting for the evil, do we notparticipate in it?

 [Messrs. Harvey of New Hampshire, Mallary of Vermont, and Ripley of Maine, voted in the Congress of 1829 against the consideration of a Resolution for inquiring into the expediency of abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. ]

Members of one confederacy, children of one family, the curse and theshame, the sin against our brother, and the sin against our God, all theiniquity of slavery which is revealed to man, and all which crieth in theear, or is manifested to the eye of Jehovah, will assuredly be visitedupon all our people. Why, then, should we stretch out our hands towardsour Southern brethren, and like the Pharisee thank God we are not likethem? For so long as we practically recognize the infernal principlethat "man can hold property in man, " God will not hold us guiltless. Solong as we take counsel of the world's policy instead of the justice ofheaven, so long as we follow a mistaken political expediency inopposition to the express commands of God, so long will the wrongs of theslaves rise like a cloud of witnesses against us at the inevitable bar. 

Slavery is protected by the constitutional compact, by the standing army, by the militia of the free states. 

 [J. Q. Adams is the only member of Congress who has ventured to speak plainly of this protection. See also his very able Report from the minority of the Committee on Manufactures. In his speech during the last session, upon the bill of the Committee of Ways and Means, after discussing the constitutional protection of slavery, he says: "But that same interest is further protected by the Laws of the United States. It was protected by the existence of a standing army. If the States of this Union were all free republican States, and none of them possessed any of the machinery of which he had spoken, and if another portion of the Union were not exposed to another danger, from their vicinity to the tribes of Indian savages, he believed it would be difficult to prove to the House any such thing as the necessity of a standing army. What in fact was the occupation of the army? It had been protecting this very same interest. It had been doing so ever since the army existed. Of what use to the district of Plymouth (which he there represented) was the standing army of the United States? Of not one dollar's use, and never had been. "]

Let us not forget that should the slaves, goaded by wrongs unendurable, rise in desperation, and pour the torrent of their brutal revenge overthe beautiful Carolinas, or the consecrated soil of Virginia, New Englandwould be called upon to arrest the progress of rebellion, --to tread outwith the armed heel of her soldiery that spirit of freedom, which knowsno distinction of cast or color; which has been kindled in the heart ofthe black as well as in that of the white. 

And what is this system which we are thus protecting and upholding? Asystem which holds two millions of God's creatures in bondage, whichleaves one million females without any protection save their own feeblestrength, and which makes even the exercise of that strength inresistance to outrage punishable with death! which considers rational, immortal beings as articles of traffic, vendible commodities, merchantable property, --which recognizes no social obligations, nonatural relations, --which tears without scruple the infant from themother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child. In thestrong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure, unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition orcomparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputedpossession of its detestable preeminence. "

So fearful an evil should have its remedies. The following are among themany which have been from time to time proposed:--

1. Placing the slaves in the condition of the serfs of Poland andRussia, fixed to the soil, and without the right on the part of themaster to sell or remove them. This was intended as a preliminary tocomplete emancipation at some remote period, but it is impossible toperceive either its justice or expediency. 

2. Gradual abolition, an indefinite term, but which is understood toimply the draining away drop by drop, of the great ocean of wrong;plucking off at long intervals some, straggling branches of the moralUpas; holding out to unborn generations the shadow of a hope which thepresent may never feel gradually ceasing to do evil; gradually refrainingfrom robbery, lust, and murder: in brief, obeying a short-sighted andcriminal policy rather than the commands of God. 

3. Abstinence on the part of the people of the free states from the useof the known products of slave labor, in order to render that laborprofitless. Beyond a doubt the example of conscientious individuals mayhave a salutary effect upon the minds of some of the slave-holders; I butso long as our confederacy exists, a commercial intercourse with slavestates and a consumption of their products cannot be avoided. 

 [The following is a recorded statement of the venerated Sir William Jones: "Let sugar be as cheap as it may, it is better to eat none, better to eat aloes and colloquintida, than violate a primary law impressed on every heart not imbruted with avarice; than rob one human creature of those eternal rights of which no law on earth can justly deprive him. "]

4. Colonization. The exclusive object of the American Colonization Society, according tothe second article of its constitution, is to colonize the free people ofcolor residing among us, in Africa or such other place as Congress maydirect. Steadily adhering to this object it has nothing to do withslavery; and I allude to it as a remedy only because some of its friendshave in view an eventual abolition or an amelioration of the evil. 

Let facts speak. The Colonization Society was organized in 1817. It hastwo hundred and eighteen auxiliary societies. The legislatures offourteen states have recommended it. Contributions have poured into itstreasury from every quarter of the United States. Addresses in its favorhave been heard from all our pulpits. It has been in operation sixteenyears. During this period nearly one million human beings have died inslavery: and the number of slaves has increased more than half a million, or in round numbers, 550, 000

The Colonization Society has been busily engaged all this while inconveying the slaves to Africa; in other words, abolishing slavery. Inthis very charitable occupation it has carried away of manumitted slaves613

Balance against the society . . . . 549, 387!

But enough of its abolition tendency. What has it done for amelioration?Witness the newly enacted laws of some of the slave states, laws bloodyas the code of Draco, violating the laws of Cod and the unalienablerights of His children?--[It will be seen that the society approves ofthese laws. ]--But why talk of amelioration? Amelioration of what? ofsin, of crime unutterable, of a system of wrong and outrage horrible inthe eye of God Why seek to mark the line of a selfish policy, a carnalexpediency between the criminality of hell and that repentance and itsfruits enjoined of heaven?

For the principles and views of the society we must look to its ownstatements and admissions; to its Annual Reports; to those of itsauxiliaries; to the speeches and writings of its advocates; and to itsorgan, the African Repository. 

1. It excuses slavery and apologizes for slaveholders. 

Proof. "Slavery is an evil entailed upon the present generation ofslave-holders, which they must suffer, whether they will or not!" "Theexistence of slavery among us, though not at all to be objected to ourSouthern brethren as a fault, " etc? "It (the society) condemns no manbecause he is a slave-holder. " "Recognizing the constitutional andlegitimate existence of slavery, it seeks not to interfere, eitherdirectly or indirectly, with the rights it creates. Acknowledging thenecessity by which its present continuance and the rigorous provisionsfor its maintenance are justified, " etc. "They (the Abolitionists)confound the misfortunes of one generation with the crimes of another, and would sacrifice both individual and public good to an unsubstantialtheory of the rights of man. "

2. It pledges itself not to oppose the system of slavery. 

Proof. "Our society and the friends of colonization wish to bedistinctly understood upon this point. From the beginning they havedisavowed, and they do yet disavow, that their object is the emancipationof slaves. "--[Speech of James S. Green, Esq. , First Annual Report of theNew Jersey Colonization Society. ]

"This institution proposes to do good by a single specific course ofmeasures. Its direct and specific purpose is not the abolition ofslavery, or the relief of pauperism, or the extension of commerce andcivilization, or the enlargement of science, or the conversion of theheathen. The single object which its constitution prescribes, and towhich all its efforts are necessarily directed, is African colonizationfrom America. It proposes only to afford facilities for the voluntaryemigration of free people of color from this country to the country oftheir fathers. "

"It is no abolition society; it addresses as yet arguments to no master, and disavows with horror the idea of offering temptations to any slave. It denies the design of attempting emancipation, either partial orgeneral. "

"The Colonization Society, as such, have renounced wholly the name andthe characteristics of abolitionists. On this point they have beenunjustly and injuriously slandered. Into their accounts the subject ofemancipation does not enter at all. "

"From its origin, and throughout the whole period of its existence, ithas constantly disclaimed all intention of interfering, in the smallestdegree, with the rights of property, or the object of emancipation, gradual or immediate. " . . . "The society presents to the Americanpublic no project of emancipation. "--[ Mr. Clay's Speech, Idem, vol. Vi. Pp. 13, 17. ]

"The emancipation of slaves or the amelioration of their condition, withthe moral, intellectual, and political improvement of people of colorwithin the United States, are subjects foreign to the powers of thissociety. "

"The society, as a society, recognizes no principles in reference to theslave system. It says nothing, and proposes to do nothing, respectingit. " . . . "So far as we can ascertain, the supporters of thecolonization policy generally believe that slavery is in this country aconstitptional and legitimate system, which they have no inclination, interest, nor ability to disturb. "

3. It regards God's rational creatures as property. 

Proof. "We hold their slaves, as we hold their other property, sacred. "

"It is equally plain and undeniable that the society, in the prosecutionof this work, has never interfered or evinced even a disposition tointerfere in any way with the rights of proprietors of slaves. "

"To the slave-holder, who has charged upon them the wicked design ofinterfering with the rights of property under the specious pretext ofremoving a vicious and dangerous free population, they address themselvesin a tone of conciliation and sympathy. We know your rights, say they, and we respect them. "

4. It boasts that its measures are calculated to perpetuate the detestedsystem of slavery, to remove the fears of the slave-holder, and increasethe value of his stock of human beings. 

Proof. "They (the Southern slave-holders) will contribute moreeffectually to the continuance and strength of this system (slavery) byremoving those now free than by any or all other methods which canpossibly be devised. "

"So far from being connected with the abolition of slavery, the measureproposed would be one of the greatest securities to enable the master tokeep in possession his own property. "--[Speech of John Randolph at thefirst meeting of the Colonization Society. ]

"The tendency of the scheme, and one of its objects, is to secure slave-holders, and the whole Southern country, against certain evilconsequences growing out of the present threefold mixture of ourpopulation. "

"There was but one way (to avert danger), but that might be madeeffectual, fortunately. It was to provide and keep open a drain for theexcess beyond the occasions of profitable employment. Mr. Archer hadbeen stating the case in the supposition, that after the present class offree blacks had been exhausted, by the operation of the plan he wasrecommending, others would be supplied for its action, in the proportionof the excess of colored population it would be necessary to throw off, by the process of voluntary manumission or sale. This effect must resultinevitably from the depreciating value of the slaves, ensuing theirdisproportionate multiplication. The depreciation would be relieved andretarded at the same time by the process. The two operations would aidreciprocally, and sustain each other, and both be in the highest degreebeneficial. It was on the ground of interest, therefore, the mostindisputable pecuniary interest, that he addressed himself to the peopleand legislatures of the slave-holding states. "

"The slave-holder, who is in danger of having his slaves contaminated bytheir free friends of color, will not only be relieved from this danger, but the value of his slave will be enhanced. "

5. It denies the power of Christian love to overcome an unholy prejudiceagainst a portion of our fellow-creatures. 

Proof. "The managers consider it clear that causes exist and areoperating to prevent their (the blacks) improvement and elevation to anyconsiderable extent as a class, in this country, which are fixed, notonly beyond the control of the friends of humanity, but of any humanpower. Christianity will not do for them here what it will do for themin Africa. This is not the fault of the colored man, nor Christianity;but an ordination of Providence, and no more to be changed than the lawsof Nature!"--[Last Annual Report of the American Colonization Society. ]

"The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society--prejudiceswhich neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religionitself, can subdue--mark the people of color, whether bond or free, asthe subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African inthis country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society, andfrom that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, hisvirtues what they may. . . . They constitute a class by themselves, aclass out of which no individual can be elevated, and below which nonecan be depressed. "

"Is it not wise, then, for the free people of color and their friends toadmit, what cannot reasonably be doubted, that the people of color must, in this country, remain for ages, probably forever, a separate andinferior caste, weighed down by causes, powerful, universal, inevitable;which neither legislation nor Christianity can remove?"

6. It opposes strenuously the education of the blacks in this country asuseless as well as dangerous. 

Proof. "If the free colored people were generally taught to read itmight be an inducement to them to remain in this country (that is, intheir native country). We would offer then no such inducement. "--[Southern Religious Telegraph, February 19, 1831. ]

"The public safety of our brethren at the South requires them (theslaves) to be kept ignorant and uninstructed. "

"It is the business of the free (their safety requires it) to keep theslaves in ignorance. But a few days ago a proposition was made in thelegislature of Georgia to allow them so much instruction as to enablethem to read the Bible; which was promptly rejected by a largemajority. "--[Proceedings of New York State Colonization Society at itssecond anniversary. ]

E. B. Caldwell, the first Secretary of the American Colonization Society, in his speech at its formation, recommended them to be kept "in thelowest state of ignorance and degradation, for (says he) the nearer youbring them to the condition of brutes, the better chance do you give themof possessing their apathy. "

My limits will not admit of a more extended examination. To thedocuments from whence the above extracts have been made I would call theattention of every real friend of humanity. I seek to do theColonization Society no injustice, but I wish the public generally tounderstand its character. 

The tendency of the society to abolish the slave-trade by means of itsAfrican colony has been strenuously urged by its friends. But thefallacy of this is now admitted by all: witness the following from thereports of the society itself:--

"Some appalling facts in regard to the slave-trade have come to theknowledge of the Board of Managers during the last year. Withundiminished atrocity and activity is this odious traffic now carried onall along the African coast. Slave factories are established in theimmediate vicinity of the colony; and at the Gallinas (between Liberiaand Sierra Leone) not less than nine hundred slaves were shipped duringthe last summer, in the space of three weeks. "

April 6, 1832, the House of Commons of England ordered the printing of adocument entitled "Slave-Trade, Sierra Leone, " containing officialevidence of the fact that the pirates engaged in the African slave-tradeare supplied from the stores of Sierra Leone and Liberia with sucharticles as the infernal traffic demands! An able English writer on thesubject of Colonization thus notices this astounding fact:--

"And here it may be well to observe, that as long as negro slavery lasts, all colonies on the African coast, of whatever description, must tend tosupport it, because, in all commerce, the supply is more or lessproportioned to the demand. The demand exists in negro slavery; thesupply arises from the African slave-trade. And what greater conveniencecould the African slave-traders desire than shops well stored along thecoast with the very articles which their trade demands. That the Africanslave-traders do get thus supplied at Sierra Leone and Liberia is matterof official evidence; and we know, from the nature of human things, thatthey will get so supplied, in defiance of all law or precaution, as longas the demand calls for the supply, and there are free shops stored withall they want at hand. The shopkeeper, however honest, would find itimpossible always to distinguish between the African slave-trader or hisagents and other dealers. And how many shopkeepers are there anywherethat would be over scrupulous in questioning a customer with a fullpurse?"

But we are told that the Colonization Society is to civilize andevangelize Africa. 

"Each emigrant, " says Henry Clay, the ablest advocate which the societyhas yet found, "is a missionary, carrying with him credentials in theholy cause of civilization, religion, and free institutions. "

Beautiful and heart-cheering idea! But stay who are these emigrants, these missionaries?

The free people of color. "They, and they only, " says the AfricanRepository, the society's organ, "are qualified for colonizing Africa. "

What are their qualifications? Let the society answer in its own words:--Free blacks are a greater nuisance than even slaves themselves. "--[African Repository, vol. Ii. P. 328. ]

"A horde of miserable people--the objects of universal suspicion--subsisting by plunder. "

"An anomalous race of beings the most debased upon earth. "--[AfricanRepository, vol. Vii. P. 230. ]

"Of all classes of our population the most vicious is that of the freecolored. "--[Tenth Annual Report of the Colonization Society. ]

I might go on to quote still further from the "credentials" which thefree people of color are to carry with them to Liberia. But I forbear. 

I come now to the only practicable, the only just scheme of emancipation:Immediate abolition of slavery; an immediate acknowledgment of the greattruth, that man cannot hold property in man; an immediate surrender ofbaneful prejudice to Christian love; an immediate practical obedience tothe command of Jesus Christ: "Whatsoever ye would that men should do untoyou, do ye even so to them. "

A correct understanding of what is meant by immediate abolition mustconvince every candid mind that it is neither visionary nor dangerous;that it involves no disastrous consequences of bloodshed and desolation;but, on the, contrary, that it is a safe, practicable, efficient remedyfor the evils of the slave system. 

The term immediate is used in contrast with that of gradual. Earnestlyas I wish it, I do not expect, no one expects, that the tremendous systemof oppression can be instantaneously overthrown. The terrible andunrebukable indignation of a free people has not yet been sufficientlyconcentrated against it. The friends of abolition have not forgotten thepeculiar organization of our confederacy, the delicate division of powerbetween the states and the general government. They see the manyobstacles in their pathway; but they know that public opinion canovercome them all. They ask no aid of physical coercion. They seek toobtain their object not with the weapons of violence and blood, but withthose of reason and truth, prayer to God, and entreaty to man. 

They seek to impress indelibly upon every human heart the true doctrinesof the rights of man; to establish now and forever this great andfundamental truth of human liberty, that man cannot hold property in hisbrother; for they believe that the general admission of this truth willutterly destroy the system of slavery, based as that system is upon adenial or disregard of it. To make use of the clear exposition of aneminent advocate of immediate abolition, our plan of emancipation issimply this: "To promulgate the true doctrine of human rights in highplaces and low places, and all places where there are human beings; towhisper it in chimney corners, and to proclaim it from the house-tops, yea, from the mountain-tops; to pour it out like water from the pulpitand the press; to raise it up with all the food of the inner man, frominfancy to gray hairs; to give 'line upon line, and precept uponprecept, ' till it forms one of the foundation principles and partsindestructible of the public soul. Let those who contemn this planrenounce, if they have not done it already, the gospel plan of convertingthe world; let them renounce every plan of moral reformation, and everyplan whatsoever, which does not terminate in the gratification of theirown animal natures. "

The friends of emancipation would urge in the first instance an immediateabolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the Territoriesof Florida and Arkansas. 

The number of slaves in these portions of the country, coming under thedirect jurisdiction of the general government, is as follows:--

District of Columbia ..... 6, 119Territory of Arkansas .... 4, 576Territory of Florida .... 15, 501

 Total 26, 196

Here, then, are twenty-six thousand human beings, fashioned in the imageof God, the fitted temples of His Holy Spirit, held by the government inthe abhorrent chains of slavery. The power to emancipate them is clear. It is indisputable. It does not depend upon the twenty-five slave votesin Congress. It lies with the free states. Their duty is before them:in the fear of God, and not of man let them perform it. 

Let them at once strike off the grievous fetters. Let them declare thatman shall no longer hold his fellow-man in bondage, a beast of burden, anarticle of traffic, within the governmental domain. God and truth andeternal justice demand this. The very reputation of our fathers, thehonor of our land, every principle of liberty, humanity, expediency, demand it. A sacred regard to free principles originated ourindependence, not the paltry amount of practical evil complained of. Andalthough our fathers left their great work unfinished, it is our duty tofollow out their principles. Short of liberty and equality we cannotstop without doing injustice to their memories. If our fathers intendedthat slavery should be perpetual, that our practice should forever givethe lie to our professions, why is the great constitutional compact soguardedly silent on the subject of human servitude? If state necessitydemanded this perpetual violation of the laws of God and the rights ofman, this continual solecism in a government of freedom, why is it notmet as a necessity, incurable and inevitable, and formally and distinctlyrecognized as a settled part of our social system? State necessity, thatimperial tyrant, seeks no disguise. In the language of Sheridan, "Whathe does, he dares avow, and avowing, scorns any other justification thanthe great motives which placed the iron sceptre in his grasp. "

Can it be possible that our fathers felt this state necessity strong uponthem? No; for they left open the door for emancipation, they left us thelight of their pure principles of liberty, they framed the great charterof American rights, without employing a term in its structure to which inaftertimes of universal freedom the enemies of our country could pointwith accusation or reproach. 

What, then, is our duty?

To give effect to the spirit of our Constitution; to plant ourselves uponthe great declaration and declare in the face of all the world thatpolitical, religious, and legal hypocrisy shall no longer cover as withloathsome leprosy the features of American freedom; to loose at once thebands of wickedness; to undo the heavy burdens, and let the oppressed gofree. 

We have indeed been authoritatively told in Congress and elsewhere thatour brethren of the South and West will brook no further agitation of thesubject of slavery. What then! shall we heed the unrighteousprohibition? No; by our duty as Christians, as politicians, by our dutyto ourselves, to our neighbor, and to God, we are called upon to agitatethis subject; to give slavery no resting-place under the hallowed aegisof a government of freedom; to tear it root and branch, with all itsfruits of abomination, at least from the soil of the national domain. The slave-holder may mock us; the representatives of property, merchandise, vendible commodities, may threaten us; still our duty isimperative; the spirit of the Constitution should be maintained withinthe exclusive jurisdiction of the government. If we cannot "provide forthe general welfare, " if we cannot "guarantee to each of the states arepublican form of government, " let us at least no longer legislate for afree nation within view of the falling whip, and within hearing of theexecrations of the task-master and the prayer of his slave!

I deny the right of the slave-holder to impose silence on his brother ofthe North in reference to slavery. What! compelled to maintain thesystem, to keep up the standing army which protects it, and yet be deniedthe poor privilege of remonstrance! Ready, at the summons of the masterto put down the insurrections of his slaves, the outbreaking of thatrevenge which is now, and has been, in all nations, and all times, theinevitable consequence of oppression and wrong, and yet like automata toact but not speak! Are we to be denied even the right of a slave, theright to murmur?

I am not unaware that my remarks may be regarded by many as dangerous andexceptionable; that I may be regarded as a fanatic for quoting thelanguage of eternal truth, and denounced as an incendiary formaintaining, in the spirit as well as the letter, the doctrines ofAmerican Independence. But if such are the consequences of a simpleperformance of duty, I shall not regard them. If my feeble appeal butreaches the hearts of any who are now slumbering in iniquity; if it shallhave power given it to shake down one stone from that foul temple wherethe blood of human victims is offered to the Moloch of slavery; if underProvidence it can break one fetter from off the image of God, and enableone suffering African

"To feelThe weight of human misery less, and glideUngroaning to the tomb, "

I shall not have written in vain; my conscience will be satisfied. 

Far be it from me to cast new bitterness into the gall and wormwoodwaters of sectional prejudice. No; I desire peace, the peace ofuniversal love, of catholic sympathy, the peace of a common interest, acommon feeling, a common humanity. But so long as slavery is tolerated, no such peace can exist. Liberty and slavery cannot dwell in harmonytogether. There will be a perpetual "war in the members" of thepolitical Mezentius between the living and the dead. God and man haveplaced between them an everlasting barrier, an eternal separation. Nomatter under what name or law or compact their union is attempted, theordination of Providence has forbidden it, and it cannot stand. Peace!there can be no peace between justice and oppression, between robbery andrighteousness, truth and falsehood, freedom and slavery. 

The slave-holding states are not free. The name of liberty is there, butthe spirit is wanting. They do not partake of its invaluable blessings. Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception ofsome recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yetfelt in a great degree the baneful and deteriorating influences of slavelabor, we hear at this moment the cry of suffering. We are told ofgrass-grown streets, of crumbling mansions, of beggared planters andbarren plantations, of fear from without, of terror within. The oncefertile fields are wasted and tenantless, for the curse of slavery, theimprovidence of that labor whose hire has been kept back by fraud, hasbeen there, poisoning the very earth beyond the reviving influence of theearly and the latter rain. A moral mildew mingles with and blasts theeconomy of nature. It is as if the finger of the everlasting God hadwritten upon the soil of the slave-holder the language of Hisdispleasure. 

Let, then, the slave-holding states consult their present interest bybeginning without delay the work of emancipation. If they fear not, andmock at the fiery indignation of Him, to whom vengeance belongeth, lettemporal interest persuade them. They know, they must know, that thepresent state of things cannot long continue. Mind is the sameeverywhere, no matter what may be the complexion of the frame which itanimates: there is a love of liberty which the scourge cannot eradicate, a hatred of oppression which centuries of degradation cannot extinguish. The slave will become conscious sooner or later of his brute strength, his physical superiority, and will exert it. His torch will be at thethreshold and his knife at the throat of the planter. Horrible andindiscriminate will be his vengeance. Where, then, will be the pride, the beauty, and the chivalry of the South? The smoke of her torment willrise upward like a thick cloud visible over the whole earth. 

 "Belie the negro's powers: in headlong will, Christian, thy brother thou shalt find him still. Belie his virtues: since his wrongs began, His follies and his crimes have stamped him man. "

Let the cause of insurrection be removed, then, as speedily as possible. Cease to oppress. "Let him that stole steal no more. " Let the laborerhave his hire. Bind him no longer by the cords of slavery, but withthose of kindness and brotherly love. Watch over him for his good. Prayfor him; instruct him; pour light into the darkness of his mind. 

Let this be done, and the horrible fears which now haunt the slumbers ofthe slave-holder will depart. Conscience will take down its racks andgibbets, and his soul will be at peace. His lands will no longerdisappoint his hopes. Free labor will renovate them. 

Historical facts; the nature of the human mind; the demonstrated truthsof political economy; the analysis of cause and effect, all concur inestablishing:

1. That immediate abolition is a safe and just and peaceful remedy forthe evils of the slave system. 

2. That free labor, its necessary consequence, is more productive, andmore advantageous to the planter than slave labor. 

In proof of the first proposition it is only necessary to state theundeniable fact that immediate emancipation, whether by an individual ora community, has in no instance been attended with violence and disorderon the part of the emancipated; but that on the contrary it has promotedcheerfulness, industry, and laudable ambition in the place of sullendiscontent, indolence, and despair. 

The case of St. Domingo is in point. Blood was indeed shed on thatisland like water, but it was not in consequence of emancipation. It wasshed in the civil war which preceded it, and in the iniquitous attempt torestore the slave system in 1801. It flowed on the sanguine altar ofslavery, not on the pure and peaceful one of emancipation. No; there, asin all the world and in all time, the violence of oppression engenderedviolence on the part of the oppressed, and vengeance followed only uponthe iron footsteps of wrong. When, where, did justice to the injuredwaken their hate and vengeance? When, where, did love and kindness andsympathy irritate and madden the persecuted, the broken-hearted, thefoully wronged?

In September, 1793, the Commissioner of the French National Conventionissued his proclamation giving immediate freedom to all the slaves of St. Domingo. Did the slaves baptize their freedom in blood? Did they fightlike unchained desperadoes because they had been made free? Did theymurder their emancipators? No; they acted, as human beings must act, under similar circumstances, by a law as irresistible as those of theuniverse: kindness disarmed them, justice conciliated them, freedomennobled them. No tumult followed this wide and instantaneousemancipation. It cost not one drop of blood; it abated not one tittle ofthe wealth or the industry of the island. Colonel Malenfant, a slaveproprietor residing at the time on the island, states that after thepublic act of abolition, the negroes remained perfectly quiet; they hadobtained all they asked for, liberty, and they continued to work upon allthe plantations. --[Malenfant in Memoirs for a History of St. Domingo byGeneral Lecroix, 1819. ]

"There were estates, " he says, "which had neither owners nor managersresident upon them, yet upon these estates, though abandoned, the negroescontinued their labors where there were any, even inferior, agents toguide them; and on those estates where no white men were left to directthem, they betook themselves to the planting of provisions; but upon allthe plantations where the whites resided the blacks continued to labor asquietly as before. " Colonel Malenfant says that when many of hisneighbors, proprietors or managers, were in prison, the negroes of theirplantations came to him to beg him to direct them in their work. "If youwill take care not to talk to them of the restoration of slavery, buttalk to them of freedom, you may with this word chain them down to theirlabor. How did Toussaint succeed? How did I succeed before his time inthe plain of the Cul-de-Sac on the plantation of Gouraud, during morethan eight months after liberty had been granted to the slaves? Letthose who knew me at that time, let the blacks themselves be asked. Theywill all reply that not a single negro upon that plantation, consistingof more than four hundred and fifty laborers, refused to work; and yetthis plantation was thought to be under the worst discipline and theslaves the most idle of any in the plain. I inspired the same activityinto three other plantations of which I had the management. If all thenegroes had come from Africa within six months, if they had the love ofindependence that the Indians have, I should own that force must beemployed; but ninety-nine out of a hundred of the blacks are aware thatwithout labor they cannot procure the things that are necessary for them;that there is no other method of satisfying their wants and their tastes. They know that they must work, they wish to do so, and they will do so. "

This is strong testimony. In 1796, three years after the act ofemancipation, we are told that the colony was flourishing underToussaint, that the whites lived happily and peaceably on their estates, and the blacks continued to work for them. Up to 1801 the same happystate of things continued. The colony went on as by enchantment;cultivation made day by day a perceptible progress, under therecuperative energies of free labor. 

In 1801 General Vincent, a proprietor of estates in the island, was sentby Toussaint to Paris for the purpose of laying before the Directory thenew Constitution which had been adopted at St. Domingo. He reachedFrance just after the peace of Amiens, when Napoleon was fitting out hisill-starred armament for the insane purpose of restoring slavery in theisland. General Vincent remonstrated solemnly and earnestly against anexpedition so preposterous, so cruel and unnecessary; undertaken at amoment when all was peace and quietness in the colony, when theproprietors were in peaceful possession of their estates, whencultivation was making a rapid progress, and the blacks were industriousand happy beyond example. He begged that this beautiful state of thingsmight not be reversed. The remonstrance was not regarded, and theexpedition proceeded. Its issue is well known. Threatened once morewith the horrors of slavery, the peaceful and quiet laborer becametransformed into a demon of ferocity. The plough-share and the pruning-hook gave way to the pike and the dagger. The white invaders were drivenback by the sword and the pestilence; and then, and not till then, wasthe property of the planters seized upon by the excited and infuriatedblacks. 

In 1804 Dessalines was proclaimed Emperor of Hayti. The black troopswere in a great measure disbanded, and they immediately returned to thecultivation of the plantations. From that period up to the present therehas been no want of industry among the inhabitants. 

Mr. Harvey, who during the reign of Christophe resided at Cape Francois, in describing the character and condition of the inhabitants, says "Itwas an interesting sight to behold this class of the Haytiens, now inpossession of their freedom, coming in groups to the market nearest whichthey resided, bringing the produce of their industry there for sale; andafterwards returning, carrying back the necessary articles of livingwhich the disposal of their commodities had enabled them to purchase; allevidently cheerful and happy. Nor could it fail to occur to the mindthat their present condition furnished the most satisfactory answer tothat objection to the general emancipation of slaves founded on theiralleged unfitness to value and improve the benefits of liberty. . . . As they would not suffer, so they do not require, the attendance of oneacting in the capacity of a driver with the instrument of punishment inhis hand. As far as I had an opportunity of ascertaining from what fellunder my own observation, and from what I gathered from other Europeanresidents, I am persuaded of one general fact, which on account of itsimportance I shall state in the most explicit terms, namely, that theHaytiens employed in cultivating the plantations, as well as the rest ofthe population, perform as much work in a given time as they wereaccustomed to do during their subjection to the French. And if we mayjudge of their future improvement by the change which has been alreadyeffected, it may be reasonably anticipated that Hayti will erelongcontain a population not inferior in their industry to that of anycivilized nation in the world. . . . Every man had some calling tooccupy his attention; instances of idleness or intemperance were of rareoccurrence; the most perfect subordination prevailed, and all appearedcontented and happy. A foreigner would have found it difficult topersuade himself, on his first entering the place, that the people he nowbeheld so submissive, industrious, and contented, were the same peoplewho a few years before had escaped from the shackles of slavery. "

The present condition of Hayti may be judged of from the following well-authenticated facts its population is more than 700, 000, its resourcesample, its prosperity and happiness general, its crimes few, its laborcrowned with abundance, with no paupers save the decrepit and aged, itspeople hospitable, respectful, orderly, and contented. 

The manumitted slaves, who to the number of two thousand were settled inNova Scotia by the British Government at the close of the RevolutionaryWar, "led a harmless life, and gained the character of an honest, industrious people from their white neighbors. " Of the free laborers ofTrinidad we have the same report. At the Cape of Good Hope, threethousand negroes received their freedom, and with scarce a singleexception betook themselves to laborious employments. 

But we have yet stronger evidence. The total abolishment of slavery inthe southern republics has proved beyond dispute the safety and utilityof immediate abolition. The departed Bolivar indeed deserves hisglorious title of Liberator, for he began his career of freedom bystriking off the fetters of his own slaves, seven hundred in number. 

In an official letter from the Mexican Envoy of the British Government, dated Mexico, March, 1826, and addressed 'to the Right Hon. GeorgeCanning, the superiority of free over slave labor is clearly demonstratedby the following facts:--

2. It is now carried on exclusively by the labor of free blacks. 

3. It was formerly wholly sustained by the forced labor of slaves, purchased at Vera Cruz at $300 to $400 each. 

4. Abolition in this section was effected not by governmentalinterference, not even from motives of humanity, but from an irresistibleconviction on the part of the planters that their pecuniary interestdemanded it. 

5. The result has proved the entire correctness of this conviction; andthe planters would now be as unwilling as the blacks themselves to returnto the old system. 

Let our Southern brethren imitate this example. It is in vain, in theface of facts like these, to talk of the necessity of maintaining theabominable system, operating as it does like a double curse upon plantersand slaves. Heaven and earth deny its necessity. It is as necessary asother robberies, and no more. 

Yes, putting aside altogether the righteous law of the living God--thesame yesterday, to-day, and forever--and shutting out the clearestpolitical truths ever taught by man, still, in human policy selfishexpediency would demand of the planter the immediate emancipation of hisslaves. 

Because slave labor is the labor of mere machines; a mechanical impulseof body and limb, with which the mind of the laborer has no sympathy, andfrom which it constantly and loathingly revolts. 

Because slave labor deprives the master altogether of the incalculablebenefit of the negro's will. That does not cooperate with the forcedtoil of the body. This is but the necessary consequence of all laborwhich does not benefit the laborer. It is a just remark of that profoundpolitical economist, Adam Smith, that "a slave can have no other interestthan to eat and waste as much, and work as little, as he can. "

To my mind, in the wasteful and blighting influences of slave labor thereis a solemn and warning moral. 

They seem the evidence of the displeasure of Him who created man afterHis own image, at the unnatural attempt to govern the bones and sinews, the bodies and souls, of one portion of His children by the caprice, theavarice, the lusts of another; at that utter violation of the design ofHis merciful Providence, whereby the entire dependence of millions of Hisrational creatures is made to centre upon the will, the existence, theability, of their fellow-mortals, instead of resting under the shadow ofHis own Infinite Power and exceeding love. 

I shall offer a few more facts and observations on this point. 

1. A distinguished scientific gentleman, Mr. Coulomb, the superintendentof several military works in the French West Indies, gives it as hisopinion, that the slaves do not perform more than one third of the laborwhich they would do, provided they were urged by their own interests andinclinations instead of brute force. 

2. A plantation in Barbadoes in 1780 was cultivated by two hundred andeighty-eight slaves ninety men, eighty-two women, fifty-six boys, andsixty girls. In three years and three months there were on thisplantation fifty-seven deaths, and only fifteen births. A change wasthen made in the government of the slaves. The use of the whip wasdenied; all severe and arbitrary punishments were abolished; the laborersreceived wages, and their offences were all tried by a sort of negrocourt established among themselves: in short, they were practically free. Under this system, in four years and three months there were forty-fourbirths, and but forty-one deaths; and the annual net produce of theplantation was more than three times what it had been before. --[EnglishQuarterly Magazine and Review, April, 1832. ]

3. The following evidence was adduced by Pitt in the British Parliament, April, 1792. The assembly of Grenada had themselves stated, "that thoughthe negroes were allowed only the afternoon of one day in a week, theywould do as much work in that afternoon, when employed for their ownbenefit, as in the whole day when employed in their master's service. ""Now after this confession, " said Mr. Pitt, "the house might burn all itscalculations relative to the negro population. A negro, if he worked forhimself, could no doubt do double work. By an improvement, then, in themode of labor, the work in the islands could be doubled. "

4. "In coffee districts it is usual for the master to hire his peopleafter they have done the regular task for the day, at a rate varying from10d. To 15. 8d. For every extra bushel which they pluck from the trees;and many, almost all, are found eager to earn their wages. "

5. In a report made by the commandant of Castries for the government ofSt. Lucia, in 1822, it is stated, in proof of the intimacy between theslaves and the free blacks, that "many small plantations of the latter, and occupied by only one man and his wife, are better cultivated and havemore land in cultivation than those of the proprietors of many slaves, and that the labor on them is performed by runaway slaves;" thus clearlyproving that even runaway slaves, under the all-depressing fears ofdiscovery and oppression, labor well, because the fruits of their laborare immediately their own. 

Let us look at this subject from another point of view. The large sum ofmoney necessary for stocking a plantation with slaves has an inevitabletendency to place the agriculture of a slave-holding communityexclusively in the hands of the wealthy, a tendency at war with practicalrepublicanism and conflicting with the best maxims of political economy. 

Two hundred slaves at $200 per head would cost in the outset $40, 000. Compare this enormous outlay for the labor of a single plantation withthe beautiful system of free labor as exhibited in New England, whereevery young laborer, with health and ordinary prudence, may acquire byhis labor on the farms of others, in a few years, a farm of his own, andthe stock necessary for its proper cultivation; where on a hard andunthankful soil independence and competence may be attained by all. 

Free labor is perfectly in accordance with the spirit of ourinstitutions; slave labor is a relic of a barbarous, despotic age. Theone, like the firmament of heaven, is the equal diffusion of similarlights, manifest, harmonious, regular; the other is the fierypredominance of some disastrous star, hiding all lesser luminaries aroundit in one consuming glare. 

Emancipation would reform this evil. The planter would no longer beunder the necessity of a heavy expenditure for slaves. He would only paya very moderate price for his labor; a price, indeed, far less than thecost of the maintenance of a promiscuous gang of slaves, which thepresent system requires. 

In an old plantation of three hundred slaves, not more than one hundredeffective laborers will be found. Children, the old and superannuated, the sick and decrepit, the idle and incorrigibly vicious, will be foundto constitute two thirds of the whole number. The remaining thirdperform only about one third as much work as the same number of freelaborers. 

Now disburden the master of this heavy load of maintenance; let himemploy free able, industrious laborers only, those who feel conscious ofa personal interest in the fruits of their labor, and who does not seethat such a system would be vastly more safe and economical than thepresent?

The slave states are learning this truth by fatal experience. Most ofthem are silently writhing under the great curse. Virginia has utteredher complaints aloud. As yet, however, nothing has been done even there, save a small annual appropriation for the purpose of colonizing the freecolored inhabitants of the state. Is this a remedy?

But it may be said that Virginia will ultimately liberate her slaves oncondition of their colonization in Africa, peacefully if possible, forcibly if necessary. 

Well, admitting that Virginia may be able and willing at some remoteperiod to rid herself of the evil by commuting the punishment of herunoffending colored people from slavery to exile, will her fearful remedyapply to some of the other slaveholding states?

It is a fact, strongly insisted upon by our Southern brethren as a reasonfor the perpetuation of slavery, that their climate and peculiaragriculture will not admit of hard labor on the part of the whites; thatamidst the fatal malaria of the rice plantations the white man is almostannually visited by the country fever; that few of the white overseers ofthese plantations reach the middle period of ordinary life; that theowners are compelled to fly from their estates as the hot seasonapproaches, without being able to return until the first frosts havefallen. But we are told that the slaves remain there, at their work, mid-leg in putrid water, breathing the noisome atmosphere, loaded withcontagion, and underneath the scorching fervor of a terrible sun; thatthey indeed suffer; but, that their habits, constitutions, and their longpractice enable them to labor, surrounded by such destructive influences, with comparative safety. 

The conclusive answer, therefore, to those who in reality cherish thevisionary hope of colonizing all the colored people of the United Statesin Africa or elsewhere, is this single, all-important fact: The labor ofthe blacks will not and cannot be dispensed with by the planter of theSouth. 

To what remedy, then, can the friends of humanity betake themselves butto that of emancipation?

And nothing but a strong, unequivocal expression of public sentiment isneeded to carry into effect this remedy, so far as the general governmentis concerned. 

And when the voice of all the non-slave-holding states shall be heard onthis question, a voice of expostulation, rebuke, entreaty--when the fulllight of truth shall break through the night of prejudice, and reveal allthe foul abominations of slavery, will Delaware still cling to the cursewhich is wasting her moral strength, and still rivet the fetters upon herthree or four thousand slaves? Let Delaware begin the work, and Marylandand Virginia must follow; the example will be contagious; and the greatobject of universal emancipation will be attained. Freemen, Christians, lovers of truth and justice Why stand ye idle? Ours is a government ofopinion, and slavery is interwoven with it. Change the current ofopinion, and slavery will be swept away. Let the awful sovereignty ofthe people, a power which is limited only by the sovereignty of Heaven, arise and pronounce judgment against the crying iniquity. Let eachindividual remember that upon himself rests a portion of thatsovereignty; a part of the tremendous responsibility of its exercise. The burning, withering concentration of public opinion upon the slavesystem is alone needed for its total annihilation. God has given us thepower to overthrow it; a power peaceful, yet mighty, benevolent, yeteffectual, "awful without severity, " a moral strength equal to theemergency. 

"How does it happen, " inquires an able writer, "that whenever duty is namedwe begin to hear of the weakness of human nature? That same nature whichoutruns the whirlwind in the chase of gain, which rages like a maniac atthe trumpet call of glory, which laughs danger and death to scorn whenits least passion is awakened, becomes weak as childhood when reminded ofthe claims of duty. " But let no one hope to find an excuse in hypocrisy. The humblest individual of the community in one way or another possessesinfluence; and upon him as well as upon the proudest rests theresponsibility of its rightful exercise and proper direction. Theoverthrow of a great national evil like that of slavery can only beeffected by the united energies of the great body of the people. Shoulder must be put to shoulder and hand linked with hand, the wholemass must be put in motion and its entire strength applied, until thefabric of oppression is shaken to its dark foundations and not one stoneis left upon another. 

Let the Christian remember that the God of his worship hateth oppression;that the mystery of faith can only be held by a pure conscience; and thatin vain is the tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, if the weihtiermatters of the law, judgment, mercy, and truth, are forgotten. Let himremember that all along the clouded region of slavery the truths of theeverlasting gospel are not spoken, that the ear of iniquity is lulled, that those who minister between the "porch and the altar" dare not speakout the language of eternal justice: "Is not this the fast which I havechosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, andto let the oppressed go free?" (Isa. Viii. 6. ) "He that stealeth a manand selleth him; or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put todeath. " (Exod. Xxi. 16. 1) Yet a little while and the voice of impartialprayer for humanity will be heard no more in the abiding place ofslavery. The truths of the gospel, its voice of warning and exhortation, will be denounced as incendiary? The night of that infidelity, whichdenies God in the abuse and degradation of man, will settle over theland, to be broken only by the upheaving earthquake of eternalretribution. 

To the members of the religious Society of Friends, I would earnestlyappeal. They have already done much to put away the evil of slavery inthis country and Great Britain. The blessings of many who were ready toperish have rested upon them. But their faithful testimony must be stillsteadily upborne, for the great work is but begun. Let them not relaxtheir exertions, nor be contented with a lifeless testimony, a formalprotestation against the evil. Active, prayerful, unwearied exertion isneeded for its overthrow. But above all, let them not aid in excusingand palliating it. Slavery has no redeeming qualities, no feature ofbenevolence, nothing pure, nothing peaceful, nothing just. Let themcarefully keep themselves aloof from all societies and all schemes whichhave a tendency to excuse or overlook its crying iniquity. True to adoctrine founded on love and mercy, "peace on earth and good will tomen, " they should regard the suffering slave as their brother, andendeavor to "put their souls in his soul's stead. " They may earnestlydesire the civilization of Africa, but they cannot aid in building up thecolony of Liberia so long as that colony leans for support upon the armof military power; so long as it proselytes to Christianity under themuzzles of its cannon; and preaches the doctrines of Christ whilepractising those of Mahomet. When the Sierra Leone Company was formed inEngland, not a member of the Society of Friends could be prevailed uponto engage in it, because the colony was to be supplied with cannon andother military stores. Yet the Foreign Agent of the Liberia ColonySociety, to which the same insurmountable objection exists, is a memberof the Society of Friends, and I understand has been recently employed inproviding gunpowder, etc. , for the use of the colony. There must be anawakening on this subject; other Woolmans and other Benezets must ariseand speak the truth with the meek love of James and the fervent sincerityof Paul. 

To the women of America, whose sympathies know no distinction of cline, or sect, or color, the suffering slave is making a strong appeal. Oh, let it not be unheeded! for of those to whom much is given much will berequired at the last dread tribunal; and never in the strongest terms ofhuman eulogy was woman's influence overrated. Sisters, daughters, wives, and mothers, your influence is felt everywhere, at the fireside, and inthe halls of legislation, surrounding, like the all-encirclingatmosphere, brother and father, husband and son! And by your love ofthem, by every holy sympathy of your bosoms, by every mournful appealwhich comes up to you from hearts whose sanctuary of affections has beenmade waste and desolate, you are called upon to exert it in the cause ofredemption from wrong and outrage. 

Let the patriot, the friend of liberty and the Union of the States, nolonger shut his eyes to the great danger, the master-evil before whichall others dwindle into insignificance. Our Union is tottering to itsfoundation, and slavery is the cause. Remove the evil. Dry up at theirsource the bitter waters. In vain you enact and abrogate your tariffs;in vain is individual sacrifice, or sectional concession. The accursedthing is with us, the stone of stumbling and the rock of offence remains. Drag, then, the Achan into light; and let national repentance atone fornational sin. 

The conflicting interests of free and slave labor furnish the only groundfor fear in relation to the permanency of the Union. The line ofseparation between them is day by day growing broader and deeper;geographically and politically united, we are already, in a moral pointof view, a divided people. But a few months ago we were on the veryverge of civil war, a war of brothers, a war between the North and theSouth, between the slave-holder and the free laborer. The danger hasbeen delayed for a time; this bolt has fallen without mortal injury tothe Union, but the cloud from whence it came still hangs above us, reddening with the elements of destruction. 

Recent events have furnished ample proof that the slave-holding interestis prepared to resist any legislation on the part of the generalgovernment which is supposed to have a tendency, directly or indirectly, to encourage and invigorate free labor; and that it is determined tocharge upon its opposite interest the infliction of all those evils whichnecessarily attend its own operation, "the primeval curse of Omnipotenceupon slavery. "

We have already felt in too many instances the extreme difficulty ofcherishing in one common course of national legislation the oppositeinterests of republican equality and feudal aristocracy and servitude. The truth is, we have undertaken a moral impossibility. These interestsare from their nature irreconcilable. The one is based upon the pureprinciples of rational liberty; the other, under the name of freedom, revives the ancient European system of barons and villains, nobles andserfs. Indeed, the state of society which existed among our Anglo-Saxonancestors was far more tolerable than that of many portions of ourrepublican confederacy. For the Anglo-Saxon slaves had it in their powerto purchase their freedom; and the laws of the realm recognized theirliberation and placed them under legal protection. 

 [The diffusion of Christianity in Great Britain was moreover followed by a general manumission; for it would seem that the priests and missionaries of religion in that early and benighted age were more faithful in the performance of their duties than those of the present. "The holy fathers, monks, and friars, " says Sir T. Smith, "had in their confessions, and specially in their extreme and deadly sickness, convinced the laity how dangerous a thing it was for one Christian to hold another in bondage; so that temporal men, by reason of the terror in their consciences, were glad to manumit all their villains. "--Hilt. Commonwealth, Blackstone, p. 52. ]

To counteract the dangers resulting from a state of society so utterly atvariance with the great Declaration of American freedom should be theearnest endeavor of every patriotic statesman. Nothing unconstitutional, nothing violent, should be attempted; but the true doctrine of the rightsof man should be steadily kept in view; and the opposition to slaveryshould be inflexible and constantly maintained. The almost dailyviolations of the Constitution in consequence of the laws of some of theslave states, subjecting free colored citizens of New England andelsewhere, who may happen to be on board of our coasting vessels, toimprisonment immediately on their arrival in a Southern port should beprovided against. Nor should the imprisonment of the free coloredcitizens of the Northern and Middle states, on suspicion of beingrunaways, subjecting them, even after being pronounced free, to the costsof their confinement and trial, be longer tolerated; for if we continueto yield to innovations like these upon the Constitution of our fathers, we shall erelong have the name only of a free government left us. 

Dissemble as we may, it is impossible for us to believe, after fullyconsidering the nature of slavery, that it can much longer maintain apeaceable existence among us. A day of revolution must come, and it isour duty to prepare for it. Its threatened evil may be changed into anational blessing. The establishment of schools for the instruction ofthe slave children, a general diffusion of the lights of Christianity, and the introduction of a sacred respect for the social obligations ofmarriage and for the relations between parents and children, among ourblack population, would render emancipation not only perfectly safe, butalso of the highest advantage to the country. Two millions of freemenwould be added to our population, upon whom in the hour of danger wecould safely depend; "the domestic foe" would be changed into a firmfriend, faithful, generous, and ready to encounter all dangers in ourdefence. It is well known that during the last war with Great Britain, wherever the enemy touched upon our Southern coast, the slaves inmultitudes hastened to join them. On the other hand, the free blackswere highly serviceable in repelling them. So warm was the zeal of thelatter, so manifest their courage in the defence of Louisiana, that thepresent Chief Magistrate of the United States publicly bestowed upon themone of the highest eulogiums ever offered by a commander to his soldiers. 

Let no one seek an apology for silence on the subject of slavery becausethe laws of the land tolerate and sanction it. But a short time ago theslave-trade was protected by laws and treaties, and sanctioned by theexample of men eminent for the reputation of piety and integrity. Yetpublic opinion broke over these barriers; it lifted the curtain andrevealed the horrors of that most abominable traffic; and unrighteous lawand ancient custom and avarice and luxury gave way before itsirresistible authority. It should never be forgotten that human lawcannot change the nature of human action in the pure eye of infinitejustice; and that the ordinances of man cannot annul those of God. Theslave system, as existing in this country, can be considered in no otherlight than as the cause of which the foul traffic in human flesh is thelegitimate consequence. It is the parent, the fosterer, the solesupporter of the slave-trade. It creates the demand for slaves, and theforeign supply will always be equal to the demand of consumption. Itkeeps the market open. It offers inducements to the slave-trader whichno severity of law against his traffic can overcome. By our laws histrade is piracy; while slavery, to which alone it owes its existence, isprotected and cherished, and those engaged in it are rewarded by anincrease of political power proportioned to the increase of their stockof human beings! To steal the natives of Africa is a crime worthy of anignominious death; but to steal and enslave annually nearly one hundredthousand of the descendants of these stolen natives, born in thiscountry, is considered altogether excusable and proper! For my own part, I know no difference between robbery in Africa and robbery at home. Icould with as quiet a conscience engage in the one as the other. 

"There is not one general principle, " justly remarks Lord Nugent, "onwhich the slave-trade is to be stigmatized which does not impeach slaveryitself. " Kindred in iniquity, both must fall speedily, fall together, and be consigned to the same dishonorable grave. The spirit which isthrilling through every nerve of England is awakening America from hersleep of death. Who, among our statesmen, would not shrink from thebaneful reputation of having supported by his legislative influence theslave-trade, the traffic in human flesh? Let them then beware; for thetime is near at hand when the present defenders of slavery will sinkunder the same fatal reputation, and leave to posterity a memory whichwill blacken through all future time, a legacy of infamy. 

"Let us not betake us to the common arts and stratagems of nations, butfear God, and put away the evil which provokes Him; and trust not in man, but in the living God; and it shall go well for England!" This counsel, given by the purehearted William Penn, in a former age, is about to befollowed in the present. An intense and powerful feeling is working inthe mighty heart of England; it is speaking through the lips of Broughamand Buxton and O'Connell, and demanding justice in the name of humanityand according to the righteous law of God. The immediate emancipation ofeight hundred thousand slaves is demanded with an authority which cannotmuch longer be disputed or trifled with. That demand will be obeyed;justice will be done; the heavy burdens will be unloosed; the oppressedset free. It shall go well for England. 

And when the stain on our own escutcheon shall be seen no more; when theDeclaration of our Independence and the practice of our people shallagree; when truth shall be exalted among us; when love shall take theplace of wrong; when all the baneful pride and prejudice of caste andcolor shall fall forever; when under one common sun of political libertythe slave-holding portions of our republic shall no longer sit, like theEgyptians of old, themselves mantled in thick darkness, while all aroundthem is glowing with the blessed light of freedom and equality, then, andnot till then, shall it go well for America!

 THE ABOLITIONISTS. 

 THEIR SENTIMENTS AND OBJECTS. 

Two letters to the 'Jeffersonian and Times', Richmond, Va. 

 I. 

A FRIEND has banded me a late number of your paper, containing a briefnotice of a pamphlet, which I have recently published on the subject ofslavery. 

From an occasional perusal of your paper, I have formed a favorableopinion of your talent and independence. Compelled to dissent from someof your political sentiments, I still give you full credit for the loftytone of sincerity and manliness with which these sentiments are avowedand defended. 

I perceive that since the adjustment of the tariff question a new subjectof discontent and agitation seems to engross your attention. 

The "accursed tariff" has no sooner ceased to be the stone of stumblingand the rock of offence, than the "abolition doctrines of the Northernenthusiasts, " as you are pleased to term the doctrines of your ownJefferson, furnish, in your opinion, a sufficient reason for poising the"Ancient Dominion" on its sovereignty, and rousing every slaveowner tomilitary preparations, until the entire South, from the Potomac to theGulf, shall bristle with bayonets, "like quills upon the fretfulporcupine. "

In proof of a conspiracy against your "vested rights, " you have commencedpublishing copious extracts from the pamphlets and periodicals of theabolitionists of New England and New York. An extract from my ownpamphlet you have headed "The Fanatics, " and in introducing it to yourreaders you inform them that "it exhibits, in strong colors, the morbidspirit of that false and fanatical philanthropy, which is at work in theNorthern states, and, to some extent, in the South. "

Gentlemen, so far as I am personally concerned in the matter, I feel nodisposition to take exceptions to any epithets which you may see fit toapply to me or my writings. A humble son of New England--a tiller of herrugged soil, and a companion of her unostentatious yeomanry--it matterslittle, in any personal consideration of the subject, whether the voiceof praise or opprobrium reaches me from beyond the narrow limits of myimmediate neighborhood. 

But when I find my opinions quoted as the sentiment of New England, andthen denounced as dangerous, "false and fanatical;" and especially when Isee them made the occasion of earnest appeals to the prejudices andsectional jealousies of the South, it becomes me to endeavor to establishtheir truths, and defend them from illegitimate influences and unjustsuspicions. 

In the first place, then, let me say, that if it be criminal to publiclyexpress a belief that it is in the power of the slave states toemancipate their slaves, with profit and safety to themselves, and thatsuch is their immediate duty, a majority of the people of New England arewholly guiltless. Of course, all are nominally opposed to slavery; butupon the little band of abolitionists should the anathemas of the slave-holder be directed, for they are the agitators of whom you complain, menwho are acting under a solemn conviction of duty, and who are bendingevery energy of their minds to the accomplishment of their object. 

And that object is the overthrow of slavery in the United States, by suchmeans only as are sanctioned by law, humanity, and religion. 

I shall endeavor, gentlemen, as briefly as may be, to give you some ofour reasons for opposing slavery and seeking its abolition; and, secondly, to explain our mode of operation; to disclose our plan ofemancipation, fully and entirely. We wish to do nothing darkly; frankrepublicans, we acknowledge no double-dealing. At this busy season ofthe year, I cannot but regret that I have not leisure for such adeliberate examination of the subject as even my poor ability mightwarrant. My remarks, penned in the intervals of labor, must necessarilybe brief, and wanting in coherence. 

We seek the abolishment of slavery

1. Because it is contrary to the law of God. 

In your paper of the 2d of 7th mo. , the same in which you denounce the"false and fanatical philanthropy" of abolitionists, you avow yourselvesmembers of the Bible Society, and bestow warm and deserved encomiums onthe "truly pious undertaking of sending the truth among all nations. "

You, therefore, gentlemen, whatever others may do, will not accuse me of"fanaticism, " if I endeavor to sustain my first great reason for opposingslavery by a reference to the volume of inspiration:

"Therefore, all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you doye even so to them. "

"Wherefore now let the fear of the Lord be upon you, take heed and do it;for there is no iniquity with the Lord, nor respect of persons. "

"Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bands ofwickedness; to undo the heavy burdens and let the oppressed go free, andthat ye break every yoke?"

"If a man be found stealing any of his brethren, and maketh merchandiseof him, or selling him, that thief shall die. "

"Of a truth, I perceive that God is no respecter of persons. "

"And he that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in hishands, he shall surely be put to death. "

2. Because it is an open violation of all human equality, of the laws ofNature and of nations. 

The fundamental principle of all equal and just law is contained in thefollowing extract from Blackstone's Commentaries, Introduction, sec. 2. 

"The rights which God and Nature have established, and which aretherefore called natural rights, such as life and liberty, need not theaid of human laws to be more effectually vested in every man than theyare; neither do they receive any additional strength when declared bymunicipal laws to be inviolable: on the contrary, no human legislationhas power to abridge or destroy there, unless the owner shall himselfcommit some act that amounts to a forfeiture. "

Has the negro committed such offence? Above all, has his infant childforfeited its unalienable right?

Surely it can be no act of the innocent child. 

Yet you must prove the forfeiture, or no human legislation can deprivethat child of its freedom. 

Its black skin constitutes the forfeiture!

What! throw the responsibility upon God! Charge the common Father of thewhite and the black, He, who is no respecter of persons, with plunderingHis unoffending children of all which makes the boon of existencedesirable; their personal liberty!

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal;that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. "--[Declaration of Independence, from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. ]

In this general and unqualified declaration, on the 4th of July, 1776, all the people of the United States, without distinction of color, wereproclaimed free, by the delegates of the people of those states assembledin their highest sovereign capacity. 

For more than half a century we have openly violated that solemndeclaration. 

3. Because it renders nugatory the otherwise beneficial example of ourfree institutions, and exposes us to the scorn and reproach of theliberal and enlightened of other nations. 

"Chains clank and groans echo around the walls of their spotlessCongress. "--[Francis Jeffrey. ]

"Man to be possessed by man! Man to be made property of! The image ofthe Deity to be put under the yoke! Let these usurpers show us theirtitle-deeds!"--[Simon Boliver. ]

"When I am indulging in my views of American prospects and Americanliberty, it is mortifying to be told that in that very country a largeportion of the people are slaves! It is a dark spot on the face of thenation. Such a state of things cannot always exist. "--[Lafayette. ]

"I deem it right to raise my humble voice to convince the citizens ofAmerica that the slaveholding states are held in abomination by all thosewhose opinion ought to be valuable. Man is the property of man in aboutone half of the American States: let them not therefore dare to prate oftheir institutions or of their national freedom, while they hold theirfellow-men in bondage! Of all men living, the American citizen who isthe owner of slaves is the most despicable. He is a political hypocriteof the very worst description. The friends of humanity and liberty inEurope should join in one universal cry of shame on the American slave-holders! 'Base wretches!' should we shout in chorus; 'base wretches!how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane ofrepublican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings inchains and slavery!'"--[Daniel O'Connell. ]

4. Because it subjects one portion of our American brethren to theunrestrained violence and unholy passions of another. 

Here, gentlemen, I might summon to my support a cloud of witnesses, ahost of incontrovertible, damning facts, the legitimate results of asystem whose tendency is to harden and deprave the heart. But I will notdescend to particulars. I am willing to believe that the majority of themasters of your section of the country are disposed to treat theirunfortunate slaves with kindness. But where the dreadful privilege ofslave-holding is extended to all, in every neighborhood, there must beindividuals whose cupidity is unrestrained by any principle of humanity, whose lusts are fiercely indulged, whose fearful power over the bodies, nay, may I not say the souls, of their victims is daily and hourlyabused. 

Will the evidence of your own Jefferson, on this point, be admissible?

"The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise, ofthe most boisterous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the onepart, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this, andlearn to imitate it. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches thelineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smallerslaves, gives loose to the worst of passions; and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot fail to be stamped by it withodious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain hismorals and manners undepraved by such circumstances. "--[Notes onVirginia, p. 241. ]

"Il n'existe a la verite aucune loi qui protege l'esclave le mauvaistraitement du maitre, " says Achille Murat, himself a Floridian slave-holder, in his late work on the United States. 

Gentlemen, is not this true? Does there exist even in Virginia any lawlimiting the punishment of a slave? Are there any bounds prescribed, beyond which the brutal, the revengeful, the intoxicated slave-master, acting in the double capacity of judge and executioner, cannot pass?

You will, perhaps, tell me that the general law against murder appliesalike to master and slave. True; but will you point out instances ofmasters suffering the penalty of that law for the murder of their slaves?If you examine your judicial reports you will find the wilful murder of aslave decided to be only a trespass!--[Virginia Reports, vol. V. P. 481, Harris versus Nichols. ]

It indeed argues well for Virginian pride of character, that latterly, the law, which expressly sanctioned the murder of a slave, who in thelanguage of Georgia and North Carolina, "died of moderate correction, "has been repealed. But, although the letter of the law is changed, itspractice remains the same. In proof of this, I would refer toBrockenborough and Holmes' Virginia Cases, p. 258. 

In Georgia and North Carolina the murder of a slave is tolerated andjustified by law, provided that in the opinion of the court he died "ofmoderate correction!"

In South Carolina the following clause of a law enacted in 1740 is stillin force:--

"If any slave shall suffer in his life, limbs, or members, when no whiteperson shall be present, or being present shall neglect or refuse to giveevidence concerning the same, in every such case the owner or otherperson who shall have the care and government of the slave shall bedeemed and taken to be guilty of such offence; unless such owner or otherperson can make the contrary appear by good and sufficient evidence, orshall by his own oath clear and exculpate himself, which oath every courtwhere such offence shall be tried is hereby empowered to administer andto acquit the offender accordingly, if clear proof of the offence be notmade by two witnesses at least, any law, usage, or custom to the contrarynotwithstanding. "

Is not this offering a reward for perjury? And what shall we think ofthat misnamed court of justice, where it is optional with the witnesses, in a case of life and death, to give or withhold their testimony. 

5. Because it induces dangerous sectional jealousies, creates ofnecessity a struggle between the opposing interests of free and slavelabor, and threatens the integrity of the Union. 

That sectional jealousies do exist, the tone of your paper, gentlemen, isof itself an evidence, if indeed any were needed. The moral sentiment ofthe free states is against slavery. The freeman has declared hisunwillingness that his labor should be reduced to a level with that ofslaves. Harsh epithets and harsh threats have been freely exchanged, until the beautiful Potomac, wherever it winds its way to the ocean, hasbecome the dividing line, not of territory only, but of feeling, interest, national pride, a moral division. 

What shook the pillars of the Union when the Missouri question wasagitated? What but a few months ago arrayed in arms a state against theUnion, and the Union against a state?

From Maine to Florida, gentlemen, the answer must be the same, slavery. 

6. Because of its pernicious influence upon national wealth andprosperity. 

Political economy has been the peculiar study of Virginia. But there aresome important truths connected with this science which she has hithertooverlooked or wantonly disregarded. 

Population increasing with the means of subsistence is a fair test ofnational wealth. 

By reference to the several censuses of the United States, it will beseen that the white population increases nearly twice as fast in stateswhere there are few or no slaves as in the slave states. 

Again, in the latter states the slave population has increased twice asfast as the white. Let us take, for example, the period of twenty years, from 1790 to 1810, and compare the increase of the two classes in threeof the Southern states. 

Per cent. Of whites. Per cent. Of blacks. 

Maryland 13 31Virginia 24 38North Carolina 30 70

The causes of this disproportionate increase, so inimical to the trueinterests of the country, are very manifest. 

A large proportion of the free inhabitants of the United States aredependent upon their labor for subsistence. The forced, unnatural systemof slavery in some of the states renders the demand for free laborersless urgent; they are not so readily and abundantly supplied with themeans of subsistence as those of their own class in the free states, andas the necessaries of life diminish population also diminishes. 

There is yet another cause for the decline of the white population. Inthe free states labor is reputable. The statesman, whose eloquence haselectrified a nation, does not disdain in the intervals of the publicservice to handle the axe and the hoe. And the woman whose beauty, talents, and accomplishments have won the admiration of all deems it nodegradation to "look well to her household. "

But the slave stamps with indelible ignominy the character of occupation. It is a disgrace for a highborn Virginian or chivalrous Carolinian tolabor, side by side, with the low, despised, miserable black man. Wretched must be the condition of the poorer classes of whites in aslave-holding community! Compelled to perform the despised offices ofthe slave, they can hardly rise above his level. They become the pariahsof society. No wonder, then, that the tide of emigration flows from theslave-cursed shores of the Atlantic to the free valleys of the West. 

In New England the labor of a farmer or mechanic is worth from $150 to$200 per annum. That of a female from $50 to $100. Our entirepopulation, with the exception of those engaged in mercantile affairs, the professional classes, and a very few moneyed idlers, are working menand women. If that of the South were equally employed (and slaveryapart, there is no reason why they should not be), how large an additionwould be annually made to the wealth of the country? The truth is, avery considerable portion of the national wealth produced by Northernlabor is taxed to defray the expenses of twenty-five representatives ofSouthern property in Congress, and to maintain an army mainly for theprotection of the slave-master against the dangerous tendencies of thatproperty. 

In the early and better days of the Roman Republic, the ancient warriorsand statesmen cultivated their fields with their own hands; but so soonas their agriculture was left to the slaves, it visibly declined, theonce fertile fields became pastures, and the inhabitants of that gardenof the world were dependent upon foreign nations for the necessaries oflife. The beautiful villages, once peopled by free contented laborers, became tenantless, and, over the waste of solitude, we see, here andthere, at weary distances, the palaces of the master, contrastingpainfully with the wretched cottages and subterranean cells of the slave. In speaking of the extraordinary fertility of the soil in the early timesof the Republic, Pliny inquires, "What was the cause of these abundantharvests? It was this, that men of rank employed themselves in theculture of the fields; whereas now it is left to wretches loaded withfetters, who carry in their countenances the shameful evidence of theirslavery. "

And what was true in the days of the Roman is now written legibly uponthe soil of your own Virginia. A traveller in your state, incontemplating the decline of its agriculture, has justly remarked that, "if the miserable condition of the negro had left his mind forreflection, he would laugh in his chains to see how slavery has strickenthe land with ugliness. "

Is the rapid increase of a population of slaves in itself no evil? Inall the slave states the increase of the slaves is vastly more rapid thanthat of the whites or free blacks. When we recollect that they are underno natural or moral restraint, careless of providing food or clothing forthemselves or their children; when, too, we consider that they are raisedas an article of profitable traffic, like the cattle of New England andthe hogs of Kentucky; that it is a matter of interest, of dollars andcents, to the master that they should multiply as fast as possible, thereis surely nothing at all surprising in the increase of their numbers. Would to heaven there were also nothing alarming!

7. Because, by the terms of the national compact, the free and the slavestates are alike involved in the guilt of maintaining slavery, and thecitizens of the former are liable, at any moment, to be called upon toaid the latter in suppressing, at the point of the bayonet, theinsurrection of the slaves. 

Slavery is, at the best, an unnatural state. And Nature, when hereternal principles are violated, is perpetually struggling to restorethem to their first estate. 

All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point. NeedI refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloodyinsurrection of Etruria, the horrible servile wars of Sicily and Capua?Or, to come down to later times, to France in the fourteenth century, Germany in the sixteenth, to Malta in the last? Need I call to mind theuntold horrors of St. Domingo, when that island, under the curse of itsservile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven, --an open hell?Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded, --the frequent slaveinsurrections of the South? One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must stillbe fresh in your recollection, --Southampton, with its fired dwellings andghastly dead! Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the deathstruggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, thelamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence andbeauty, and childhood, and hoary age!

"The hour of emancipation, " said Thomas Jefferson, "is advancing in themarch of time. It will come. If not brought on by the generous energyof our own minds, it will come by the bloody process of St. Domingo!"

To the just and prophetic language of your own great statesman I have buta few words to add. They shall be those of truth and soberness. 

We regard the slave system in your section of the country as a greatevil, moral and political, --an evil which, if left to itself for even afew years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of theblacks. 

The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than twomillions of our fellow-beings as your property; not, indeed, morally, really, de facto, but still legally your property! We acknowledge thatyou have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this"property, " but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantageof that power. For truth will not allow us to admit that any human lawor compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God andthe eternal laws of Nature. 

We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holdingstates to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must bedangerous to themselves in time and eternity, and full of injustice totheir slaves and to their brethren of the free states. 

Because the slave has never forfeited his right to freedom, and thecontinuance of his servitude is a continuance of robbery; and because, inthe event of a servile war, the people of the free states would be calledupon to take a part in its unutterable horrors. 

New England would obey that call, for she will abide unto death by theConstitution of the land. Yet what must be the feelings of her citizens, while engaged in hunting down like wild beasts their fellow-men--brutaland black it may be, but still oppressed, suffering human beings, struggling madly and desperately for their liberty, if they feel and knowthat the necessity of so doing has resulted from a blind fatality on thepart of the oppressor, a reckless disregard of the warnings of earth andheaven, an obstinate perseverance in a system founded and sustained byrobbery and wrong?

All wars are horrible, wicked, inexcusable, and truly and solemnly hasJefferson himself said that, in a contest of this kind, between the slaveand the master, "the Almighty has no attribute which could take side withus. "

Understand us, gentlemen. We only ask to have the fearful necessitytaken away from us of sustaining the wretched policy of slavery by moralinfluence or physical force. We ask alone to be allowed to wash ourhands of the blood of millions of your fellow-beings, the cry of whom isrising up as a swift witness unto God against us. 

8. Because all the facts connected with the subject warrant us in a mostconfident belief that a speedy and general emancipation might be madewith entire safety, and that the consequences of such an emancipationwould be highly beneficial to the planters of the South. 

Awful as may be their estimate in time and eternity, I will not, gentlemen, dwell upon the priceless benefits of a conscience at rest, asoul redeemed from the all-polluting influences of slavery, and againstwhich the cry of the laborer whose hire has been kept back by fraud doesnot ascend. Nor will I rest the defence of my position upon the factthat it can never be unsafe to obey the commands of God. These are theold and common arguments of "fanatics" and "enthusiasts, " melting awaylike frost-work in the glorious sunshine of expediency and utility. Inthe light of these modern luminaries, then, let us reason together. 

A long and careful examination of the subject will I think fully justifyme in advancing this general proposition. 

Wherever, whether in Europe, the East and West Indies, South America, orin our own country, a fair experiment has been made of the comparativeexpense of free and slave labor, the result has uniformly been favorableto the former. 

 [See Brougham's Colonial Policy. Hodgdon's Letter to Jean Baptiste Say. Waleh's Brazil. Official Letter of Hon. Mr. Ward, from Mexico. Dr. Dickson's Mitigation of Slavery. Franklin on The Peopling of Countries. Ramsay's Essay. Botham's Sugar Cultivation in Batavia. Marsden's History of Sumatra. Coxe's Travels. Dr. Anderson's Observations on Slavery. Storch's Political Economy. Adam Smith. J. Jeremies' Essays. Humboldt's Travels, etc. , etc. ]

Here, gentlemen, the issue is tendered. Standing on your own ground ofexpediency, I am ready to defend my position. 

I pass from the utility to the safety of emancipation. And here, gentlemen, I shall probably be met at the outset with your supposedconsequences, bloodshed, rapine, promiscuous massacre!

The facts, gentlemen! In God's name, bring out your facts! If slaveryis to cast over the prosperity of our country the thick shadow of aneverlasting curse, because emancipation is dreaded as a remedy worse thanthe disease itself, let us know the real grounds of your fear. 

Do you find them in the emancipation of the South American Republics? InHayti? In the partial experiments of some of the West India Islands?Does history, ancient or modern, justify your fears? Can you find anyexcuse for them in the nature of the human mind, everywhere maddened byinjury and conciliated by kindness? No, gentlemen; the dangers ofslavery are manifest and real, all history lies open for your warning. But the dangers of emancipation, of "doing justly and loving mercy, "exist only in your imaginations. You cannot produce one fact incorroboration of your fears. You cannot point to the stain of a singledrop of any master's blood shed by the slave he has emancipated. 

I have now given some of our reasons for opposing slavery. In my nextletter I shall explain our method of opposition, and I trust I shall beable to show that there is nothing "fanatical, " nothing"unconstitutional, " and nothing unchristian in that method. 

In the mean time, gentlemen, I am your friend and well-wisher. 

HAVERHILL, MASS. , 22d 7th Mo. , 1833. 

 II. 

The abolitionists of the North have been grossly misrepresented. Inattacking the system of slavery, they have never recommended any measureor measures conflicting with the Constitution of the United States. 

They have never sought to excite or encourage a spirit of rebellion amongthe slaves: on the contrary, they would hold any such attempt, bywhomsoever made, in utter and stern abhorrence. 

All the leading abolitionists of my acquaintance are, from principle, opposed to war of all kinds, believing that the benefits of no warwhatever can compensate for the sacrifice of one human life by violence. 

Consequently, they would be the first to deprecate any physicalinterference with your slave system on the part of the generalgovernment. 

They are, without exception, opposed to any political interposition ofthe government, in regard to slavery as it exists in the states. For, although they feel and see that the canker of the moral disease isaffecting all parts of the confederacy, they believe that the remedy lieswith yourselves alone. Any such interference they would considerunlawful and unconstitutional; and the exercise of unconstitutionalpower, although sanctioned by the majority of a republican government, they believe to be a tyranny as monstrous and as odious as the despotismof a Turkish Sultan. 

Having made this disclaimer on the part of myself and my friends, let meinquire from whence this charge of advocating the interference of thegeneral government with the sovereign jurisdiction of the states hasarisen? Will you, gentlemen, will the able editors of the United StatesTelegraph and the Columbian Telescope, explain? For myself, I havesought in vain among the writings of our "Northern Enthusiasts, " andamong the speeches of the Northern statesmen and politicians, for somegrounds for the accusation. 

The doctrine, such as it is, does not belong to us. I think it may betraced home to the South, to Virginia, to her Convention of 1829, to thespeech of Ex-President Monroe, on the white basis question. 

"As to emancipation, " said that distinguished son of your state, "if everthat should take place, it cannot be done by the state; it must be doneby the Union. "

Again, "If emancipation can ever be effected, it can only be done withthe aid of the general government. "

Gentlemen, you are welcome to your doctrine. It has no advocates amongthe abolitionists of New England. 

We aim to overthrow slavery by the moral influence of an enlightenedpublic sentiment;

By a clear and fearless exposition of the guilt of holding property inman;

By analyzing the true nature of slavery, and boldly rebuking sin;

By a general dissemination of the truths of political economy, in regardto free and slave labor;

By appeals from the pulpit to the consciences of men;

By the powerful influence of the public press;

By the formation of societies whose object shall be to oppose theprinciple of slavery by such means as are consistent with our obligationsto law, religion, and humanity;

By elevating, by means of education and sympathy, the character of thefree people of color among us. 

Our testimony against slavery is the same which has uniformly, and withso much success, been applied to prevailing iniquity in all ages of theworld, the truths of divine revelation. 

Believing that there can be nothing in the Providence of God to which Hisholy and eternal law is not strictly applicable, we maintain that nocircumstances can justify the slave-holder in a continuance of hissystem. 

That the fact that this system did not originate with the presentgeneration is no apology for retaining it, inasmuch as crime cannot beentailed; and no one is under a necessity of sinning because others havedone so before him;

That the domestic slave-trade is as repugnant to the laws of God, andshould be as odious in the eyes of a Christian community, as the foreign;

That the black child born in a slave plantation is not "an entailedarticle of property;" and that the white man who makes of that child aslave is a thief and a robber, stealing the child as the sea pirate stolehis father!

We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find noauthority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say toslaveholders, "Repent now, to-day, immediately;" just as we say to theintemperate, "Break off from your vice at once; touch not, taste not, handle not, from henceforth forever. "

Besides, the plan of gradual abolition has been tried in this country andthe West Indies, and found wanting. It has been in operation in ourslave states ever since the Declaration of Independence, and its resultsare before the nation. Let us see. 

THE ABOLITIONISTS 79

In 1790 there were in the slave states south of the Potomac and the Ohio20, 415 free blacks. Their increase for the ten years following was atthe rate of sixty per cent. , their number in 1800 being 32, 604. In 1810there were 58, 046, an increase of seventy-five per cent. Thiscomparatively large increase was, in a great measure, owing to the freediscussions going on in England and in this country on the subject of theslave-trade and the rights of man. The benevolent impulse extended tothe slave-masters, and manumissions were frequent. But the salutaryimpression died away; the hand of oppression closed again upon itsvictims; and the increase for the period of twenty years, 1810 to 1830, was only seventy-seven per cent. , about one half of what it was in theten years from 1800 to 1810. And this is the practical result of themuch-lauded plan of gradual abolition. 

In 1790, in the states above mentioned, there were only 550, 604 slaves, but in 1830 there were 1, 874, 098! And this, too, is gradual abolition. 

"What, then!" perhaps you will ask, "do you expect to overthrow our wholeslave system at once? to turn loose to-day two millions of negroes?"

No, gentlemen; we expect no such thing. Enough for us if in the spiritof fraternal duty we point to your notice the commands of God; if we urgeyou by every cherished remembrance of common sacrifices upon a commonaltar, by every consideration of humanity, justice, and expediency, tobegin now, without a moment's delay, to break away from your miserablesystem, --to begin the work of moral reformation, as God commands you tobegin, not as selfishness, or worldly policy, or short-sighted politicalexpediency, may chance to dictate. 

Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded onGod's eternal truth, plain, simple, and perfect, --the doctrine ofimmediate, unprocrastinated repentance applied to the sin of slavery. 

Of this doctrine, and of our plan for crrrying it into effect, I havegiven an exposition, with the most earnest regard to the truth. Doeseither embrace anything false, fanatical, or unconstitutional? Do theyafford a reasonable protext for your fierce denunciations of yourNorthern brethren? Do they furnish occasion for your newspaper chivalry, your stereotyped demonstrations of Southern magnanimity and Yankeemeanness?--things, let me say, unworthy of Virginians, degrading toyourselves, insulting to us. 

Gentlemen, it is too late for Virginia, with all her lofty intellect andnobility of feeling, to defend and advocate the principle of slavery. The death-like silence which for nearly two centuries brooded over herexecrable system has been broken; light is pouring in upon the minds ofher citizens; truth is abroad, "searching out and overturning the lies ofthe age. " A moral reformation has been already awakened, and it cannotnow be drugged to sleep by the sophistries of detected sin. A thousandintelligences are at work in her land; a thousand of her noblest heartsare glowing with the redeeming spirit of that true philanthropy, which ismoving all the world. No, gentlemen; light is spreading from the hillsof Western Virginia to the extremest East. You cannot arrest itsprogress. It is searching the consciences; it is exercising the reason;it is appealing to the noblest characteristics of intelligent Virginians. It is no foreign influence. From every abandoned plantation where theprofitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery;from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the foxmay look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass iscreeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not imbrutedby avarice, indolence, and the lust of power. 

Abolitionist as I am, the intellectual character of Virginia has nowarmer admirer than myself. Her great names, her moral trophies, theglories of her early day, the still proud and living testimonials of hermental power, I freely acknowledge and strongly appreciate. And, believeme, it is with no other feelings than those of regret and heartfeltsorrow that I speak plainly of her great error, her giant crime, a crimewhich is visibly calling down upon her the curse of an offended Deity. But I cannot forget that upon some of the most influential and highlyfavored of her sons rests the responsibility at the present time ofsustaining this fearful iniquity. Blind to the signs of the times, careless of the wishes of thousands of their white fellow-citizens and ofthe manifold wrongs of the black man, they have dared to excuse, defend, nay, eulogize, the black abominations of slavery. 

Against the tottering ark of the idol these strong men have placed theirshoulders. That ark must fall; that idol must be cast down; what, then, will be the fate of their supporters?

When the Convention of 1829 had gathered in its splendid galaxy oftalents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turnedtheir eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it wouldadopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character ofits members and of the age in which they lived. I need not say how deepand bitter was our disappointment. Western Virginia indeed spoke on thatoccasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity. But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned awayto listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph, as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that systemof oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial ofthe citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave-holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before theconvention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrustaside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved. 

"In a political point of view, " says the memorial, "we esteem slavery anevil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us, and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden ofremoving it. We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as ourproposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with thatof the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and thegeneral depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and isproducing?"

I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper. Thememorialists state their belief

"That the labor of slaves is vastly less productive than that of freemen;that it therefore requires a larger space to furnish subsistence for agiven number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of theformer necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence ourpopulation, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and wouldunder other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty toa square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a sourceof endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on thefarm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt ofsteady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt inducesidleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; thatthe waste of the products of the land, nay, of the land itself, isbringing poverty on all its inhabitants; that this poverty and thesparseness of population either prevent the institution of schoolsthroughout the country, or keep them in a most languid and inefficientcondition; and that the same causes most obviously paralyze all ourschemes and efforts for the useful improvement of the country. "

Gentlemen, you have only to look around you to know that this picture hasbeen drawn with the pencil of truth. What has made desolate and sterileone of the loveliest regions of the whole earth? What mean the signs ofwasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finishedmansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed-grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled andnaked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern? Is all thisin the ordinary course of nature? Has man husbanded well the good giftsof God, and are they nevertheless passing from him, by a process ofdeterioration over which he has no control? No, gentlemen. For morethan two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded itsannual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun ofour brief summer. The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor haschanged a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosainto one of pastoral beauty, --the abode of independence and happiness. Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, richwith Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all herterritory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry! What achange would have been manifest in your whole character! Freemen in theplace of slaves, industry, reputable economy, a virtue, dissipationdespised, emigration unnecessary!

 [A late Virginia member of Congress described the Virginia slave- holder as follows: "He is an Eastern Virginian whose good fortune it has been to have been born wealthy, and to have become a profound politician at twenty-one without study or labor. This individual, from birth and habit, is above all labor and exertion. He never moves a finger for any useful purpose; he lives on the labor of his slaves, and even this labor he is too proud and indolent to direct in person. While he is at his ease, a mercenary with a whip in his hand drives his slaves in the field. Their dinner, consisting of a few scraps and lean bones, is eaten in the burning sun. They have no time to go to a shade and be refreshed such easement is reserved for the horses"!--Speech of Hon. P. P. Doddridge in House of Delegates, 1829. ]

All this, you will say, comes too late; the curse is upon you, the evilin the vitals of your state, the desolation widening day by day. No, itis not too late. There are elements in the Virginian character capableof meeting the danger, extreme as it is, and turning it aside. Could youbut forget for a time partisan contest and unprofitable politicalspeculations, you might successfully meet the dangerous exigencies ofyour state with those efficient remedies which the spirit of the agesuggests; you might, and that too without pecuniary loss, relinquish yourclaims to human beings as slaves, and employ them as free laborers, undersuch restraint and supervision as their present degraded condition mayrender necessary. In the language of one of your own citizens, "it isuseless for you to attempt to linger on the skirts of the age which isdeparted. The action of existing causes and principles is steady andprogressive. It cannot be retarded, unless you would blow out all themoral lights around you; and if you refuse to keep up with it, you willbe towed in the wake, whether you will or not. "--[Speech in Virginialegislature, 1832. ]

The late noble example of the eloquent statesman of Roanoke, themanumission of his slaves, speaks volumes to his political friends. Inthe last hour of existence, when his soul was struggling from his brokentenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act ofa former period. Light rest the turf upon him beneath his ownpatrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made happy by hisbenevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it. 

Gentlemen, in concluding these letters, let me once more assure you thatI entertain towards you and your political friends none other than kindlyfeelings. If I have spoken at all with apparent harshness, it has beenof principles rather than of men. But I deprecate no censure. Consciousof the honest and patriotic motives which have prompted their avowal, Icheerfully leave my sentiments to their fate. Despised and contemned asthey may be, I believe they cannot be gainsaid. Sustained by the truthas it exists in Nature and Revelation, sanctioned by the prevailingspirit of the age, they are yet destined to work out the political andmoral regeneration of our country. The opposition which they meet withdoes not dishearten me. In the lofty confidence of John Milton, Ibelieve that "though all the winds of doctrine be let loose upon theearth, so Truth be among them, we need not fear. Let her and Falsehoodgrapple; whoever knew her to be put to the worst in a free and openencounter?"

HAVERHILL, MASS. , 29th of 7th Mo. , 1833. 

 LETTER TO SAMUEL E. SEWALL. 

 HAVERHILL, 10th of 1st Mo. , 1834. 

SAMUEL E. SEWALL, ESQ. , Secretary New England A. S. Society

DEAR FRIEND, --I regret that circumstances beyond my control will notallow of my attendance at the annual meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. 

I need not say to the members of that society that I am with them, heartand soul, in the cause of abolition; the abolition not of physicalslavery alone, abhorrent and monstrous as it is, but of that intellectualslavery, the bondage of corrupt and mistaken opinion, which has fetteredas with iron the moral energies and intellectual strength of New England. 

For what is slavery, after all, but fear, --fear, forcing mind and bodyinto unnatural action? And it matters little whether it be the terror ofthe slave-whip on the body, or of the scourge of popular opinion upon theinner man. 

We all know how often the representatives of the Southern division of thecountry have amused themselves in Congress by applying the opprobriousname of "slave" to the free Northern laborer. And how familiar have thesignificant epithets of "white slave" and "dough-face" become!

I fear these epithets have not been wholly misapplied. Have we not beentold here, gravely and authoritatively, by some of our learned judges, divines, and politicians, that we, the free people of New England, haveno right to discuss the subject of slavery? Freemen, and no right tosuggest the duty or the policy of a practical adherence to the doctrinesof that immortal declaration upon which our liberties are founded!Christians, enjoying perfect liberty of conscience, yet possessing noright to breathe one whisper against a system of adultery and blood, which is filling the whole land with abomination and blasphemy! And thiscraven sentiment is echoed by the very men whose industry is taxed todefray the expenses of twenty-five representatives of property, vested inbeings fashioned in the awful image of their Maker; by men whose hardearnings aid in supporting a standing army mainly for the protection ofslaveholding indolence; by men who are liable at any moment to be calledfrom the field and workshop to put down by force the ever upwardtendencies of oppressed humanity, to aid the negro-breeder and the negro-trader in the prosecution of a traffic most horrible in the eye of God, to wall round with their bayonets two millions of colored Americans, children of a common Father and heirs of a common eternity, while thebroken chain is riveted anew and the thrown-off fetter replaced. 

I am for the abolition of this kind of slavery. It must be accomplishedbefore we can hope to abolish the negro slavery of the country. Thepeople of the free states, with a perfect understanding of their ownrights and a sacred respect for the rights of others, must put theirstrong shoulders to the work of moral reform, and our statesmen, orators, and politicians will follow, floating as they must with the tendency ofthe current, the mere indices of popular sentiment. They cannot beexpected to lead in this matter. They are but instruments in the handsof the people for good or evil:--

 "A breath can make them, as a breath has made. "

Be it our task to give tone and direction to these instruments; to turnthe tide of popular feeling into the pure channels of justice; to breakup the sinful silence of the nation; to bring the vaunted Christianity ofour age and country to the test of truth; to try the strength and purityof our republicanism. If the Christianity we profess has not power topull down the strongholds of prejudice, and overcome hate, and melt theheart of oppression, it is not of God. If our republicanism is based onother foundation than justice and humanity, let it fall forever. 

No better evidence is needed of the suicidal policy of this nation thanthe death-like silence on the subject of slavery which pervades itspublic documents. Who that peruses the annual messages of the nationalexecutive would, from their perusal alone, conjecture that such an evilas slavery had existence among us? Have the people reflected upon thecause of this silence? The evil has grown to be too monstrous to bequestioned. Its very magnitude has sealed the lips of the rulers. Uneasily, and troubled with its dream of guilt, the nation sleeps on. The volcano is beneath. God is above us. 

At every step of our peaceful and legal agitation of this subject we aremet with one grave objection. We are told that the system which we areconscientiously opposing is recognized and protected by the Constitution. For all the benefits of our fathers' patriotism--and they are neither fewnor trifling--let us be grateful to God and to their memories. But itshould not be forgotten that the same constitutional compact which nowsanctions slavery guaranteed protection for twenty years to the foreignslave-trade. It threw the shield of its "sanctity" around the nowuniversally branded pirate. It legalized the most abhorrent system ofrobbery which ever cursed the family of man. 

During those years of sinful compromise the crime of man-robbery lessatrocious than at present? Because the Constitution permitted, in thatsingle crime, the violation of all the commandments of God, was thatviolation less terrible to earth or offensive to heaven?

No one now defends that "constitutional" slavetrade. Loaded with thecurse of God and man, it stands amidst minor iniquities, like Satan inPandemonium, preeminent and monstrous in crime. 

And if the slave-trade has become thus odious, what must be the fate, erelong, of its parent, slavery? If the mere consequence be thusblackening under the execration of all the world, who shall measure thedreadful amount of infamy which must finally settle on the cause itself?The titled ecclesiastic and the ambitious statesman should have theirwarning on this point. They should know that public opinion is steadilyturning to the light of truth. The fountains are breaking up around us, and the great deep will soon be in motion. A stern, uncompromising, andsolemn spirit of inquiry is abroad. It cannot be arrested, and itsresult may be easily foreseen. It will not long be popular to talk ofthe legality of soul-murder, the constitutionality of man-robbery. 

One word in relation to our duty to our Southern brethren. If we detesttheir system of slavery in our hearts, let us not play the hypocrite withour lips. Let us not pay so poor a compliment to their understandings asto suppose that we can deceive them into a compliance with our views ofjustice by ambiguous sophistry, and overcome their sinful practices andestablished prejudices by miserable stratagem. Let us not first doviolence to our consciences by admitting their moral right to property inman, and then go to work like so many vagabond pedlers to cheat them outof it. They have a right to complain of such treatment. It is mean, andwicked, and dishonorable. Let us rather treat our Southern friends asintelligent and high-minded men, who, whatever may be their faults, despise unmanly artifice, and loathe cant, and abhor hypocrisy. Connected with them, not by political ties alone, but by commonsacrifices and mutual benefits, let us seek to expostulate with themearnestly and openly, to gain at least their confidence in our sincerity, to appeal to their consciences, reason, and interests; and, using noother weapons than those of moral truth, contend fearlessly with the evilsystem they are cherishing. And if, in an immediate compliance with thestrict demands of justice, they should need our aid and sympathy, let usopen to them our hearts and our purses. But in the name of sincerity, and for the love of peace and the harmony of the Union, let there be nomore mining and countermining, no more blending of apology withdenunciation, no more Janus-like systems of reform, with one face for theSouth and another for the North. 

If we steadily adhere to the principles upon which we have heretoforeacted, if we present our naked hearts to the view of all, if we meet thethreats and violence of our misguided enemies with the bare bosom andweaponless hand of innocence, may we not trust that the arm of ourHeavenly Father will be under us, to strengthen and support us? Andalthough we may not be able to save our country from the awful judgmentshe is provoking, though the pillars of the Union fall and all theelements of her greatness perish, still let it be our part to rallyaround the standard of truth and justice, to wash our hands of evil, tokeep our own souls unspotted, and, bearing our testimony and lifting ourwarning voices to the last, leave the event in the hands of a righteousGod. 

 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 

 In 1837 Isaac Knapp printed Letters from John Quincy Adams to his Constituents of the Twelfth Congressional District in Massachusetts, to which is added his Speech in Congress, delivered February 9, 1837, and the following stood as an introduction to the pamphlet. 

THE following letters have been published, within a few weeks, in theQuincy (Mass. ) 'Patriot'. Notwithstanding the great importance of thesubjects which they discuss, the intense interest which they arecalculated to awaken throughout this commonwealth and the whole country, and the exalted reputation of their author as a profound statesman andpowerful writer, they are as yet hardly known beyond the limits of theconstituency to whom they are particularly addressed. The reason of thisis sufficiently obvious. John Quincy Adams belongs to neither of theprominent political parties, fights no partisan battles, and cannot beprevailed upon to sacrifice truth and principle upon the altar of partyexpediency and interest. Hence neither party is interested in defendinghis course, or in giving him an opportunity to defend himself. Buthowever systematic may be the efforts of mere partisan presses tosuppress and hold back from the public eye the powerful and triumphantvindication of the Right of Petition, the graphic delineation of theslavery spirit in Congress, and the humbling disclosure of Northerncowardice and treachery, contained in these letters, they are destined toexert a powerful influence upon the public mind. They will constituteone of the most striking pages in the history of our times. They will beread with avidity in the North and in the South, and throughout Europe. Apart from the interest excited by the subjects under discussion, andviewed only as literary productions, they may be ranked among the highestintellectual efforts of their author. Their sarcasm is Junius-like, --cold, keen, unsparing. In boldness, directness, and eloquent appeal, they will bear comparison with O'Connell's celebrated 'Letters to theReformers of Great Britain'. They are the offspring of an intellectunshorn of its primal strength, and combining the ardor of youth with theexperience of age. 

The disclosure made in these letters of the slavery influence exerted inCongress over the representatives of the free states, of the manner inwhich the rights of freemen have been bartered for Southern votes, orbasely yielded to the threats of men educated in despotism, and stampedby the free indulgence of unrestrained tyranny with the "odiouspeculiarities" of slavery, is painful and humiliating in the extreme. Itwill be seen that, in the great struggle for and against the Right ofPetition, an account of which is given in the following pages, theirauthor stood, in a great measure, alone and unsupported by his Northerncolleagues. On his "gray, discrowned head" the entire fury of slave-holding arrogance and wrath was expended. He stood alone, beating back, with his aged and single arm, the tide which would have borne down andoverwhelmed a less sturdy and determined spirit. 

We need not solicit for these letters, and the speech which accompaniesthem, a thorough perusal. They deserve, and we trust will receive, acirculation throughout the entire country. They will meet a cordialwelcome from every lover of human liberty, from every friend of justiceand the rights of man, irrespective of color or condition. Theprinciples which they defend, the sentiments which they express, arethose of Massachusetts, as recently asserted, almost unanimously, by herlegislature. In both branches of that body, during the discussion of thesubject of slavery and the right of petition, the course of the ex-President was warmly and eloquently commended. Massachusetts willsustain her tried and faithful representative; and the time is not fardistant when the best and worthiest citizens of the entire North willproffer him their thanks for his noble defence of their rights asfreemen, and of the rights of the slave as a man. 

THE BIBLE AND SLAVERY. 

 From a review of a pro-slavery pamphlet by "Evangelicus" in the Boston Emancipator in 1843. 

THE second part of the essay is occupied in proving that the slavery inthe Roman world, at the time of our Saviour, was similar in all essentialfeatures to American slavery at the present day; and the third andconcluding part is devoted to an examination of the apostolicaldirections to slaves and masters, as applicable to the same classes inthe United States. He thinks the command to give to servants that whichis just and equal means simply that the masters should treat their slaveswith equity, and that while the servant is to be profitable to themaster, the latter is bound in "a fair and equitable manner to providefor the slave's subsistence and happiness. " Although he professes tobelieve that a faithful adherence to Scriptural injunctions on this pointwould eventually terminate in the emancipation of the slaves, he thinksit not necessary to inquire whether the New Testament does or does not"tolerate slavery as a permanent institution"!

From the foregoing synopsis it will be seen at once that whatever mayhave been the motives of the writer, the effect of his publication, sofar as it is at all felt, will be to strengthen the oppressor in hisguilt, and hold him back from the performance of his immediate duty inrespect to his slaves, and to shield his conscience from the reproofs ofthat class who, according to "Evangelicus, " have "no personalacquaintance with the actual domestic state or the social and politicalconnections of their Southern fellow-citizens. " We look upon it only asanother vain attempt to strike a balance between Christian duty andcriminal policy, to reconcile Christ and Belial, the holy philanthropy ofHim who went about doing good with the most abhorrent manifestation ofhuman selfishness, lust, and hatred which ever provoked the divinedispleasure. There is a grave-stone coldness about it. The authormanifests as little feeling as if he were solving a question in algebra. No sigh of sympathy breathes through its frozen pages for the dumb, chained millions, no evidence of a feeling akin to that of Him who at thegrave of Lazarus

 "Wept, and forgot His power to save;"

no outburst of that indignant reproof with which the Divine Masterrebuked the devourers of widows' houses and the oppressors of the poor iscalled forth by the writer's stoical contemplation of the tyranny of his"Christian brethren" at the South. 

"It is not necessary, " says Evangelicus, "to inquire whether the NewTestament does not tolerate slavery as a permanent institution. " Andthis is said when the entire slave-holding church has sheltered itsabominations under the pretended sanction of the gospel; when slavery, including within itself a violation of every command uttered amidst thethunders of Sinai, a system which has filled the whole South with theoppression of Egypt and the pollutions of Sodom, is declared to be aninstitution of the Most High. With all due deference to the author, wetell him, and we tell the church, North and South, that this questionmust be met. Once more we repeat the solemn inquiry which has beenalready made in our columns, "Is the Bible to enslave the world?" Has itbeen but a vain dream of ours that the mission of the Author of thegospel was to undo the heavy burdens, to open the prison doors, and tobreak the yoke of the captive? Let Andover and Princeton answer. If thegospel does sanction the vilest wrong which man can inflict upon hisfellow-man, if it does rivet the chains which humanity, left to itself, would otherwise cast off, then, in humanity's name, let it perish foreverfrom the face of the earth. Let the Bible societies dissolve; let notanother sheet issue from their presses. Scatter not its leaves abroadover the dark places of the earth; they are not for the healing of thenations. Leave rather to the Persian his Zendavesta, to the Mussulmanhis Koran. We repeat it, this question must be met. Already we haveheard infidelity exulting over the astute discoveries of bespectacledtheological professors, that the great Head of the Christian Churchtolerated the horrible atrocities of Roman slavery, and that His mostfavored apostle combined slave-catching with his missionary labors. Andwhy should it not exult? Fouler blasphemy than this was never uttered. A more monstrous libel upon the Divine Author of Christianity was neverpropagated by Paine or Voltaire, Kneeland or Owen; and we are constrainedto regard the professor of theology or the doctor of divinity who taskshis sophistry and learning in an attempt to show that the Divine Mindlooks with complacency upon chattel slavery as the most dangerous enemywith which Christianity has to contend. The friends of pure andundefiled religion must awake to this danger. The Northern church mustshake itself clean from its present connection with blasphemers andslave-holders, or perish with them. 

WHAT IS SLAVERY

 Addressed to the Liberty Party Convention at New Bedford in September, 1843. 

I HAVE just received your kind invitation to attend the meeting of theLiberty Party in New Bedford on the 2d of next month. Believe me, it iswith no ordinary feelings of regret that I find myself under thenecessity of foregoing the pleasure of meeting with you on that occasion. But I need not say to you, and through you to the convention, that youhave my hearty sympathy. 

I am with the Liberty Party because it is the only party in the countrywhich is striving openly and honestly to reduce to practice the greattruths which lie at the foundation of our republic: all men createdequal, endowed with rights inalienable; the security of these rights theonly just object of government; the right of the people to alter ormodify government until this great object is attained. Precious andglorious truths! Sacred in the sight of their Divine Author, gratefuland beneficent to suffering humanity, essential elements of that ultimateand universal government of which God is laying the strong and widefoundations, turning and overturning, until He whose right it is shallrule. The voice which calls upon us to sustain them is the voice of God. In the eloquent language of the lamented Myron Holley, the man who firstlifted up the standard of the Liberty Party: "He calls upon us to sustainthese truths in the recorded voice of the holy of ancient times. Hecalls us to sustain them in the sound as of many waters and mightythunderings rising from the fields of Europe, converted into one vastAceldama by the exertions of despots to suppress them; in the persuasivehistory of the best thoughts and boldest deeds of all our brave, self-sacrificing ancestors; in the tender, heart-reaching whispers of ourchildren, preparing to suffer or enjoy the future, as we leave it forthem; in the broken and disordered but moving accents of half our raceyet groping in darkness and galled by the chains of bondage. He callsupon us to sustain them by the solemn and considerate use of all thepowers with which He has invested us. " In a time of almost universalpolitical scepticism, in the midst of a pervading and growing unbelief inthe great principles enunciated in the revolutionary declaration, theLiberty Party has dared to avow its belief in these truths, and to carrythem into action as far as it has the power. It is a protest against thepolitical infidelity of the day, a recurrence to first principles, asummons once more to that deserted altar upon which our fathers laidtheir offerings. 

It may be asked why it is that a party resting upon such broad principlesis directing its exclusive exertions against slavery. "Are there notother great interests?" ask all manner of Whig and Democrat editors andpoliticians. "Consider, for instance, " say the Democrats, "the mightyquestion which is agitating us, whether a 'Northern man with Southernprinciples' or a Southern man with the principles of a Nero or Caligulashall be President. " "Or look at us, " say the Whigs, "deprived of ourinalienable right to office by this Tyler-Calhoun administration. Andbethink you, gentlemen, how could your Liberty Party do better than tovote with us for a man who, if he does hold some threescore of slaves, and maintain that 'two hundred years of legislation has sanctioned andsanctified negro slavery, ' is, at the same time, the champion of Greekliberty, and Polish liberty, and South American liberty, and, in short, of all sorts of liberties, save liberty at home. "

Yes, friends, we have considered all this, and more, namely, that onesixth part of our entire population are slaves, and that you, with yoursubtreasuries and national banks, propose no relief for them. Nay, farther, it is because both of you, when in power, have used yourauthority to rivet closer the chains of unhappy millions, that we havebeen compelled to abandon you, and form a liberty party having for itsfirst object the breaking of these chains. 

What is slavery? For upon the answer to this question must the LibertyParty depend for its justification. 

The slave laws of the South tell us that it is the conversion of men intoarticles of property; the transformation of sentient immortal beings into"chattels personal. " The principle of a reciprocity of benefits, whichto some extent characterizes all other relations, does not exist in thatof master and slave. The master holds the plough which turns the soil ofhis plantation, the horse which draws it, and the slave who guides it byone and the same tenure. The profit of the master is the great end ofthe slave's existence. For this end he is fed, clothed, and prescribedfor in sickness. He learns nothing, acquires nothing, for himself. Hecannot use his own body for his own benefit. His very personality isdestroyed. He is a mere instrument, a means in the hands of another forthe accomplishment of an end in which his own interests are not regarded, a machine moved not by his own will, but by another's. In him the awfuldistinction between a person and a thing is annihilated: he is thrustdown from the place which God and Nature assigned him, from the equalcompanionship of rational intelligence's, --a man herded with beasts, animmortal nature classed with the wares of the merchant!

The relations of parent and child, master and apprentice, government andsubject, are based upon the principle of benevolence, reciprocalbenefits, and the wants of human society; relations which sacredlyrespect the rights and legacies which God has given to all His rationalcreatures. But slavery exists only by annihilating or monopolizing theserights and legacies. In every other modification of society, man'spersonal ownership remains secure. He may be oppressed, deprived ofprivileges, loaded with burdens, hemmed about with legal disabilities, his liberties restrained. But, through all, the right to his own bodyand soul remains inviolate. He retains his inherent, original possessionof himself. Even crime cannot forfeit it, for that law which destroyshis personality makes void its own claims upon him as a moral agent; andthe power to punish ceases with the accountability of the criminal. Hemay suffer and die under the penalties of the law, but he suffers as aman, he perishes as a man, and not as a thing. To the last moments ofhis existence the rights of a moral agent are his; they go with him tothe grave; they constitute the ground of his accountability at the bar ofinfinite justice, --rights fixed, eternal, inseparable; attributes of allrational intelligence in time and eternity; the same in essence, anddiffering in degree only, with those of the highest moral being, of Godhimself. 

Slavery alone lays its grasp upon the right of personal ownership, thatfoundation right, the removal of which uncreates the man; a right whichGod himself could not take away without absolving the being thus deprivedof all moral accountability; and so far as that being is concerned, making sin and holiness, crime and virtue, words without significance, and the promises and sanctions of revelation, dreams. Hence, thecrowning horror of slavery, that which lifts it above all otheriniquities, is not that it usurps the prerogatives of Deity, but that itattempts that which even He who has said, "All souls are mine, " cannotdo, without breaking up the foundations of His moral government. Slaveryis, in fact, a struggle with the Almighty for dominion over His rationalcreatures. It is leagued with the powers of darkness, in wresting manfrom his Maker. It is blasphemy lifting brazen brow and violent hand toheaven, attempting a reversal of God's laws. Man claiming the right touncreate his brother; to undo that last and most glorious work, which Godhimself pronounced good, amidst the rejoicing hosts of heaven! Manarrogating to himself the right to change, for his own selfish purposes, the beautiful order of created existences; to pluck the crown of animmortal nature, scarce lower than that of angels, from the brow of hisbrother; to erase the God-like image and superscription stamped upon himby the hand of his Creator, and to write on the despoiled and desecratedtablet, "A chattel personal!"

This, then, is slavery. Nature, with her thousand voices, cries outagainst it. Against it, divine revelation launches its thunders. Thevoice of God condemns it in the deep places of the human heart. The woesand wrongs unutterable which attend this dreadful violation of naturaljustice, the stripes, the tortures, the sunderings of kindred, thedesolation of human affections, the unchastity and lust, the toiluncompensated, the abrogated marriage, the legalized heathenism, theburial of the mind, are but the mere incidentals of the first grandoutrage, that seizure of the entire man, nerve, sinew, and spirit, whichrobs him of his body, and God of his soul. These are but the naturalresults and outward demonstrations of slavery, the crystallizations fromthe chattel principle. 

It is against this system, in its active operation upon three millions ofour countrymen, that the Liberty Party is, for the present, directing allits efforts. With such an object well may we be "men of one idea. " Nordo we neglect "other great interests, " for all are colored and controlledby slavery, and the removal of this disastrous influence would mosteffectually benefit them. 

Political action is the result and immediate object of moral suasion onthis subject. Action, action, is the spirit's means of progress, itssole test of rectitude, its only source of happiness. And should notdecided action follow our deep convictions of the wrong of slavery?Shall we denounce the slave-holders of the states, while we retain ourslavery in the District of Columbia? Shall we pray that the God of theoppressed will turn the hearts of "the rulers" in South Carolina, whilewe, the rulers of the District, refuse to open the prisons and break upthe slave-markets on its ten miles square? God keep us from suchhypocrisy! Everybody now professes to be opposed to slavery. Theleaders of the two great political parties are grievously concerned lestthe purity of the antislavery enterprise will suffer in its connectionwith politics. In the midst of grossest pro-slavery action, they arefull of anti-slavery sentiment. They love the cause, but, on the whole, think it too good for this world. They would keep it sublimated, aloft, out of vulgar reach or use altogether, intangible as Magellan's clouds. Everybody will join us in denouncing slavery, in the abstract; not afaithless priest nor politician will oppose us; abandon action, andforsooth we can have an abolition millennium; the wolf shall lie downwith the lamb, while slavery in practice clanks, in derision, its threemillions of unbroken chains. Our opponents have no fear of the harmlessspectre of an abstract idea. They dread it only when it puts on theflesh and sinews of a practical reality, and lifts its right arm in thestrength which God giveth to do as well as theorize. 

As honest men, then, we must needs act; let us do so as becomes menengaged in a great and solemn cause. Not by processions and idle paradesand spasmodic enthusiasms, by shallow tricks and shows and artifices, cana cause like ours be carried onward. Leave these to parties contendingfor office, as the "spoils of victory. " We need no disguises, nor falsepretences, nor subterfuges; enough for us to present before our fellow-countrymen the holy truths of freedom, in their unadorned and nativebeauty. Dark as the present may seem, let us remember with heartyconfidence that truth and right are destined to triumph. Let us blot outthe word "discouragement" from the anti-slavery vocabulary. Let theenemies of freedom be discouraged; let the advocates of oppressiondespair; but let those who grapple with wrong and falsehood, in the nameof God and in the power of His truth, take courage. Slavery must die. The Lord hath spoken it. The vials of His hot displeasure, like thosewhich chastised the nations in the Apocalyptic vision, are smoking evennow, above its "habitations of cruelty. " It can no longer be borne withby Heaven. Universal humanity cries out against it. Let us work, then, to hasten its downfall, doing whatsoever our hands find to do, "with allour might. "

October, 1843. 

 DEMOCRACY AND SLAVERY. 

 [1843. ]

THE great leader of American Democracy, Thomas Jefferson, was an ultra-abolitionist in theory, while from youth to age a slave-holder inpractice. With a zeal which never abated, with a warmth which the frostof years could not chill, he urged the great truths, that each man shouldbe the guardian of his own weal; that one man should never have absolutecontrol over another. He maintained the entire equality of the race, theinherent right of self-ownership, the equal claim of all to a fairparticipation in the enactment of the laws by which they are governed. 

He saw clearly that slavery, as it existed in the South and on his ownplantation, was inconsistent with this doctrine. His early efforts foremancipation in Virginia failed of success; but he next turned hisattention to the vast northwestern territory, and laid the foundation ofthat ordinance of 1787, which, like the flaming sword of the angel at thegates of Paradise, has effectually guarded that territory against theentrance of slavery. Nor did he stop here. He was the friend andadmirer of the ultra-abolitionists of revolutionary France; he warmlyurged his British friend, Dr. Price, to send his anti-slavery pamphletsinto Virginia; he omitted no opportunity to protest against slavery asanti-democratic, unjust, and dangerous to the common welfare; and in hisletter to the territorial governor of Illinois, written in old age, hebequeathed, in earnest and affecting language, the cause of negroemancipation to the rising generation. "This enterprise, " said he, "isfor the young, for those who can carry it forward to its consummation. It shall have all my prayers, and these are the only weapons of an oldman. "

Such was Thomas Jefferson, the great founder of American Democracy, theadvocate of the equality of human rights, irrespective of any conditionsof birth, or climate, or color. His political doctrines, it is strangeto say, found their earliest recipients and most zealous admirers in theslave states of the Union. The privileged class of slaveholders, whoserank and station "supersede the necessity of an order of nobility, "became earnest advocates of equality among themselves--the democracy ofaristocracy. With the misery and degradation of servitude always beforethem, in the condition of their own slaves, an intense love of personalindependence, and a haughty impatience of any control over their actions, prepared them to adopt the democratic idea, so far as it might be appliedto their own order. Of that enlarged and generous democracy, the love, not of individual freedom alone, but of the rights and liberties of allmen, the unselfish desire to give to others the privileges which all menvalue for themselves, we are constrained to believe the great body ofThomas Jefferson's slave-holding admirers had no adequate conception. They were just such democrats as the patricians of Rome and thearistocracy of Venice; lords over their own plantations, a sort of "holyalliance" of planters, admitting and defending each other's divine rightof mastership. 

Still, in Virginia, Maryland, and in other sections of the slave states, truer exponents and exemplifiers of the idea of democracy, as it existedin the mind of Jefferson, were not wanting. In the debate on thememorials presented to the first Congress of the United States, prayingfor the abolition of slavery, the voice of the Virginia delegation inthat body was unanimous in deprecation of slavery as an evil, social, moral, and political. In the Virginia constitutional convention--of 1829there were men who had the wisdom to perceive and the firmness to declarethat slavery was not only incompatible with the honor and prosperity ofthe state, but wholly indefensible on any grounds which could beconsistently taken by a republican people. In the debate on the samesubject in the legislature in 1832, universal and impartial democracyfound utterance from eloquent lips. We might say as much of Kentucky, the child of Virginia. But it remains true that these were exceptions tothe general rule. With the language of universal liberty on their lips, and moved by the most zealous spirit of democratic propagandism, thegreater number of the slave-holders of the Union seem never to haveunderstood the true meaning, or to have measured the length and breadthof that doctrine which they were the first to adopt, and of which theyhave claimed all along to be the peculiar and chosen advocates. 

The Northern States were slow to adopt the Democratic creed. Theoligarchy of New England, and the rich proprietors and landholders of theMiddle States, turned with alarm and horror from the levelling doctrinesurged upon them by the "liberty and equality" propagandists of the South. The doctrines of Virginia were quite as unpalatable to Massachusetts atthe beginning of the present century as those of Massachusetts now are tothe Old Dominion. Democracy interfered with old usages and time-honoredinstitutions, and threatened to plough up the very foundations of thesocial fabric. It was zealously opposed by the representatives of NewEngland in Congress and in the home legislatures; and in many pulpitshands were lifted to God in humble entreaty that the curse and bane ofdemocracy, an offshoot of the rabid Jacobinism of revolutionary France, might not be permitted to take root and overshadow the goodly heritage ofPuritanism. The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures ofthe evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrinesin their midst, have drawn nothing more fearful than the visions of such

 "Prophets of war and harbingers of ill"

as Fisher Ames in the forum and Parish in the desk, when contemplatingthe inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, andproperty of the North. 

But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, themechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter. The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel. Itwas in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinentinconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in thefree states. Come the doctrine from whom it might, the people felt it tobe true. State after state revolted from the ranks of federalism, andenrolled itself on the side of democracy. The old order of things wasbroken up; equality before the law was established, religious tests andrestrictions of the right of suffrage were abrogated. TakeMassachusetts, for example. There the resistance to democraticprinciples was the most strenuous and longest continued. Yet, at thistime, there is no state in the Union more thorough in its practicaladoption of them. No property qualifications or religious tests prevail;all distinctions of sect, birth, or color, are repudiated, and suffrageis universal. The democracy, which in the South has only been held in astate of gaseous abstraction, hardened into concrete reality in the coldair of the North. The ideal became practical, for it had found lodgmentamong men who were accustomed to act out their convictions and test alltheir theories by actual experience. 

While thus making a practical application of the new doctrine, the peopleof the free states could not but perceive the incongruity of democracyand slavery. 

Selleck Osborn, who narrowly escaped the honor of a Democratic martyr inConnecticut, denounced slave-holding, in common with other forms ofoppression. Barlow, fresh from communion with Gregoire, Brissot, andRobespierre, devoted to negro slavery some of the most vigorous andtruthful lines of his great poem. Eaton, returning from his romanticachievements in Tunis for the deliverance of white slaves, improved theoccasion to read a lecture to his countrymen on the inconsistency andguilt of holding blacks in servitude. In the Missouri struggle of 1819-20, the people of the free states, with a few ignoble exceptions, tookissue with the South against the extension of slavery. Some ten yearslater, the present antislavery agitation commenced. It originated, beyond a question, in the democratic element. With the words ofJefferson on their lips, young, earnest, and enthusiastic men called theattention of the community to the moral wrong and political reproach ofslavery. In the name and spirit of democracy, the moral and politicalpowers of the people were invoked to limit, discountenance, and put anend to a system so manifestly subversive of its foundation principles. It was a revival of the language of Jefferson and Page and Randolph, anecho of the voice of him who penned the Declaration of Independence andoriginated the ordinance of 1787. 

Meanwhile the South had wellnigh forgotten the actual significance of theteachings of its early political prophets, and their renewal in the shapeof abolitionism was, as might have been expected, strange and unwelcome. Pleasant enough it had been to hold up occasionally these democraticabstractions for the purpose of challenging the world's admiration andcheaply acquiring the character of lovers of liberty and equality. Frederick of Prussia, apostrophizing the shades of Cato and Brutus, "Vous de la liberte heros que je revere, "

while in the full exercise of his despotic power, was quite as consistentas these democratic slaveowners, whose admiration of liberty increased inexact ratio with its distance from their own plantations. They had notcalculated upon seeing their doctrine clothed with life and power, apractical reality, pressing for application to their slaves as well as tothemselves. They had not taken into account the beautiful ordination ofProvidence, that no man can vindicate his own rights, without directly orimpliedly including in that vindication the rights of all other men. Thehaughty and oppressive barons who wrung from their reluctant monarch theGreat Charter at Runnymede, acting only for themselves and their class, little dreamed of the universal application which has since been made oftheir guaranty of rights and liberties. As little did the nobles of theparliament of Paris, when strengthening themselves by limiting the kinglyprerogative, dream of the emancipation of their own serfs, by arevolution to which they were blindly giving the first impulse. God'struth is universal; it cannot be monopolized by selfishness. 

 THE TWO PROCESSIONS. 

 [1844. ]

 "Look upon this picture, and on this. " HAMLET. 

CONSIDERING that we have a slave population of nearly three millions, andthat in one half of the states of the Republic it is more hazardous toact upon the presumption that "all men are created free and equal" thanit would be in Austria or Russia, the lavish expression of sympathy andextravagant jubilation with which, as a people, we are accustomed togreet movements in favor of freedom abroad are not a little remarkable. We almost went into ecstasies over the first French revolution; we filledour papers with the speeches of orator Hunt and the English radicals; wefraternized with the United Irishmen; we hailed as brothers in the causeof freedom the very Mexicans whom we have since wasted with fire andsword; our orators, North and South, grew eloquent and classic over theGreek and Polish revolutions. In short, long ere this, if the walls ofkingcraft and despotism had been, like those of Jericho, destined to beoverthrown by sound, our Fourth of July cannon-shootings and bell-ringings, together with our fierce, grandiloquent speech-makings in andout of Congress, on the occasions referred to, would have left no stoneupon another. 

It is true that an exception must be made in the case of Hayti. We firedno guns, drank no toasts, made no speeches in favor of the establishmentof that new republic in our neighborhood. The very mention of thepossibility that Haytien delegates might ask admittance to the congressof the free republics of the New World at Panama "frightened from theirpropriety" the eager propagandists of republicanism in the Senate, andgave a death-blow to their philanthropic projects. But as Hayti is arepublic of blacks who, having revolted from their masters as well asfrom the mother country, have placed themselves entirely without the paleof Anglo-Saxon sympathy by their impertinent interference with themonopoly of white liberty, this exception by no means disproves thegeneral fact, that in the matter of powder-burning, bell-jangling, speech-making, toast-drinking admiration of freedom afar off and in theabstract we have no rivals. The caricature of our "general sympathizers"in Martin Chuzzlewit is by no means a fancy sketch. 

The news of the revolution of the three days in Paris, and the triumph ofthe French people over Charles X. And his ministers, as a matter ofcourse acted with great effect upon our national susceptibility. We allthrew up our hats in excessive joy at the spectacle of a king dashed downheadlong from his throne and chased out of his kingdom by his long-suffering and oppressed subjects. We took half the credit of theperformance to ourselves, inasmuch as Lafayette was a principal actor init. Our editors, from Passamaquoddy to the Sabine, indited paragraphsfor a thousand and one newspapers, congratulating the Parisian patriots, and prophesying all manner of evil to holy alliances, kings, andaristocracies. The National Intelligencer for September 27, 1830, contains a full account of the public rejoicings of the good people ofWashington on the occasion. Bells were rung in all the steeples, gunswere fired, and a grand procession was formed, including the President ofthe United States, the heads of departments, and other publicfunctionaries. Decorated with tricolored ribbons, and with tricoloredflags mingling with the stripes and stars over their heads, and gazeddown upon by bright eyes from window and balcony, the "generalsympathizers" moved slowly and majestically through the broad avenuetowards the Capitol to celebrate the revival of French liberty in amanner becoming the chosen rulers of a free people. 

What a spectacle was this for the representatives of European kingcraftat our seat of government! How the titled agents of Metternich andNicholas must have trembled, in view of this imposing demonstration, forthe safety of their "peculiar institutions!"

Unluckily, however, the moral effect of this grand spectacle was marredsomewhat by the appearance of another procession, moving in a contrarydirection. It was a gang of slaves! Handcuffed in pairs, with thesullen sadness of despair in their faces, they marched wearily onward tothe music of the driver's whip and the clanking iron on their limbs. Think of it! Shouts of triumph, rejoicing bells, gay banners, andglittering cavalcades, in honor of Liberty, in immediate contrast withmen and women chained and driven like cattle to market! The editor ofthe American Spectator, a paper published at Washington at that time, speaking of this black procession of slavery, describes it as "drivenalong by what had the appearance of a man on horseback. " The miserablewretches who composed it were doubtless consigned to a slave-jail toawait their purchase and transportation to the South or Southwest; andperhaps formed a part of that drove of human beings which the same editorstates that he saw on the Saturday following, "males and females chainedin couples, starting from Robey's tavern, on foot, for Alexandria, toembark on board a slave-ship. "

At a Virginia camp-meeting, many years ago, one of the brethren, attempting an exhortation, stammered, faltered, and finally came to adead stand. "Sit down, brother, " said old Father Kyle, the one-eyedabolition preacher; "it's no use to try; you can't preach with twentynegroes sticking in your throat!" It strikes us that our country is verymuch in the condition of the poor confused preacher at the camp-meeting. Slavery sticks in its throat, and spoils its finest performances, political and ecclesiastical; confuses the tongues of its evangelicalalliances; makes a farce of its Fourth of July celebrations; and, as inthe case of the grand Washington procession of 1830, sadly mars theeffect of its rejoicings in view of the progress of liberty abroad. There is a stammer in all our exhortations; our moral and politicalhomilies are sure to run into confusions and contradictions; and theresponse which comes to us from the nations is not unlike that of FatherKyle to the planter's attempt at sermonizing: "It's no use, brotherJonathan; you can't preach liberty with three millions of slaves in yourthroat!"

 A CHAPTER OF HISTORY. 

 [1844. ]

THE theory which a grave and learned Northern senator has recentlyannounced in Congress, that slavery, like the cotton-plant, is confinedby natural laws to certain parallels of latitude, beyond which it can byno possibility exist, however it may have satisfied its author and itsauditors, has unfortunately no verification in the facts of the case. Slavery is singularly cosmopolitan in its habits. The offspring ofpride, and lust, and avarice, it is indigenous to the world. Rooted inthe human heart, it defies the rigors of winter in the steppes of Tartaryand the fierce sun of the tropics. It has the universal acclimation ofsin. 

The first account we have of negro slaves in New England is from the penof John Josselyn. Nineteen years after the landing at Plymouth, thisinteresting traveller was for some time the guest of Samuel Maverick, whothen dwelt, like a feudal baron, in his fortalice on Noddle's Island, surrounded by retainers and servants, bidding defiance to his Indianneighbors behind his strong walls, with "four great guns" mountedthereon, and "giving entertainment to all new-comers gratis. "

"On the 2d of October, 1639, about nine o'clock in the morning, Mr. Maverick's negro woman, " says Josselyn, "came to my chamber, and in herown country language and tune sang very loud and shrill. Going out toher, she used a great deal of respect towards me, and would willinglyhave expressed her grief in English had she been able to speak thelanguage; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment. Whereupon I repaired to my host to learn of him the cause, and resolvedto entreat him in her behalf; for I had understood that she was a queenin her own country, and observed a very dutiful and humble garb usedtowards her by another negro, who was her maid. Mr. Maverick wasdesirous to have a breed of negroes; and therefore, seeing she would notyield by persuasions to company with a negro young man he had in hishouse, he commanded him, willed she, nilled she, to go to her bed, whichwas no sooner done than she thrust him out again. This she took in highdisdain beyond her slavery; and this was the cause of her grief. "

That the peculiar domestic arrangements and unfastidious economy of thisslave-breeding settler were not countenanced by the Puritans of thatearly time we have sufficient evidence. It is but fair to suppose, fromthe silence of all other writers of the time with respect to negroes andslaves, that this case was a marked exception to the general habits andusage of the Colonists. At an early period a traffic was commencedbetween the New England Colonies and that of Barbadoes; and it is notimprobable that slaves were brought to Boston from that island. Thelaws, however, discouraged their introduction and purchase, givingfreedom to all held to service at the close of seven years. 

In 1641, two years after Josselyn's adventure on Noddle's Island, thecode of laws known by the name of the Body of Liberties was adopted bythe Colony. It was drawn up by Nathaniel Ward, the learned and ingeniousauthor of the 'Simple Cobbler of Agawarn', the earliest poetical satireof New England. One of its provisions was as follows:--

"There shall be never any bond slaverie, villainage, or captivitieamongst us, unless it be lawfull captives taken in just warres and suchstrangers as willingly sell themselves or are sold to us. And theseshall have all the liberties and Christian usages which the law of Godestablished in Israel doth morally require. "

In 1646, Captain Smith, a Boston church-member, in connection with oneKeeser, brought home two negroes whom he obtained by the surprise andburning of a negro village in Africa and the massacre of many of itsinhabitants. Sir Richard Saltonstall, one of the assistants, presented apetition to the General Court, stating the outrage thereby committed asthreefold in its nature, namely murder, man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking; inasmuch as the offence of "chasing the negers, as aforesayde, upon the Sabbath day (being a servile work, and such as cannot beconsidered under any other head) is expressly capital by the law of God;"for which reason he prays that the offenders may be brought to justice, "soe that the sin they have committed may be upon their own heads and notupon ourselves. "

Upon this petition the General Court passed the following order, eminently worthy of men professing to rule in the fear and according tothe law of God, --a terror to evil-doers, and a praise to them that dowell:--

"The General Court, conceiving themselves bound by the first opportunityto bear witness against the heinous and crying sin of man-stealing, asalso to prescribe such timely redress for what has passed, and such a lawfor the future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us tohave to do in such vile and odious courses, justly abhorred of all goodand just men, do order that the negro interpreter, and others unlawfullytaken, be by the first opportunity, at the charge of the country for thepresent, sent to his native country, Guinea, and a letter with him of theindignation of the Court thereabout, and justice thereof, desiring ourhonored Governor would please put this order in execution. "

There is, so far as we know, no historical record of the actual return ofthese stolen men to their home. A letter is extant, however, addressedin behalf of the General Court to a Mr. Williams on the Piscataqua, bywhom one of the negroes had been purchased, requesting him to send theman forthwith to Boston, that he may be sent home, "which this Court doresolve to send back without delay. "

Three years after, in 1649, the following law was placed upon thestatute-book of the Massachusetts Colony:--

"If any man stealeth a man, or mankind, he shall surely be put to death. "

It will thus be seen that these early attempts to introduce slavery intoNew England were opposed by severe laws and by that strong popularsentiment in favor of human liberty which characterized the Christianradicals who laid the foundations of the Colonies. It was not the rigorof her Northern winter, nor the unkindly soil of Massachusetts, whichdiscouraged the introduction of slavery in the first half-century of herexistence as a colony. It was the Puritan's recognition of thebrotherhood of man in sin, suffering, and redemption, his estimate of theawful responsibilities and eternal destinies of humanity, his hatred ofwrong and tyranny, and his stern sense of justice, which led him toimpose upon the African slave-trader the terrible penalty of the Mosaiccode. 

But that brave old generation passed away. The civil contentions in themother country drove across the seas multitudes of restless adventurersand speculators. The Indian wars unsettled and demoralized the people. Habits of luxury and the greed of gain took the place of the severe self-denial and rigid virtues of the fathers. Hence we are not surprised tofind that Josselyn, in his second visit to New England, some twenty-fiveyears after his first, speaks of the great increase of servants andnegroes. In 1680 Governor Bradstreet, in answer to the inquiries of hisMajesty's Privy Council, states that two years before a vessel fromMadagasca "brought into the Colony betwixt forty and fifty negroes, mostly women and children, who were sold at a loss to the owner of thevessel. " "Now and then, " he continues, "two or three negroes are broughtfrom Barbadoes and other of his Majesty's plantations and sold for twentypounds apiece; so that there may be within the government about onehundred or one hundred and twenty, and it may be as many Scots, broughthither and sold for servants in the time of the war with Scotland, andabout half as many Irish. "

The owning of a black or white slave, or servant, at this period wasregarded as an evidence of dignity and respectability; and hencemagistrates and clergymen winked at the violation of the law by themercenary traders, and supplied themselves without scruple. Indianslaves were common, and are named in old wills, deeds, and inventories, with horses, cows, and household furniture. As early as the year 1649 wefind William Hilton, of Newbury, sells to George Carr, "for one quarterpart of a vessel, James, my Indian, with all the interest I have in him, to be his servant forever. " Some were taken in the Narragansett war andother Indian wars; others were brought from South Carolina and theSpanish Main. It is an instructive fact, as illustrating the retributivedealings of Providence, that the direst affliction of the MassachusettsColony--the witchcraft terror of 1692--originated with the Indian Tituba, a slave in the family of the minister of Danvers. 

In the year 1690 the inhabitants of Newbury were greatly excited by thearrest of a Jerseyman who had been engaged in enticing Indians andnegroes to leave their masters. He was charged before the court withsaying that "the English should be cut off and the negroes set free. "James, a negro slave, and Joseph, an Indian, were arrested with him. Their design was reported to be, to seize a vessel in the port and escapeto Canada and join the French, and return and lay waste and plunder theirmasters. They were to come back with five hundred Indians and threehundred Canadians; and the place of crossing the Merrimac River, and ofthe first encampment on the other side, were even said to be fixed upon. When we consider that there could not have been more than a score ofslaves in the settlement, the excitement into which the inhabitants werethrown by this absurd rumor of conspiracy seems not very unlike that of aconvocation of small planters in a backwoods settlement in South Carolinaon finding an anti-slavery newspaper in their weekly mail bag. 

In 1709 Colonel Saltonstall, of Haverhill, had several negroes, and amongthem a high-spirited girl, who, for some alleged misdemeanor, wasseverely chastised. The slave resolved upon revenge for her injury, andsoon found the means of obtaining it. The Colonel had on hand, forservice in the Indian war then raging, a considerable store of gunpowder. This she placed under the room in which her master and mistress slept, laid a long train, and dropped a coal on it. She had barely time toescape to the farm-house before the explosion took place, shattering thestately mansion into fragments. Saltonstall and his wife were carried ontheir bed a considerable distance, happily escaping serious injury. Somesoldiers stationed in the house were scattered in all directions; but nolives were lost. The Colonel, on recovering from the effects of hissudden overturn, hastened to the farm-house and found his servants all upsave the author of the mischief, who was snug in bed and apparently in aquiet sleep. 

In 1701 an attempt was made in the General Court of Massachusetts toprevent the increase of slaves. Judge Sewall soon after published apamphlet against slavery, but it seems with little effect. Bostonmerchants and ship-owners became, to a considerable extent, involved inthe slave-trade. Distilleries, established in that place and in RhodeIsland, furnished rum for the African market. The slaves were usuallytaken to the West Indies, although occasionally part of a cargo found itsway to New England, where the wholesome old laws against man-stealing hadbecome a dead letter on the statute-book. 

In 1767 a bill was brought before the Legislature of Massachusetts toprevent "the unwarrantable and unnatural custom of enslaving mankind. "The Council of Governor Bernard sent it back to the House greatly changedand curtailed, and it was lost by the disagreement of the two branches. Governor Bernard threw his influence on the side of slavery. In 1774 abill prohibiting the traffic in slaves passed both Houses; but GovernorHutchinson withheld his assent and dismissed the Legislature. Thecolored men sent a deputation of their own to the Governor to solicit hisconsent to the bill; but he told them his instructions forbade him. Asimilar committee waiting upon General Gage received the same answer. 

In the year 1770 a servant of Richard Lechmere, of Cambridge, stimulatedby the general discussion of the slavery question and by the advice ofsome of the zealous advocates of emancipation, brought an action againsthis master for detaining him in bondage. The suit was decided in hisfavor two years before the similar decision in the case of Somerset inEngland. The funds necessary for carrying on this suit were raised amongthe blacks themselves. Other suits followed in various parts of theProvince; and the result was, in every instance, the freedom of theplaintiff. In 1773 Caesar Hendrick sued his master, one Greenleaf, ofNewburyport, for damages, laid at fifty pounds, for holding him as aslave. The jury awarded him his freedom and eighteen pounds. 

According to Dr. Belknap, whose answers to the queries on the subject, propounded by Judge Tucker, of Virginia, have furnished us with many ofthe facts above stated, the principal grounds upon which the counsel ofthe masters depended were, that the negroes were purchased in openmarket, and included in the bills of sale like other property; thatslavery was sanctioned by usage; and, finally, that the laws of theProvince recognized its existence by making masters liable for themaintenance of their slaves, or servants. 

On the part of the blacks, the law and usage of the mother country, confirmed by the Great Charter, that no man can be deprived of hisliberty but by the judgment of his peers, were effectually pleaded. Theearly laws of the Province prohibited slavery, and no subsequentlegislation had sanctioned it; for, although the laws did recognize itsexistence, they did so only to mitigate and modify an admitted evil. 

The present state constitution was established in 1780. The firstarticle of the Bill of Rights prohibited slavery by affirming thefoundation truth of our republic, that "all men are born free and equal. "The Supreme Court decided in 1783 that no man could hold another asproperty without a direct violation of that article. 

In 1788 three free black citizens of Boston were kidnapped and sold intoslavery in one of the French islands. An intense excitement followed. Governor Hancock took efficient measures for reclaiming the unfortunatemen. The clergy of Boston petitioned the Legislature for a totalprohibition of the foreign slave-trade. The Society of Friends, and theblacks generally, presented similar petitions; and the same year an actwas passed prohibiting the slave-trade and granting relief to personskidnapped or decoyed out of the Commonwealth. The fear of a burden tothe state from the influx of negroes from abroad led the Legislature, inconnection with this law, to prevent those who were not citizens of thestate or of other states from gaining a residence. 

The first case of the arrest of a fugitive slave in Massachusetts underthe law of 1793 took place in Boston soon after the passage of the law. It is the case to which President Quincy alludes in his late letteragainst the fugitive slave law. The populace at the trial aided theslave to escape, and nothing further was done about it. 

The arrest of George Latimer as a slave, in Boston, and his illegalconfinement in jail, in 1842, led to the passage of the law of 1843 forthe "protection of personal liberty, " prohibiting state officers fromarresting or detaining persons claimed as slaves, and the use of thejails of the Commonwealth for their confinement. This law was strictlyin accordance with the decision of the supreme judiciary, in the case ofPrigg vs. The State of Pennsylvania, that the reclaiming of fugitives wasa matter exclusively belonging to the general government; yet that thestate officials might, if they saw fit, carry into effect the law ofCongress on the subject, "unless prohibited by state legislation. "

It will be seen by the facts we have adduced that slavery inMassachusetts never had a legal existence. The ermine of the judiciaryof the Puritan state has never been sullied by the admission of itsdetestable claims. It crept into the Commonwealth like other evils andvices, but never succeeded in clothing itself with the sanction andauthority of law. It stood only upon its own execrable foundation ofrobbery and wrong. 

With a history like this to look back upon, is it strange that the peopleof Massachusetts at the present day are unwilling to see their time-honored defences of personal freedom, the good old safeguards of Saxonliberty, overridden and swept away after the summary fashion of "theFugitive Slave Bill;" that they should loathe and scorn the task whichthat bill imposes upon them of aiding professional slave-hunters inseizing, fettering, and consigning to bondage men and women accused onlyof that which commends them to esteem and sympathy, love of liberty andhatred of slavery; that they cannot at once adjust themselves to"constitutional duties" which in South Carolina and Georgia are reservedfor trained bloodhounds? Surely, in view of what Massachusetts has been, and her strong bias in favor of human freedom, derived from her great-hearted founders, it is to be hoped that the Executive and Cabinet atWashington will grant her some little respite, some space for turning, some opportunity for conquering her prejudices, before letting loose thedogs of war upon her. Let them give her time, and treat with forbearanceher hesitation, qualms of conscience, and wounded pride. Her people, indeed, are awkward in the work of slave-catching, and, it would seem, rendered but indifferent service in a late hunt in Boston. Whether theywould do better under the surveillance of the army and navy of the UnitedStates is a question which we leave with the President and his Secretaryof State. General Putnam once undertook to drill a company of Quakers, and instruct them, by force of arms, in the art and mystery of fighting;but not a single pair of drab-colored breeches moved at his "forwardmarch;" not a broad beaver wheeled at his word of command; no handunclosed to receive a proffered musket. Patriotic appeal, hard swearing, and prick of bayonet had no effect upon these impracticable raw recruits;and the stout general gave them up in despair. We are inclined tobelieve that any attempt on the part of the Commander-in-chief of ourarmy and navy to convert the good people of Massachusetts into expertslave-catchers, under the discipline of West Point and Norfolk, wouldprove as idle an experiment as that of General Putnam upon the Quakers. 

 THOMAS CARLYLE ON THE SLAVE-QUESTION. 

 [1846. ]

A LATE number of Fraser's Magazine contains an article bearing theunmistakable impress of the Anglo-German peculiarities of Thomas Carlyle, entitled, 'An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question', which would beinteresting as a literary curiosity were it not in spirit and tendency sounspeakably wicked as to excite in every rightminded reader a feeling ofamazement and disgust. With a hard, brutal audacity, a blasphemousirreverence, and a sneering mockery which would do honor to the devil ofFaust, it takes issue with the moral sense of mankind and the precepts ofChristianity. Having ascertained that the exports of sugar and spicesfrom the West Indies have diminished since emancipation, --and that thenegroes, having worked, as they believed, quite long enough withoutwages, now refuse to work for the planters without higher pay than thelatter, with the thriftless and evil habits of slavery still clinging tothem, can afford to give, --the author considers himself justified indenouncing negro emancipation as one of the "shams" which he wasspecially sent into this world to belabor. Had he confned himself tosimple abuse and caricature of the self-denying and Christianabolitionists of England--"the broad-brimmed philanthropists of ExeterHall"--there would have been small occasion for noticing his spleneticand discreditable production. Doubtless there is a cant of philanthropy--the alloy of human frailty and folly--in the most righteous reforms, which is a fair subject for the indignant sarcasm of a professed hater ofshows and falsities. Whatever is hollow and hypocritical in politics, morals, or religion, comes very properly within the scope of his mockery, and we bid him Godspeed in plying his satirical lash upon it. Imposturesand frauds of all kinds deserve nothing better than detection andexposure. Let him blow them up to his heart's content, as Daniel did theimage of Bell and the Dragon. 

But our author, in this matter of negro slavery, has undertaken to applyhis explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but tohumanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen theamount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacredrights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of hisHeavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates thepoor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to aMississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle onthe banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen andauction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon goodtaste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insultshis readers. 

He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject theBaconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourseto facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West IndiaIslands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; thatGod created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords, " thewhite men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for theirmasters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that, if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employedto compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowestslang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee, " sneers the gentlemanlyphilosopher, --"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out thespices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a littleless ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since othermethods avail not, will be compelled to work. "

It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in suchoffensive language with anything like respect. Common sense andunperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrinethey inculcate is that which underlies all tyranny and wrong of mantowards man. It is that under which "the creation groaneth andtravaileth unto this day. " It is as old as sin; the perpetual argumentof strength against weakness, of power against right; that of the Greekphilosopher, that the barbarians, being of an inferior race, were born tobe slaves to the Greeks; and of the infidel Hobbes, that every man, beingby nature at war with every other man, has a perpetual right to reducehim to servitude if he has the power. It is the cardinal doctrine ofwhat John Quincy Adams has very properly styled the Satanic school ofphilosophy, --the ethics of an old Norse sea robber or an Arab plundererof caravans. It is as widely removed from the sweet humanities andunselfish benevolence of Christianity as the faith and practice of theEast India Thug or the New Zealand cannibal. 

Our author does not, however, take us altogether by surprise. He hasbefore given no uncertain intimations of the point towards which hisphilosophy was tending. In his brilliant essay upon 'Francia ofParaguay', for instance, we find him entering with manifest satisfactionand admiration into the details of his hero's tyranny. In his 'Lettersand Speeches of Oliver Cromwell'--in half a dozen pages of savage andalmost diabolical sarcasm directed against the growing humanity of theage, the "rose-pink sentimentalisms, " and squeamishness which shudders atthe sight of blood and infliction of pain--he prepares the way for ajustification of the massacre of Drogheda. More recently he hasintimated that the extermination of the Celtic race is the best way ofsettling the Irish question; and that the enslavement and forcibletransportation of her poor, to labor under armed taskmasters in thecolonies, is the only rightful and proper remedy for the political andsocial evils of England. In the 'Discourse on Negro Slavery' we see thisdevilish philosophy in full bloom. The gods, he tells us, are with thestrong. Might has a divine right to rule, --blessed are the crafty ofbrain and strong of hand! Weakness is crime. "Vae victis!" as Brennussaid when he threw his sword into the scale, --Woe to the conquered! Thenegro is weaker in intellect than his "born lord, " the white man, and hasno right to choose his own vocation. Let the latter do it for him, and, if need be, return to the "beneficent whip. " "On the side of theoppressor there is power;" let him use it without mercy, and hold fleshand blood to the grindstone with unrelenting rigor. Humanity issqueamishness; pity for the suffering mere "rose-pink sentimentalism, "maudlin and unmanly. The gods (the old Norse gods doubtless) laugh toscorn alike the complaints of the miserable and the weak compassions and"philanthropisms" of those who would relieve them. This is the substanceof Thomas Carlyle's advice; this is the matured fruit of his philosophichusbandry, --the grand result for which he has been all his life soundingunfathomable abysses or beating about in the thin air ofTranscendentalism. Such is the substitute which he offers us for theSermon on the Mount. 

He tells us that the blacks have no right to use the islands of the WestIndies for growing pumpkins and garden stuffs for their own use andbehoof, because, but for the wisdom and skill of the whites, theseislands would have been productive only of "jungle, savagery, and swampmalaria. " The negro alone could never have improved the islands orcivilized himself; and therefore their and his "born lord, " the whiteman, has a right to the benefits of his own betterments of land and "two-legged cattle!" "Black Quashee" has no right to dispose of himself andhis labor because he owes his partial civilization to others! And prayhow has it been with the white race, for whom our philosopher claims thedivine prerogative of enslaving? Some twenty and odd centuries ago, apair of half-naked savages, daubed with paint, might have been seenroaming among the hills and woods of the northern part of the Britishisland, subsisting on acorns and the flesh of wild animals, with anoccasional relish of the smoked hams and pickled fingers of someunfortunate stranger caught on the wrong side of the Tweed. Thisinteresting couple reared, as they best could, a family of children, who, in turn, became the heads of families; and some time about the beginningof the present century one of their descendants in the borough ofEcclefechan rejoiced over the birth of a man child now somewhat famous as"Thomas Carlyle, a maker of books. " Does it become such a one to raveagainst the West India negro's incapacity for self-civilization? Unaidedby the arts, sciences, and refinements of the Romans, he might have been, at this very day, squatted on his naked haunches in the woods ofEcclefechan, painting his weather-hardened epidermis in the sun like hisPiet ancestors. Where, in fact, can we look for unaided self-improvementand spontaneous internal development, to any considerable extent, on thepart of any nation or people? From people to people the original God-given impulse towards civilization and perfection has been transmitted, as from Egypt to Greece, and thence to the Roman world. 

But the blacks, we are told, are indolent and insensible to the duty ofraising sugar and coffee and spice for the whites, being mainly carefulto provide for their own household and till their own gardens fordomestic comforts and necessaries. The exports have fallen off somewhat. And what does this prove? Only that the negro is now a consumer ofproducts, of which, under the rule of the whip, he was a producer merely. As to indolence, under the proper stimulus of fair wages we have reasonto believe that the charge is not sustained. If unthrifty habits andlack of prudence on the part of the owners of estates, combined with therepeal of duties on foreign sugars by the British government, have placedit out of their power to pay just and reasonable wages for labor, who canblame the blacks if they prefer to cultivate their own garden plotsrather than raise sugar and spice for their late masters upon termslittle better than those of their old condition, the "beneficent whip"always excepted? The despatches of the colonial governors agree inadmitting that the blacks have had great cause for complaint anddissatisfaction, owing to the delay or non-payment of their wages. SirC. E. Gray, writing from Jamaica, says, that "in a good many instancesthe payment of the wages they have earned has been either veryirregularly made, or not at all, probably on account of the inability ofthe employers. " He says, moreover:--

"The negroes appear to me to be generally as free from rebellioustendencies or turbulent feelings and malicious thoughts as any race oflaborers I ever saw or heard of. My impression is, indeed, that under asystem of perfectly fair dealing and of real justice they will come to bean admirable peasantry and yeomanry; able-bodied, industrious, and hard-working, frank, and well-disposed. "

It must, indeed, be admitted that, judging by their diminished exportsand the growing complaints of the owners of estates, the condition of theislands, in a financial point of view, is by no means favorable. Animmediate cause of this, however, must be found in the unfortunate SugarAct of 1846. The more remote, but for the most part powerful, cause ofthe present depression is to be traced to the vicious and unnaturalsystem of slavery, which has been gradually but surely preparing the wayfor ruin, bankruptcy, and demoralization. Never yet, by a community oran individual, have the righteous laws of God been violated withimpunity. Sooner or later comes the penalty which the infinite justicehas affixed to sin. Partial and temporary evils and inconveniences haveundoubtedly resulted from the emancipation of the laborers; and manyyears must elapse before the relations of the two heretofore antagonisticclasses can be perfectly adjusted and their interests brought into entireharmony. But that freedom is not to be held mainly accountable for thedepression of the British colonies is obvious from the fact that DutchSurinam, where the old system of slavery remains in its original rigor, is in an equally depressed condition. The 'Paramaribo Neuws enAdvertentie Blad', quoted in the Jamaica Gazette, says, under date ofJanuary 2, 1850: "Around us we hear nothing but complaints. People seekand find matter in everything to picture to themselves the lot of theplace in which they live as bitterer than that of any other country. Ofa large number of flourishing plantations, few remain that can now becalled such. So deteriorated has property become within the last fewyears, that many of these estates have not been able to defray theirweekly expenses. The colony stands on the brink of a yawning abyss, intowhich it must inevitably plunge unless some new and better system isspeedily adopted. It is impossible that our agriculture can any longerproceed on its old footing; our laboring force is dying away, and thesocial position they held must undergo a revolution. "

The paper from which we have quoted, the official journal of the colony, thinks the condition of the emancipated British colonies decidedlypreferable to that of Surinam, where the old slave system has continuedin force, and insists that the Dutch government must follow the exampleof Great Britain. The actual condition of the British colonies sinceemancipation is perfectly well known in Surinam: three of them, Essequibo, Demerara, and Berbice, being its immediate neighbors, whateverevils and inconveniences have resuited from emancipation must be wellunderstood by the Dutch slave-holders; yet we find them looking towardsemancipation as the only prospect of remedy for the greater evils oftheir own system. 

This fact is of itself a sufficient answer to the assumption of Carlyleand others, that what they call "the ruin of the colonies" has beenproduced by the emancipation acts of 1833 and 1838. 

We have no fears whatever of the efect of this literary monstrosity, which we have been considering upon the British colonies. Quashee, blackand ignorant as he may be, will not "get himself made a slave again. "The mission of the "beneficent whip" is there pretty well over; and itmay now find its place in museums and cabinets of ghastly curiosities, with the racks, pillories, thumbscrews, and branding-irons of old days. What we have feared, however, is, that the advocates and defenders ofslave-holding in this country might find in this discourse matter ofencouragement, and that our anti-christian prejudices against the coloredman might be strengthened and confirmed by its malignant vituperation andsarcasm. On this point we have sympathized with the forebodings of aneloquent writer in the London Enquirer:--

"We cannot imagine a more deadly moral poison for the American peoplethan his [Carlyle's] last composition. Every cruel practice of socialexclusion will derive from it new sharpness and venom. The slave-holder, of course, will exult to find himself, not apologized for, butenthusiastically cheered, upheld, and glorified, by a writer of Europeancelebrity. But it is not merely the slave who will feel Mr. Carlyle'shand in the torture of his flesh, the riveting of his fetters, and thedenial of light to his mind. The free black will feel him, too, in themore contemptuous and abhorrent scowl of his brother man, who will easilyderive from this unfortunate essay the belief that his inhuman feelingsare of divine ordination. It is a true work of the Devil, the fosteringof a tyrannical prejudice. Far and wide over space, and long into thefuture, the winged words of evil counsel will go. In the market-place, in the house, in the theatre, and in the church, --by land and by sea, inall the haunts of men, --their influence will be felt in a perennialgrowth of hate and scorn, and suffering and resentment. Amongst thesufferers will be many to whom education has given every refinedsusceptibility that makes contempt and exclusion bitter. Men and women, faithful and diligent, loving and worthy to be loved, and bearing, it maybe, no more than an almost imperceptible trace of African descent, willcontinue yet longer to be banished from the social meal of the white man, and to be spurned from his presence in the house of God, because a writerof genius has lent the weight of his authority and his fame, if not ofhis power, to the perpetuation of a prejudice which Christianity wasundermining. "

A more recent production, 'Latter Day Pamphlets', in which man'scapability of self-government is more than doubted, democracy somewhatcontemptuously sneered at, and the "model republic" itself stigmatized asa "nation of bores, " may have a salutary effect in restraining ouradmiration and in lessening our respect for the defender and eulogist ofslavery. The sweeping impartiality with which in this latter productionhe applies the principle of our "peculiar institution" to the laboringpoor man, irrespective of color, recognizing as his only inalienableright "the right of being set to labor" for his "born lords, " will, weimagine, go far to neutralize the mischief of his Discourse upon NegroSlavery. It is a sad thing to find so much intellectual power as Carlylereally possesses so little under the control of the moral sentiments. Insome of his earlier writings--as, for instance, his beautiful tribute tothe Corn Law Rhymer--we thought we saw evidence of a warm and generoussympathy with the poor and the wronged, a desire to ameliorate humansuffering, which would have done credit to the "philanthropisms of ExeterHall" and the "Abolition of Pain Society. " Latterly, however, likeMoliere's quack, he has "changed all that;" his heart has got upon thewrong side; or rather, he seems to us very much in the condition of thecoal-burner in the German tale, who had swapped his heart of flesh for acobblestone. 

 FORMATION OF THE AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY SOCIETY. 

 A letter to William Lloyd Garrison, President of the Society. 

 AMESBURY, 24th 11th mo. , 1863. 

MY DEAR FRIEND, --I have received thy kind letter, with the accompanyingcircular, inviting me to attend the commemoration of the thirtiethanniversary of the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society, atPhiladelphia. It is with the deepest regret that I am compelled, by thefeeble state of my health, to give up all hope of meeting thee and myother old and dear friends on an occasion of so much interest. How muchit costs me to acquiesce in the hard necessity thy own feelings will tellthee better than any words of mine. 

I look back over thirty years, and call to mind all the circumstances ofmy journey to Philadelphia, in company with thyself and the excellent Dr. Thurston of Maine, even then, as we thought, an old man, but stillliving, and true as ever to the good cause. I recall the early graymorning when, with Samuel J. May, our colleague on the committee toprepare a Declaration of Sentiments for the convention, I climbed to thesmall "upper chamber" of a colored friend to hear thee read the firstdraft of a paper which will live as long as our national history. I seethe members of the convention, solemnized by the responsibility, rise oneby one, and solemnly affix their names to that stern pledge of fidelityto freedom. Of the signers, many have passed away from earth, a few havefaltered and turned back, but I believe the majority still live torejoice over the great triumph of truth and justice, and to devote whatremains of time and strength to the cause to which they consecrated theiryouth and manhood thirty years ago. 

For while we may well thank God and congratulate one another on theprospect of the speedy emancipation of the slaves of the United States, we must not for a moment forget that, from this hour, new and mightyresponsibilities devolve upon us to aid, direct, and educate thesemillions, left free, indeed, but bewildered, ignorant, naked, andfoodless in the wild chaos of civil war. We have to undo the accumulatedwrongs of two centuries; to remake the manhood which slavery has well-nigh unmade; to see to it that the long-oppressed colored man has a fairfield for development and improvement; and to tread under our feet thelast vestige of that hateful prejudice which has been the strongestexternal support of Southern slavery. We must lift ourselves at once tothe true Christian altitude where all distinctions of black and white areoverlooked in the heartfelt recognition of the brotherhood of man. 

I must not close this letter without confessing that I cannot besufficiently thankful to the Divine Providence which, in a great measurethrough thy instrumentality, turned me away so early from what RogerWilliams calls "the world's great trinity, pleasure, profit, and honor, "to take side with the poor and oppressed. I am not insensible toliterary reputation. I love, perhaps too well, the praise and good-willof my fellow-men; but I set a higher value on my name as appended to theAnti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title-page of any book. Looking over a life marked by many errors and shortcomings, I rejoicethat I have been able to maintain the pledge of that signature, and that, in the long intervening years, "My voice, though not the loudest, has been heard Wherever Freedom raised her cry of pain. "

Let me, through thee, extend a warm greeting to the friends, whether ofour own or the new generation, who may assemble on the occasion ofcommemoration. There is work yet to be done which will task the bestefforts of us all. For thyself, I need not say that the love and esteemof early boyhood have lost nothing by the test of time; and

 I am, very cordially, thy friend, JOHN G. WHITTIER

 THE LESSON AND OUR DUTY. 

 From the Amesbury Villager. 

 [1865. ]

IN the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the unspeakably brutalassault upon Secretary Seward slavery has made another revelation ofitself. Perhaps it was needed. In the magnanimity of assured victory wewere perhaps disposed to overlook, not so much the guilty leaders andmisguided masses of the great rebellion as the unutterable horror and sinof slavery which prompted it. 

How slowly we of the North have learned the true character of this mightymischief! How our politicians bowed their strong shoulders under itsburthens! How our churches reverenced it! How our clergy contrasted theheresy-tolerating North with the purely orthodox and Scriptural type ofslave-holding Christianity! How all classes hunted down, not merely thefugitive slave, but the few who ventured to give him food and shelter anda Godspeed in his flight from bondage! How utterly ignored was thenegro's claim of common humanity! How readily was the decision of theslave-holding chief justice acquiesced in, that "the black man had norights which the white man is bound to respect"!

We saw a senator of the United States, world-known and honored for hislearning, talents, and stainless integrity, beaten down and all butmurdered at his official desk by a South Carolina slave-holder, for thecrime of speaking against the extension of slavery; and we heard thedastardly deed applauded throughout the South, while its brutalperpetrator was rewarded with orations and gifts and smiles of beauty asa chivalrous gentleman. We saw slavery enter Kansas, with bowieknife inhand and curses on its lips; we saw the life of the Union struck at bysecession and rebellion; we heard of the bones of sons and brothers, fallen in defence of freedom and law, dug up and wrought into ornamentsfor the wrists and bosoms of slave-holding women; we looked into the openhell of Andersonville, upon the deliberate, systematic starvation ofhelpless prisoners; we heard of Libby Prison underlaid with gunpowder, for the purpose of destroying thousands of Union prisoners in case of theoccupation of Richmond by our army; we saw hundreds of prisonersmassacred in cold blood at Fort Pillow, and the midnight sack of Lawrenceand the murder of its principal citizens. The flames of our merchantvessels, seized by pirates, lighted every sea; we heard of officers ofthe rebel army and navy stealing into our cities, firing hotels filledwith sleeping occupants, and laying obstructions on the track of railcars, for the purpose of killing and mangling their passengers. Yet inspite of these revelations of the utterly barbarous character of slaveryand its direful effect upon all connected with it, we were on the verypoint of trusting to its most criminal defenders the task ofreestablishing the state governments of the South, leaving the real Unionmen, white as well as black, at the mercy of those who have made hatred areligion and murder a sacrament. The nation needed one more terriblelesson. It has it in the murder of its beloved chief magistrate and theattempted assassination of its honored prime minister, the two men of allothers prepared to go farthest to smooth the way of defeated rebellionback to allegiance. 

Even now the lesson of these terrible events seems but half learned. Inthe public utterances I hear much of punishing and hanging leadingtraitors, fierce demands for vengeance, and threats of the summarychastisement of domestic sympathizers with treason, but comparativelylittle is said of the accursed cause, the prolific mother ofabominations, slavery. The government is exhorted to remember that itdoes not bear the sword in vain, the Old Testament is ransacked for textsof Oriental hatred and examples of the revenges of a semi-barbarousnation; but, as respects the four millions of unmistakably loyal peopleof the South, the patient, the long-suffering, kind-hearted victims ofoppressions, only here and there a voice pleads for their endowment withthe same rights of citizenship which are to be accorded to the rank andfile of disbanded rebels. The golden rule of the Sermon on the Mount isnot applied to them. Much is said of executing justice upon rebels;little of justice to loyal black men. Hanging a few ringleaders oftreason, it seems to be supposed, is all that is needed to restore andreestablish the revolted states. The negro is to be left powerless inthe hands of the "white trash, " who hate him with a bitter hatred, exceeding that of the large slave-holders. In short, four years ofterrible chastisement, of God's unmistakable judgments, have not taughtus, as a people, their lesson, which could scarcely be plainer if it hadbeen written in letters of fire on the sky. Why is it that we are soslow to learn, so unwilling to confess that slavery is the accursed thingwhich whets the knife of murder, and transforms men, with the exterior ofgentlemen and Christians, into fiends? How pitiful is our exultationover the capture of the wretched Booth and his associates! The greatcriminal, of whom he and they were but paltry instruments, still stalksabroad in the pine woods of Jersey, where the state has thrown around himher legislative sanction and protection. He is in Pennsylvania, thrusting the black man from public conveyances. Wherever God's childrenare despised, insulted, and abused on account of their color, there isthe real assassin of the President still at large. I do not wonder atthe indignation which has been awakened by the late outrage, for I havepainfully shared it. But let us see to it that it is rightly directed. The hanging of a score of Southern traitors will not restore AbrahamLincoln nor atone for the mighty loss. In wreaking revenge upon thesemiserable men, we must see to it that we do not degrade ourselves and dodishonor to the sacred memory of the dead. We do well to be angry; and, if need be, let our wrath wax seven times hotter, until that which "was amurderer from the beginning" is consumed from the face of the earth. Asthe people stand by the grave of Lincoln, let them lift their right handsto heaven and take a solemn vow upon their souls to give no sleep totheir eyes nor slumber to their eyelids until slavery is hunted from itslast shelter, and every man, black and white, stands equal before thelaw. 

In dealing with the guilty leaders and instigators of the rebellion weshould beware how we take counsel of passion. Hatred has no place besidethe calm and awful dignity of justice. Human life is still a very sacredthing; Christian forbearance and patience are still virtues. For my ownpart, I should be satisfied to see the chiefs of the great treason go outfrom among us homeless, exiled, with the mark of Cain on their foreheads, carrying with them, wherever they go, the avenging Nemesis of conscience. We cannot take lessons, at this late day, in their school of barbarism;we cannot starve and torture them as they have starved and tortured oursoldiers. Let them live. Perhaps that is, after all, the most terriblepenalty. For wherever they hide themselves the story of their acts willpursue them; they can have no rest nor peace save in that deep repentancewhich, through the mercy of God, is possible for all. 

I have no disposition to stand between these men and justice. Ifarrested, they can have no claim to exemption from the liabilities ofcriminals. But it is not simply a question of deserts that is to beconsidered; we are to take into account our own reputation as a Christianpeople, the wishes of our best friends abroad, and the humane instinctsof the age, which forbid all unnecessary severity. Happily we are notcalled upon to take counsel of our fears. Rabbinical writers tell usthat evil spirits who are once baffled in a contest with human beingslose from thenceforth all power of further mischief. The defeated rebelsare in the precise condition of these Jewish demons. Deprived ofslavery, they are like wasps that have lost their stings. 

As respects the misguided masses of the South, the shattered and crippledremnants of the armies of treason, the desolate wives, mothers, andchildren mourning for dear ones who have fallen in a vain and hopelessstruggle, it seems to me our duty is very plain. We must forgive theirpast treason, and welcome and encourage their returning loyalty. Nonebut cowards will insult and taunt the defeated and defenceless. We mustfeed and clothe the destitute, instruct the ignorant, and, bearingpatiently with the bitterness and prejudice which will doubtless for atime thwart our efforts and misinterpret our motives, aid them inrebuilding their states on the foundation of freedom. Our sole enemy wasslavery, and slavery is dead. We have now no quarrel with the people ofthe South, who have really more reason than we have to rejoice over thedownfall of a system which impeded their material progress, pervertedtheir religion, shut them out from the sympathies of the world, andridged their land with the graves of its victims. 

We are victors, the cause of all this evil and suffering is removedforever, and we can well afford to be magnanimous. How better can weevince our gratitude to God for His great mercy than in doing good tothose who hated us, and in having compassion on those who havedespitefully used us? The hour is hastening for us all when our soleground of dependence will be the mercy and forgiveness of God. Let usendeavor so to feel and act in our relations to the people of the Souththat we can repeat in sincerity the prayer of our Lord: "Forgive us ourtrespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, " reverentlyacknowledging that He has indeed "led captivity captive and receivedgifts for men; yea, for the rebellious also, that the Lord God mightdwell among them. "

 CHARLES SUMNER AND THE STATE-DEPARTMENT. 

 [1868. ]

THE wise reticence of the President elect in the matter of his cabinethas left free course to speculation and conjecture as to its composition. That he fully comprehends the importance of the subject, and that he willcarefully weigh the claims of the possible candidates on the score ofpatriotic services, ability, and fitness for specific duties, no one whohas studied his character, and witnessed his discretion, clear insight, and wise adaptation of means to ends, under the mighty responsibilitiesof his past career, can reasonably doubt. 

It is not probable that the distinguished statesman now at the head ofthe State Department will, under the circumstances, look for acontinuance in office. History will do justice to his eminent servicesin the Senate and in the cabinet during the first years of the rebellion, but the fact that he has to some extent shared the unpopularity of thepresent chief magistrate seems to preclude the idea of his retention inthe new cabinet. In looking over the list of our public men in search ofa successor, General Grant is not likely to be embarrassed by the numberof individuals fitted by nature, culture, and experience for such animportant post. The newspaper press, in its wide license of conjectureand suggestion, has, as far as I have seen, mentioned but three or fournames in this connection. Allusions have been made to Senator Fessendenof Maine, ex-Minister Motley, General Dix, ex-Secretary Stanton, andCharles Sumner of Massachusetts. 

Without disparaging in any degree his assumed competitors, the last-namedgentleman is unquestionably preeminently fitted for the place. He hashad a lifelong education for it. The entire cast of his mind, the bentof his studies, the habit and experience of his public life, his profoundknowledge of international law and the diplomatic history of his own andother countries, his well-earned reputation as a statesman andconstitutional lawyer, not only at home, but wherever our country hasrelations of amity and commerce, the honorable distinction which heenjoys of having held a foremost place in the great conflict betweenfreedom and slavery, union and rebellion, all mark him as the man for theoccasion. There seems, indeed, a certain propriety in assigning to theman who struck the heaviest blows at secession and slavery in thenational Senate the first place under him who, in the field, made themhenceforth impossible. The great captain and the great senator united inwar should not be dissevered in peace. 

I am not unaware that there are some, even in the Republican party, whohave failed to recognize in Senator Sumner the really wise and practicalstatesmanship which a careful review of his public labors cannot but makemanifest. It is only necessary to point such to the open record of hissenatorial career. Few men have had the honor of introducing anddefending with exhaustive ability and thoroughness so many measures ofacknowledged practical importance to his imrnedicte constituents, thecountry at large, and the wider interests of humanity and civilization. In what exigency has he been found wanting? What legislative act ofpublic utility for the last eighteen years has lacked his encouragement?At the head of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, his clearness of vision, firmness, moderation, and ready comprehension of the duties of his timeand place must be admitted by all parties. It was shrewdly said by Burkethat "men are wise with little reflection and good with little self-denial, in business of all times except their own. " But Charles Sumner, the scholar, loving the "still air of delightful studies, " has shownhimself as capable of thoroughly comprehending and digesting the eventstranspiring before his eyes as of pronouncing judgment upon thoserecorded in history. Far in advance of most of his contemporaries, hesaw and enunciated the true doctrine of reconstruction, the earlyadoption of which would have been of incalculable service to the country. One of the ablest statesmen and jurists of the Democratic party has hadthe rare magnanimity to acknowledge that in this matter the Republicansenator was right, and himself and his party wrong. 

The Republicans of Massachusetts will make no fractious or importunatedemand upon the new President. They are content to leave to his unbiasedand impartial judgment the selection of his cabinet. But if, looking tothe best interests of the country, he shall see fit to give theirdistinguished fellow-citizen the first place in it, they will feel nosolicitude as to the manner in which the duties of the office will bedischarged. They will feel that "the tools are with him who can usethem. " Nothing more directly affects the reputation of a country thanthe character of its diplomatic correspondence and its foreignrepresentatives. We have suffered in times past from sad mismanagementabroad, and intelligent Americans have too often been compelled to hangtheir heads with shame to see the flag of their country floating over theconsular offices of worthless, incompetent agents. There can be noquestion that so far as they are entrusted to Senator Sumner's hands, theinterest, honor, and dignity of the nation will be safe. 

In a few weeks Charles Summer will be returned for his fourth term in theUnited States Senate by the well-nigh unanimous vote of both branches ofthe legislature of Massachusetts. Not a syllable of opposition to hisreelection is heard from any quarter. There is not a Republican in thelegislature who could have been elected unless he had been virtuallypledged to his support. No stronger evidence of the popular estimate ofhis ability and integrity than this could be offered. As a matter ofcourse, the marked individuality of his intense convictions, earnestness, persistence, and confident reliance upon the justice of his conclusions, naturally growing out of the consciousness of having brought to hishonest search after truth all the lights of his learning and experience, may, at times, have brought him into unpleasant relations with some ofhis colleagues; but no one, friend or foe, has questioned his ability andpatriotism, or doubted his fidelity to principle. He has lent himself tono schemes of greed. While so many others have taken advantage of thefacilities of their official stations to fill, directly or indirectly, their own pockets or those of their relatives and retainers, it is to thehonor of Massachusetts that her representatives in the Senate have notonly "shaken their hands from the holding of bribes, " but have so bornethemselves that no shadow of suspicion has ever rested on them. 

In this connection it may be proper to state that, in the event of achange in the War Department, the claims of General Wilson, to whoseservices in the committee on military affairs the country is deeplyindebted, may be brought under consideration. In that case Massachusettswould not, if it were in her power, discriminate between her senators. Both have deserved well of her and of the country. In expressing thusbriefly my opinion, I do not forget that after all the choice andresponsibility rest with General Grant alone. There I am content toleave them. I am very far from urging any sectional claim. Let thecountry but have peace after its long discord, let its good faith andfinancial credit be sustained, and all classes of its citizens everywhereprotected in person and estate, and it matters very little to me whetherMassachusetts is represented at the Executive Council board, or not. Personally, Charles Sumner would gain nothing by a transfer from theSenate Chamber to the State Department. He does not need a place in theAmerican cabinet any more than John Bright does in the British. Thehighest ambition might well be satisfied with his present position, fromwhich, looking back upon an honorable record, he might be justified inusing Milton's language of lofty confidence in the reply to Salmasius: "Iam not one who has disgraced beauty of sentiment by deformity of conduct, or the maxims of a freeman by the actions of a slave, but, by the graceof God, I have kept my life unsullied. "

 THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1872. 

 The following letter was written on receiving a request from a committee of colored voters for advice as to their action at the presidential election of 1872. 

 AMESBURY, 9th mo. 3d, 1872. 

DEAR FRIENDS, --I have just received your letter of the 29th ult. Askingmy opinion of your present duty as colored voters in the choice betweenGeneral Grant and Horace Greeley for the presidency. You state that youhave been confused by the contradictory advice given you by such friendsof your people as Charles Sumner on one hand, and William L. Garrison andWendell Phillips on the other; and you ask me, as one whom you arepleased to think "free from all bias, " to add my counsel to theirs. 

I thank you for the very kind expression of your confidence and yourgenerous reference to my endeavors to serve the cause of freedom; but Imust own that I would fain have been spared the necessity of adding tothe already too long list of political epistles. I have felt it my dutyin times past to take an active part--often very distasteful to me--inpolitical matters, having for my first object the deliverance of mycountry from the crime and curse of slavery. That great question beingnow settled forever, I have been more than willing to leave to youngerand stronger hands the toils and the honors of partisan service. Painedand saddened by the bitter and unchristian personalities of the canvassnow in progress, I have hitherto held myself aloof from it as far aspossible, unwilling to sanction in the slightest degree the criminationsand recriminations of personal friends whom I have every reason to loveand respect, and in whose integrity I have unshaken confidence. In thepresent condition of affairs I have not been able to see that any specialaction as an abolitionist was required at my hands. Both of the greatparties, heretofore widely separated, have put themselves onsubstantially the same platform. The Republican party, originallypledged only to the non-extension of slavery, and whose most illustriousrepresentative, President Lincoln, avowed his willingness to save theUnion without abolishing slavery, has been, under Providence, mainlyinstrumental in the total overthrow of the detestable system; while theDemocratic party, composed largely of slave-holders, and, even at theNorth, scarcely willing to save the Union at the expense of the slaveinterest upon which its success depended, shattered and crippled by thecivil war and its results, has at last yielded to the inexorable logic ofevents, abandoned a position no longer tenable, and taken its "newdeparture" with an abolitionist as its candidate. As a friend of thelong-oppressed colored man, and for the sake of the peace and prosperityof the country, I rejoice at this action of the Democratic party. Theunderlying motives of this radical change are doubtless somewhat mixedand contradictory, honest conviction on the part of some, and partyexpediency and desire of office on the part of others; but the changeitself is real and irrevocable; the penalty of receding would be swiftand irretrievable ruin. In any point of view the new order of things isdesirable; and nothing more fully illustrates "the ways that are dark andthe tricks that are vain" of party politics than the attempt of professedfriends of the Union and equal rights for all to counteract it by givingaid and comfort to a revival of the worst characteristics of the oldparty in the shape of a straight-out Democratic convention. 

As respects the candidates now before us, I can see no good reason whycolored voters as such should oppose General Grant, who, though not anabolitionist and not even a member of the Republican party previous tohis nomination, has faithfully carried out the laws of Congress in theirbehalf. Nor, on the other hand, can I see any just grounds for distrustof such a man as Horace Greeley, who has so nobly distinguished himselfas the advocate of human rights irrespective of race or color, and who bythe instrumentality of his press has been for thirty years the educatorof the people in the principles of justice, temperance, and freedom. Both of these men have, in different ways, deserved too well of thecountry to be unnecessarily subjected to the brutalities of apresidential canvass; and, so far as they are personally concerned, itwould doubtless have been better if the one had declined a second term ofuncongenial duties, and the other continued to indite words of wisdom inthe shades of Chappaqua. But they have chosen otherwise; and I amwilling, for one, to leave my colored fellow-citizens to the unbiasedexercise of their own judgment and instincts in deciding between them. The Democratic party labors under the disadvantage of antecedents notcalculated to promote a rapid growth of confidence; and it is no matterof surprise that the vote of the emancipated class is likely to belargely against it. But if, as will doubtless be the case, that voteshall be to some extent divided between the two candidates, it will havethe effect of inducing politicians of the rival parties to treat withrespect and consideration this new element of political power, from self-interest if from no higher motive. The fact that at this time bothparties are welcoming colored orators to their platforms, and that, inthe South, old slave-masters and their former slaves fraternize at caucusand barbecue, and vote for each other at the polls, is full ofsignificance. If, in New England, the very men who thrust FrederickDouglass from car and stage-coach, and mobbed and hunted him like a wildbeast, now crowd to shake his hand and cheer him, let us not despair ofseeing even the Ku-Klux tarried into decency, and sitting "clothed intheir right minds" as listeners to their former victims. The colored manis to-day the master of his own destiny. No power on earth can deprivehim of his rights as an American citizen. And it is in the light ofAmerican citizenship that I choose to regard my colored friends, as menhaving a common stake in the welfare of the country; mingled with, andnot separate from, their white fellow-citizens; not herded together as adistinct class to be wielded by others, without self-dependence andincapable of self-determination. Thanks to such men as Sumner and Wilsonand their compeers, nearly all that legislation can do for them hasalready been done. We can now only help them to help themselves. Industry, economy, temperance, self-culture, education for theirchildren, --these things, indispensable to their elevation and progress, are in a great measure in their own hands. 

You will, therefore, my friends and fellow-citizens, pardon me if Idecline to undertake to decide for you the question of your politicalduty as respects the candidates for the presidency, --a question which youhave probably already settled in your own minds. If it had been apparentto me that your rights and liberties were really in danger from thesuccess of either candidate, your letter would not have been needed tocall forth my opinion. In the long struggle of well-nigh forty years, Ican honestly say that no consideration of private interest, nor mynatural love of peace and retirement and the good-will of others, havekept me silent when a word could be fitly spoken for human rights. Ihave not so long acted with the class to which you belong withoutacquiring respect for your intelligence and capacity for judging wiselyfor yourselves. I shall abide your decision with confidence, andcheerfully acquiesce in it. 

If, on the whole, you prefer to vote for the reelection of General Grant, let me hope you will do so without joining with eleventh-hour friends indenouncing and reviling such an old and tried friend as Charles Sumner, who has done and suffered so much in your behalf. If, on the other hand, some of you decide to vote for Horace Greeley, you need not in so doingforget your great obligations to such friends as William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Lydia Maria Child. Agree or disagree with them, take their advice or reject it, but stand by them still, and teach theparties with which you are connected to respect your feelings towardsyour benefactors. 

 THE CENSURE OF SUMNER. 

 A letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser in reference to the petition for the rescinding of the resolutions censuring Senator Sumner for his motion to erase from the United States flags the record of the battles of the civil war. 

I BEG leave to occupy a small space in the columns of the Advertiser forthe purpose of noticing a charge which has been brought against thepetitioners for rescinding the resolutions of the late extra sessionvirtually censuring the Hon. Charles Sumner. It is intimated that theaction of these petitioners evinces a lack of appreciation of theservices of the soldiers of the Union, and that not to censure CharlesSumner is to censure the volunteers of Massachusetts. 

As a matter of fact, the petitioners express no opinion as to the policyor expediency of the senator's proposition. Some may believe it not onlyright in itself, but expedient and well-timed; others that it wasinexpedient or premature. None doubt that, sooner or later, the thingwhich it contemplates must be done, if we are to continue a unitedpeople. What they feel and insist upon is that the proposition is onewhich implies no disparagement of the soldiers of Massachusetts and theUnion; that it neither receives nor merits the "unqualified condemnationof the people" of the state; and that it furnishes no ground whatever forlegislative interference or censure. A single glance at the names of thepetitioners is a sufficient answer to the insinuation that they areunmindful of that self-sacrifice and devotion, the marble and granitememorials of which, dotting the state from the Merrimac to theConnecticut, testify the gratitude of the loyal heart of Massachusetts. 

I have seen no soldier yet who considered himself wronged or "insulted"by the proposition. In point of fact the soldiers have never asked forsuch censure of the brave and loyal statesman who was the bosom friendand confidant of Secretary Stanton (the great war-minister, second, if atall, only to Carnot) and of John A. Andrew, dear to the heart of everyMassachusetts soldier, and whose tender care and sympathy reached themwherever they struggled or died for country and freedom. The proposal ofSenator Sumner, instead of being an "insult, " was, in fact, the highestcompliment which could be paid to brave men; for it implied that theycherished no vindictive hatred of fallen foes; that they were too proudlysecure of the love and gratitude of their countrymen to need above theirheads the flaunting blazon of their achievements; that they were asmagnanimous in peace and victory as they were heroic and patient throughthe dark and doubtful arbitrament of war. As such they understand it. Ishould be sorry to think there existed a single son of Massachusetts weakenough to believe that his reputation and honor as a soldier needed thiscensure of Charles Sumner. I have before me letters from men, rankingfrom orderly sergeant to general, who have looked at death full in theface on every battlefield where the flag of Massachusetts floated, andthey all thank me for my efforts to rescind this uncalled-for censure, and pledge me their hearty support. They cordially indorse the nobleletter of Vice-President Wilson offering his signature to the petitionfor rescinding the obnoxious resolutions; and if these resolutions arenot annulled, it will not be the fault of Massachusetts volunteers, butrather of the mistaken zeal of men more familiar with the drill of thecaucus than with that of the camp. 

I am no blind partisan of Charles Sumner. I have often differed from himin opinion. I regretted deeply the position which he thought it his dutyto take during the late presidential campaign. He felt the atmosphereabout him thick and foul with corruption and bribery and greed; he sawthe treasury ringed about like Saturn with unscrupulous combinations andcorporations; and it is to be regretted more than wondered at if hestruck out wildly in his indignation, and that his blows fell sometimesupon the wrong object. But I did not intend to act the part of hisapologist. The twenty years of his senatorial life are crowded withmemorials of his loyalty to truth and free dom and humanity, which willbe enduring as our history. He is no party to this movement, in which myname has been more prominent than I could have wished, and no word of hisprompted or suggested it. From its inception to the present time he hasremained silent in his chamber of pain, waiting to bequeath, like thetestator of the dramatist, "A fame by scandal untouched To Memory and Time's old daughter Truth. "

He can well afford to wait, and the issue of the present question beforeour legislature is of far less consequence to him than to us. To use thewords of one who stood by him in the dark days of the Fugitive Slave Law, the Chief Justice of the United States, --"Time and the wiser thought willvindicate the illustrious statesman to whom Massachusetts, the country, and humanity owe so much, but the state can ill afford the damage to itsown reputation which such a censure of such a man will inflict. "

AMESBURY, 3d month, 8, 1873. 

 THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833. 

 [1874. ]

In the gray twilight of a chill day of late November, forty years ago, adear friend of mine, residing in Boston, made his appearance at the oldfarm-house in East Haverhill. He had been deputed by the abolitionistsof the city, William L. Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, and others, toinform me of my appointment as a delegate to the Convention about to beheld in Philadelphia for the formation of an American Anti-SlaverySociety, and to urge upon me the necessity of my attendance. 

Few words of persuasion, however, were needed. I was unused totravelling; my life had been spent on a secluded farm; and the journey, mostly by stage-coach, at that time was really a formidable one. Moreover, the few abolitionists were everywhere spoken against, theirpersons threatened, and in some instances a price set on their heads bySouthern legislators. Pennsylvania was on the borders of slavery, and itneeded small effort of imagination to picture to one's self the breakingup of the Convention and maltreatment of its members. This latterconsideration I do not think weighed much with me, although I was betterprepared for serious danger than for anything like personal indignity. Ihad read Governor Trumbull's description of the tarring and feathering ofhis hero MacFingal, when, after the application of the melted tar, thefeather-bed was ripped open and shaken over him, until

 "Not Maia's son, with wings for ears, Such plumes about his visage wears, Nor Milton's six-winged angel gathers Such superfluity of feathers, "

and I confess I was quite unwilling to undergo a martyrdom which my bestfriends could scarcely refrain from laughing at. But a summons like thatof Garrison's bugle-blast could scarcely be unheeded by one who, frombirth and education, held fast the traditions of that earlierabolitionism which, under the lead of Benezet and Woolman, had effacedfrom the Society of Friends every vestige of slave-holding. I had thrownmyself, with a young man's fervid enthusiasm, into a movement whichcommended itself to my reason and conscience, to my love of country, andmy sense of duty to God and my fellow-men. My first venture inauthorship was the publication, at my own expense, in the spring of 1833, of a pamphlet entitled Justice and Expediency, on the moral and politicalevils of slavery, and the duty of emancipation. Under such circumstancesI could not hesitate, but prepared at once for my journey. It wasnecessary that I should start on the morrow, and the intervening time, with a small allowance for sleep, was spent in providing for the care ofthe farm and homestead during my absence. 

So the next morning I took the stage for Boston, stopping at the ancienthostelry known as the Eastern Stage Tavern; and on the day following, incompany with William Lloyd Garrison, I left for New York. At that citywe were joined by other delegates, among them David Thurston, aCongregational minister from Maine. On our way to Philadelphia, we took, as a matter of necessary economy, a second-class conveyance, and foundourselves, in consequence, among rough and hilarious companions, whoselanguage was more noteworthy for strength than refinement. Our worthyfriend the clergyman bore it awhile in painful silence, but at last feltit his duty to utter words of remonstrance and admonition. The leader ofthe young roisterers listened with a ludicrous mock gravity, thanked himfor his exhortation, and, expressing fears that the extraordinary efforthad exhausted his strength, invited him to take a drink with him. FatherThurston buried his grieved face in his cloak-collar, and wisely left theyoung reprobates to their own devices. 

On reaching Philadelphia, we at once betook, ourselves to the humbledwelling on Fifth Street occupied by Evan Lewis, a plain, earnest man andlifelong abolitionist, who had been largely interested in preparing theway for the Convention. In one respect the time of our assembling seemedunfavorable. The Society of Friends, upon whose cooperation we hadcounted, had but recently been rent asunder by one of those unhappycontroversies which so often mark the decline of practical righteousness. The martyr-age of the society had passed, wealth and luxury had taken theplace of the old simplicity, there was a growing conformity to the maximsof the world in trade and fashion, and with it a correspondingunwillingness to hazard respectability by the advocacy of unpopularreforms. Unprofitable speculation and disputation on one hand, and avain attempt on the other to enforce uniformity of opinion, hadmeasurably lost sight of the fact that the end of the gospel is love, andthat charity is its crowning virtue. After a long and painful strugglethe disruption had taken place; the shattered fragments, under the nameof Orthodox and Hicksite, so like and yet so separate in feeling, confronted each other as hostile sects, and

 "Never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining; They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs that have been torn asunder A dreary sea now flows between; But neither rain, nor frost, nor thunder, Can wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once has been. "

We found about forty members assembled in the parlors of our friendLewis, and, after some general conversation, Lewis Tappan was asked topreside over an informal meeting, preparatory to the opening of theConvention. A handsome, intellectual-looking man, in the prime of life, responded to the invitation, and in a clear, well-modulated voice, thefirm tones of which inspired hope and confidence, stated the objects ofour preliminary council, and the purpose which had called us together, inearnest and well-chosen words. In making arrangements for theConvention, it was thought expedient to secure, if possible, the servicesof some citizen of Philadelphia, of distinction and high social standing, to preside over its deliberations. Looking round among ourselves in vainfor some titled civilian or doctor of divinity, we were fain to confessthat to outward seeming we were but "a feeble folk, " sorely needing theshield of a popular name. A committee, of which I was a member, wasappointed to go in search of a president of this description. We visitedtwo prominent gentlemen, known as friendly to emancipation and of highsocial standing. They received us with the dignified courtesy of the oldschool, declined our proposition in civil terms, and bowed us out with acool politeness equalled only by that of the senior Winkle towards theunlucky deputation of Pickwick and his unprepossessing companions. As weleft their doors we could not refrain from smiling in each other's facesat the thought of the small inducement our proffer of the presidency heldout to men of their class. Evidently our company was not one forrespectability to march through Coventry with. 

On the following morning we repaired to the Adelphi Building, on FifthStreet, below Walnut, which had been secured for our use. Sixty-twodelegates were found to be in attendance. Beriah Green, of the Oneida(New York) Institute, was chosen president, a fresh-faced, sandy-haired, rather common-looking man, but who had the reputation of an able andeloquent speaker. He had already made himself known to us as a resoluteand self-sacrificing abolitionist. Lewis Tappan and myself took ourplaces at his side as secretaries, on the elevation at the west end ofthe hall. 

Looking over the assembly, I noticed that it was mainly composed ofcomparatively young men, some in middle age, and a few beyond thatperiod. They were nearly all plainly dressed, with a view to comfortrather than elegance. Many of the faces turned towards me wore a look ofexpectancy and suppressed enthusiasm; all had the earnestness which mightbe expected of men engaged in an enterprise beset with difficulty andperhaps with peril. The fine, intellectual head of Garrison, prematurelybald, was conspicuous; the sunny-faced young man at his side, in whom allthe beatitudes seemed to find expression, was Samuel J. May, mingling inhis veins the best blood of the Sewalls and Quincys, --a man soexceptionally pure and large-hearted, so genial, tender, and loving, thathe could be faithful to truth and duty without making an enemy. 

 "The de'il wad look into his face, And swear he couldna wrang him. "

That tall, gaunt, swarthy man, erect, eagle-faced, upon whose somewhatmartial figure the Quaker coat seemed a little out of place, was LindleyCoates, known in all eastern Pennsylvania as a stern enemy of slavery;that slight, eager man, intensely alive in every feature and gesture, wasThomas Shipley, who for thirty years had been the protector of the freecolored people of Philadelphia, and whose name was whispered reverentlyin the slave cabins of Maryland as the friend of the black man, one of aclass peculiar to old Quakerism, who in doing what they felt to be duty, and walking as the Light within guided them, knew no fear and shrank fromno sacrifice. Braver men the world has not known. Beside him, differingin creed, but united with him in works of love and charity, sat ThomasWhitson, of the Hicksite school of Friends, fresh from his farm inLancaster County, dressed in plainest homespun, his tall form surmountedby a shock of unkempt hair, the odd obliquity of his vision contrastingstrongly with he clearness and directness of his spiritual insight. Elizur Wright, the young professor of a Western college, who had lost hisplace by his bold advocacy of freedom, with a look of sharp concentrationin keeping with an intellect keen as a Damascus blade, closely watchedthe proceedings through his spectacles, opening his mouth only to speakdirectly to the purpose. The portly form of Dr. Bartholomew Fussell, thebeloved physician, from that beautiful land of plenty and peace whichBayard Taylor has described in his Story of Kennett, was not to beoverlooked. Abolitionist in heart and soul, his house was known as theshelter of runaway slaves, and no sportsman ever entered into the chasewith such zest as he did into the arduous and sometimes dangerous work ofaiding their escape and baffling their pursuers. The youngest manpresent was, I believe, James Miller McKim, a Presbyterian minister fromColumbia, afterwards one of our most efficient workers. James Mott, E. L. Capron, Arnold Buffum, and Nathan Winslow, men well known in the anti-slavery agitation, were conspicuous members. Vermont sent down from hermountains Orson S. Murray, a man terribly in earnest, with a zeal thatbordered on fanaticism, and who was none the more genial for the mob-violence to which he had been subjected. In front of me, awakeningpleasant associations of the old homestead in Merrimac valley, sat myfirst school-teacher, Joshua Coffin, the learned and worthy antiquarianand historian of Newbury. A few spectators, mostly of the Hicksitedivision of Friends, were present, in broad brims and plain bonnets, among them Esther Moore and Lucretia Mott. 

Committees were chosen to draft a constitution for a national Anti-Slavery Society, nominate a list of officers, and prepare a declarationof principles to be signed by the members. Dr. A. L. Cox of New York, while these committees were absent, read something from my pen eulogisticof William Lloyd Garrison; and Lewis Tappan and Amos A. Phelps, aCongregational clergyman of Boston, afterwards one of the most devotedlaborers in the cause, followed in generous commendation of the zeal, courage, and devotion of the young pioneer. The president, after callingJames McCrummell, one of the two or three colored members of theConvention, to the chair, made some eloquent remarks upon those editorswho had ventured to advocate emancipation. At the close of his speech ayoung man rose to speak, whose appearance at once arrested my attention. I think I have never seen a finer face and figure, and his manner, words, and bearing were in keeping. "Who is he?" I asked of one of thePennsylvania delegates. "Robert Purvis, of this city, a colored man, "was the answer. He began by uttering his heart-felt thanks to thedelegates who had convened for the deliverance of his people. He spokeof Garrison in terms of warmest eulogy, as one who had stirred the heartof the nation, broken the tomblike slumber of the church, and compelledit to listen to the story of the slave's wrongs. He closed by declaringthat the friends of colored Americans would not be forgotten. "Theirmemories, " he said, "will be cherished when pyramids and monuments shallhave crumbled in dust. The flood of time which is sweeping away therefuge of lies is bearing on the advocates of our cause to a gloriousimmortality. "

The committee on the constitution made their report, which afterdiscussion was adopted. It disclaimed any right or intention ofinterfering, otherwise than by persuasion and Christian expostulation, with slavery as it existed in the states, but affirming the duty ofCongress to abolish it in the District of Columbia and territories, andto put an end to the domestic slave-trade. A list of officers of the newsociety was then chosen: Arthur Tappan of New York, president, and ElizurWright, Jr. , William Lloyd Garrison, and A. L. Cox, secretaries. Amongthe vice-presidents was Dr. Lord of Dartmouth College, then professedlyin favor of emancipation, but who afterwards turned a moral somersault, aself-inversion which left him ever after on his head instead of his feet. 

He became a querulous advocate of slavery as a divine institution, anddenounced woe upon the abolitionists for interfering with the will andpurpose of the Creator. As the cause of freedom gained ground, the poorman's heart failed him, and his hope for church and state grew fainterand fainter. A sad prophet of the evangel of slavery, he testified inthe unwilling ears of an unbelieving generation, and died at lastdespairing of a world which seemed determined that Canaan should nolonger be cursed, nor Onesimus sent back to Philemon. 

The committee on the declaration of principles, of which I was a member, held a long session, discussing the proper scope and tenor of thedocument. But little progress being made, it was finally decided toentrust the matter to a sub-committee, consisting of William L. Garrison, S. J. May, and myself; and after a brief consultation andcomparison of each other's views, the drafting of the important paper wasassigned to the former gentleman. We agreed to meet him at his lodgingsin the house of a colored friend early the next morning. It was stilldark when we climbed up to his room, and the lamp was still burning bythe light of which he was writing the last sentence of the declaration. We read it carefully, made a few verbal changes, and submitted it to thelarge committee, who unanimously agreed to report it to the Convention. 

The paper was read to the Convention by Dr. Atlee, chairman of thecommittee, and listened to with the profoundest interest. 

Commencing with a reference to the time, fifty-seven years before, when, in the same city of Philadelphia, our fathers announced to the worldtheir Declaration of Independence, --based on the self-evident truths ofhuman equality and rights, --and appealed to arms for its defence, itspoke of the new enterprise as one "without which that of our fathers isincomplete, " and as transcending theirs in magnitude, solemnity, andprobable results as much "as moral truth does physical force. " It spokeof the difference of the two in the means and ends proposed, and of thetrifling grievances of our fathers compared with the wrongs andsufferings of the slaves, which it forcibly characterized as unequalledby any others on the face of the earth. It claimed that the nation wasbound to repent at once, to let the oppressed go free, and to admit themto all the rights and privileges of others; because, it asserted, no manhas a right to enslave or imbrute his brother; because liberty isinalienable; because there is no difference, in principle, between slave-holding and man-stealing, which the law brands as piracy; and because nolength of bondage can invalidate man's claim to himself, or render slavelaws anything but "an audacious usurpation. "

It maintained that no compensation should be given to plantersemancipating slaves, because that would be a surrender of fundamentalprinciples; "slavery is a crime, and is, therefore, not an article to besold;" because slave-holders are not just proprietors of what they claim;because emancipation would destroy only nominal, not real property; andbecause compensation, if given at all, should be given to the slaves. 

It declared any "scheme of expatriation" to be "delusive, cruel, anddangerous. " It fully recognized the right of each state to legislateexclusively on the subject of slavery within its limits, and concededthat Congress, under the present national compact, had no right tointerfere; though still contending that it had the power, and shouldexercise it, "to suppress the domestic slave-trade between the severalstates, " and "to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and inthose portions of our territory which the Constitution has placed underits exclusive jurisdiction. "

After clearly and emphatically avowing the principles underlying theenterprise, and guarding with scrupulous care the rights of persons andstates under the Constitution, in prosecuting it, the declaration closedwith these eloquent words:--

We also maintain that there are, at the present time, the highestobligations resting upon the people of the free states to remove slaveryby moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of theUnited States. They are now living under a pledge of their tremendousphysical force to fasten the galling fetters of tyranny upon the limbs ofmillions in the Southern states; they are liable to be called at anymoment to suppress a general insurrection of the slaves; they authorizethe slave-owner to vote on three fifths of his slaves as property, andthus enable him to perpetuate his oppression; they support a standingarmy at the South for its protection; and they seize the slave who hasescaped into their territories, and send him back to be tortured by anenraged master or a brutal driver. This relation to slavery is criminaland full of danger. It must be broken up. 

"These are our views and principles, --these our designs and measures. With entire confidence in the overruling justice of God, we plantourselves upon the Declaration of Independence and the truths of divinerevelation as upon the everlasting rock. 

"We shall organize anti-slavery societies, if possible, in every city, town, and village in our land. 

"We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, ofwarning, of entreaty and rebuke. 

"We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively anti-slavery tracts andperiodicals. 

"We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause of the sufferingand the dumb. 

"We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation inthe guilt of slavery. 

"We shall encourage the labor of freemen over that of the slaves, bygiving a preference to their productions; and

"We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation tospeedy repentance. 

"Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated, but our principles never. Truth, justice, reason, humanity, must andwill gloriously triumph. Already a host is coming up to the help of theLord against the mighty, and the prospect before us is full ofencouragement. 

"Submitting this declaration to the candid examination of the people ofthis country, and of the friends of liberty all over the world, we herebyaffix our signatures to it; pledging ourselves that, under the guidanceand by the help of Almighty God, we will do all that in us lies, consistently with this declaration of our principles, to overthrow themost execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth, to deliver our land from its deadliest curse, to wipe out the fouleststain which rests upon our national escutcheon, and to secure to thecolored population of the United States all the rights and privilegeswhich belong to them as men and as Americans, come what may to ourpersons, our interests, or our reputations, whether we live to witnessthe triumph of justice, liberty, and humanity, or perish untimely asmartyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause. "

The reading of the paper was followed by a discussion which lastedseveral hours. A member of the Society of Friends moved its immediateadoption. "We have, " he said, "all given it our assent: every heart hereresponds to it. It is a doctrine of Friends that these strong and deepimpressions should be heeded. " The Convention, nevertheless, deemed itimportant to go over the declaration carefully, paragraph by paragraph. During the discussion, one of the spectators asked leave to say a fewwords. A beautiful and graceful woman, in the prime of life, with a facebeneath her plain cap as finely intellectual as that of Madame Roland, offered some wise and valuable suggestions, in a clear, sweet voice, thecharm of which I have never forgotten. It was Lucretia Mott ofPhiladelphia. The president courteously thanked her, and encouraged herto take a part in the discussion. On the morning of the last day of oursession, the declaration, with its few verbal amendments, carefullyengrossed on parchment, was brought before the Convention. Samuel J. Mayrose to read it for the last time. His sweet, persuasive voice falteredwith the intensity of his emotions as he repeated the solemn pledges ofthe concluding paragraphs. After a season of silence, David Thurston ofMaine rose as his name was called by one of the secretaries, and affixedhis name to the document. One after another passed up to the platform, signed, and retired in silence. All felt the deep responsibility of theoccasion the shadow and forecast of a life-long struggle rested uponevery countenance. 

Our work as a Convention was now done. President Green arose to make theconcluding address. The circumstances under which it was uttered mayhave lent it an impressiveness not its own; but as I now recall it, itseems to me the most powerful and eloquent speech to which I have everlistened. He passed in review the work that had been done, theconstitution of the new society, the declaration of sentiments, and theunion and earnestness which had marked the proceedings. His closingwords will never be forgotten by those who heard them:--

"Brethren, it has been good to be here. In this hallowed atmosphere Ihave been revived and refreshed. This brief interview has more thanrepaid me for all that I have ever suffered. I have here met congenialminds; I have rejoiced in sympathies delightful to the soul. Heart hasbeat responsive to heart, and the holy work of seeking to benefit theoutraged and despised has proved the most blessed employment. 

"But now we must retire from these balmy influences and breathe anotheratmosphere. The chill hoar-frost will be upon us. The storm and tempestwill rise, and the waves of persecution will dash against our souls. Letus be prepared for the worst. Let us fasten ourselves to the throne ofGod as with hooks of steel. If we cling not to Him, our names to thatdocument will be but as dust. 

"Let us court no applause, indulge in no spirit of vain boasting. Let usbe assured that our only hope in grappling with the bony monster is in anArm that is stronger than ours. Let us fix our gaze on God, and walk inthe light of His countenance. If our cause be just--and we know it is--His omnipotence is pledged to its triumph. Let this cause be entwinedaround the very fibres of our hearts. Let our hearts grow to it, so thatnothing but death can sunder the bond. "

He ceased, and then, amidst a silence broken only by the deep-drawnbreath of emotion in the assembly, lifted up his voice in a prayer toAlmighty God, full of fervor and feeling, imploring His blessing andsanctification upon the Convention and its labors. And with thesolemnity of this supplication in our hearts we clasped hands infarewell, and went forth each man to his place of duty, not knowing thethings that should befall us as individuals, but with a confidence, nevershaken by abuse and persecution, in the certain triumph of our cause. 

 KANSAS

Read at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the state ofKansas. 

 BEAR CAMP HOUSE, WEST OSSIPEE, N. H. , Eighth month, 29th, 1879. 

To J. S. EMERY, R. MORROW, AND C. W. SMITH, COMMITTEE:

I HAVE received your invitation to the twenty-fifth anniversarycelebration of the first settlement of Kansas. It would give me greatpleasure to visit your state on an occasion of such peculiar interest, and to make the acquaintance of its brave and self-denying pioneers, butI have not health and strength for the journey. It is very fitting thatthis anniversary should be duly recognized. No one of your sister stateshas such a record as yours, --so full of peril and adventure, fortitude, self-sacrifice, and heroic devotion to freedom. Its baptism of martyrblood not only saved the state to liberty, but made the abolition ofslavery everywhere possible. Barber and Stillwell and Colpetzer andtheir associates did not die in vain. All through your long, hardstruggle I watched the course of events in Kansas with absorbinginterest. I rejoiced, while I marvelled at the steady courage which nodanger could shake, at the firm endurance which outwearied thebrutalities of your slaveholding invaders, and at that fidelity to rightand duty which the seduction of immediate self-interest could not swerve, nor the military force of a proslavery government overawe. All mysympathies were with you in that stern trial of your loyalty to God andhumanity. And when, in the end, you had conquered peace, and the last ofthe baffled border ruffians had left your territory, I felt that the doomof the accursed institution was sealed, and that its abolition was but aquestion of time. A state with such a record will, I am sure, be true toits noble traditions, and will do all in its power to aid the victims ofprejudice and oppression who may be compelled to seek shelter within itsborders. I will not for a moment distrust the fidelity of Kansas to herfoundation principle. God bless and prosper her! Thanking you for thekind terms of your invitation, I am, gentlemen, very truly your friend. 

 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. 

An Introduction to Oliver Johnson's "William Lloyd Garrison and hisTimes. "

 [1879. ]

I no not know that any word of mine can give additional interest to thismemorial of William Lloyd Garrison from the pen of one of his earliestand most devoted friends, whose privilege it has been to share hisconfidence and his labors for nearly half a century; but I cannot wellforego the opportunity afforded me to add briefly my testimony to thetribute to the memory of the great Reformer, whose friendship I haveshared, and with whom I have been associated in a common cause from youthto age. 

My acquaintance with him commenced in boyhood. My father was asubscriber to his first paper, the Free Press, and the humanitarian toneof his editorials awakened a deep interest in our little household, whichwas increased by a visit which he made us. When he afterwards edited theJournal of the Times, at Bennington, Vt. , I ventured to write him aletter of encouragement and sympathy, urging him to continue his laborsagainst slavery, and assuring him that he could "do great things, " anunconscious prophecy which has been fulfilled beyond the dream of myboyish enthusiasm. The friendship thus commenced has remained unbrokenthrough half a century, confirming my early confidence in his zeal anddevotion, and in the great intellectual and moral strength which hebrought to the cause with which his name is identified. 

During the long and hard struggle in which the abolitionists wereengaged, and amidst the new and difficult questions and side-issues whichpresented themselves, it could scarcely be otherwise than thatdifferences of opinion and action should arise among them. The leaderand his disciples could not always see alike. My friend, the author ofthis book, I think, generally found himself in full accord with him, while I often decidedly dissented. I felt it my duty to use my right ofcitizenship at the ballot-box in the cause of liberty, while Garrison, with equal sincerity, judged and counselled otherwise. Each acted undera sense of individual duty and responsibility, and our personal relationswere undisturbed. If, at times, the great anti-slavery leader failed todo justice to the motives of those who, while in hearty sympathy with hishatred of slavery, did not agree with some of his opinions and methods, it was but the pardonable and not unnatural result of his intensity ofpurpose, and his self-identification with the cause he advocated; and, while compelled to dissent, in some particulars, from his judgment of menand measures, the great mass of the antislavcry people recognized hismoral leadership. The controversies of old and new organization, nonresistance and political action, may now be looked upon by the partiesto them, who still survive, with the philosophic calmness which followsthe subsidence of prejudice and passion. We were but fallible men, anddoubtless often erred in feeling, speech, and action. Ours was but thecommon experience of reformers in all ages. 

 "Never in Custom's oiled grooves The world to a higher level moves, But grates and grinds with friction hard On granite bowlder and flinty shard. Ever the Virtues blush to find The Vices wearing their badge behind, And Graces and Charities feel the fire Wherein the sins of the age expire. "

It is too late now to dwell on these differences. I choose rather, witha feeling of gratitude to God, to recall the great happiness of laboringwith the noble company of whom Garrison was the central figure. I loveto think of him as he seemed to me, when in the fresh dawn of manhood hesat with me in the old Haverhill farmhouse, revolving even then schemesof benevolence; or, with cheery smile, welcoming me to his frugal meal ofbread and milk in the dingy Boston printing-room; or, as I found him inthe gray December morning in the small attic of a colored man, inPhiladelphia, finishing his night-long task of drafting his immortalDeclaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society; or, as Isaw him in the jail of Leverett Street, after his almost miraculousescape from the mob, playfully inviting me to share the safe lodgingswhich the state had provided for him; and in all the varied scenes andsituations where we acted together our parts in the great endeavor andsuccess of Freedom. 

The verdict of posterity in his case may be safely anticipated. With thetrue reformers and benefactors of his race he occupies a place inferiorto none other. The private lives of many who fought well the battles ofhumanity have not been without spot or blemish. But his privatecharacter, like his public, knew no dishonor. No shadow of suspicionrests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of whichshould be the Alpine flower that symbolizes noble purity. 

 ANTI-SLAVERY ANNIVERSARY. 

Read at the semi-centennial celebration of the American Anti-SlaverySociety at Philadelphia, on the 3d December, 1883. 

 OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS. , 11th mo. , 30, 1883. 

I NEED not say how gladly I would be with you at the semi-centennial ofthe American Anti-Slavery Society. I am, I regret to say, quite unableto gratify this wish, and can only represent myself by a letter. 

Looking back over the long years of half a century, I can scarcelyrealize the conditions under which the convention of 1833 assembled. Slavery was predominant. Like Apollyon in Pilgrim's Progress, it"straddled over the whole breadth of the way. " Church and state, pressand pulpit, business interests, literature, and fashion were prostrate atits feet. Our convention, with few exceptions, was composed of menwithout influence or position, poor and little known, strong only intheir convictions and faith in the justice of their cause. To onlookersour endeavor to undo the evil work of two centuries and convert a nationto the "great renunciation" involved in emancipation must have seemedabsurd in the last degree. Our voices in such an atmosphere found noecho. We could look for no response but laughs of derision or themissiles of a mob. 

But we felt that we had the strength of truth on our side; we were right, and all the world about us was wrong. We had faith, hope, andenthusiasm, and did our work, nothing doubting, amidst a generation whofirst despised and then feared and hated us. For myself I have neverceased to be grateful to the Divine Providence for the privilege oftaking a part in that work. 

And now for more than twenty years we have had a free country. No slavetreads its soil. The anticipated dangerous consequences of completeemancipation have not been felt. The emancipated class, as a whole, havedone wisely, and well under circumstances of peculiar difficulty. Themasters have learned that cotton can be raised better by free than byslave labor, and nobody now wishes a return to slave-holding. Sectionalprejudices are subsiding, the bitterness of the civil war is slowlypassing away. We are beginning to feel that we are one people, with noreally clashing interests, and none more truly rejoice in the growingprosperity of the South than the old abolitionists, who hated slavery asa curse to the master as well as to the slave. 

In view of this commemorative semi-centennial occasion, many thoughtscrowd upon me; memory recalls vanished faces and voices long hushed. Ofthose who acted with me in the convention fifty years ago nearly all havepassed into another state of being. We who remain must soon follow; wehave seen the fulfilment of our desire; we have outlived scorn andpersecution; the lengthening shadows invite us to rest. If, in lookingback, we feel that we sometimes erred through impatient zeal in ourcontest with a great wrong, we have the satisfaction of knowing that wewere influenced by no merely selfish considerations. The low light ofour setting sun shines over a free, united people, and our last prayershall be for their peace, prosperity, and happiness. 

 RESPONSE

TO THE CELEBRATION OF MY EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY BY THE COLORED CITIZENS OFWASHINGTON D. C. 

To R. H. TERRELL AND GEORGE W. WILLIAMS, ESQUIRES. 

GENTLEMEN, --Among the great number of tokens of interest and good-willwhich reached me on my birthday, none have touched me more deeply thanthe proceedings of the great meeting of the colored citizens of thenation's capital, of which you are the representatives. The resolutionsof that meeting came to me as the voice of millions of my fellow-countrymen. That voice was dumb in slavery when, more than half acentury ago, I put forth my plea for the freedom of the slave. 

It could not answer me from the rice swamp and cotton field, but now, Godbe praised, it speaks from your great meeting in Washington and from allthe colleges and schools where the youth of your race are taught. Iscarcely expected then that the people for whom I pleaded would ever knowof my efforts in their behalf. I cannot be too thankful to the DivineProvidence that I have lived to hear their grateful response. 

I stand amazed at the rapid strides which your people have made sinceemancipation, at your industry, your acquisition of property and land, your zeal for education, your self-respecting but unresentful attitudetoward those who formerly claimed to be your masters, your pathetic butmanly appeal for just treatment and recognition. I see in all this thepromise that the time is not far distant when, in common with the whiterace, you will have the free, undisputed rights of American citizenshipin all parts of the Union, and your rightful share in the honors as wellas the protection of the government. 

Your letter would have been answered sooner if it had been possible. Ihave been literally overwbelmed with letters and telegrams, which, owingto illness, I have been in a great measure unable to answer or even read. 

I tender to you, gentlemen, and to the people you represent my heartfeltthanks, and the assurance that while life lasts you will find me, as Ihave been heretofore, under more difficult circumstances, your faithfulfriend. 

OAK KNOLL, DANVERS, MASS. , first mo. , 9, 1888.