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 in
New England, where we all acknowledge it to be an evil. Because such an
acknowledgment is not enough on our part. It is doing no more than the
slave-master and the slave-trader. "We have found," says James Monroe,
in his speech on the subject before the Virginia Convention, "that this
evil has preyed upon the very vitals of the Union; and has been
prejudicial to all the states in which it has existed." All the states
in their several Constitutions and declarations of rights have made a
similar statement. And what has been the consequence of this general
belief in the evil of human servitude? Has it sapped the foundations of
the infamous system? No. Has it decreased the number of its victims?
Quite the contrary. Unaccompanied by philanthropic action, it has been
in 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 our
sympathies. Sympathy the sympathy of the Priest and the Levite, looking
on, and acknowledging, but holding itself aloof from mortal suffering.
Can such hollow sympathy reach the broken of heart, and does the blessing
of those who are ready to perish answer it? Does it hold back the lash
from the slave, or sweeten his bitter bread? One's heart and soul are
becoming weary of this sympathy, this heartless mockery of feeling; sick
of the common cant of hypocrisy, wreathing the artificial flowers of
sentiment over unutterable pollution and unimaginable wrong. It is
white-washing the sepulchre to make us forget its horrible deposit. It
is scattering flowers around the charnel-house and over the yet festering
grave to turn away our thoughts "from the dead men's bones and all
uncleanness," 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 longer
strive to forget it; let us no more dare to palliate it. It is better to
meet it here with repentance than at the bar of God. The cry of the
oppressed, of the millions who have perished among us as the brute
perisheth, shut out from the glad tidings of salvation, has gone there
before us, to Him who as a father pitieth all His children. Their blood
is upon us as a nation; woe unto us, if we repent not, as a nation, in
dust and ashes. Woe unto us if we say in our hearts, "The Lord shall not
see, 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, and
is 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 in
his sins, and yet not responsible! Joining hands with crime, covenanting
with oppression, leaguing with pollution, and yet not responsible!
Palliating the evil, hiding the evil, voting for the evil, do we not
participate 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 the
shame, the sin against our brother, and the sin against our God, all the
iniquity of slavery which is revealed to man, and all which crieth in the
ear, or is manifested to the eye of Jehovah, will assuredly be visited
upon all our people. Why, then, should we stretch out our hands towards
our Southern brethren, and like the Pharisee thank God we are not like
them? For so long as we practically recognize the infernal principle
that "man can hold property in man," God will not hold us guiltless. So
long as we take counsel of the world's policy instead of the justice of
heaven, so long as we follow a mistaken political expediency in
opposition to the express commands of God, so long will the wrongs of the
slaves 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 over
the beautiful Carolinas, or the consecrated soil of Virginia, New England
would be called upon to arrest the progress of rebellion,--to tread out
with the armed heel of her soldiery that spirit of freedom, which knows
no distinction of cast or color; which has been kindled in the heart of
the black as well as in that of the white.
And what is this system which we are thus protecting and upholding? A
system which holds two millions of God's creatures in bondage, which
leaves one million females without any protection save their own feeble
strength, and which makes even the exercise of that strength in
resistance to outrage punishable with death! which considers rational,
immortal beings as articles of traffic, vendible commodities,
merchantable property,--which recognizes no social obligations, no
natural relations,--which tears without scruple the infant from the
mother, the wife from the husband, the parent from the child. In the
strong but just language of another: "It is the full measure of pure,
unmixed, unsophisticated wickedness; and scorning all competition or
comparison, it stands without a rival in the secure, undisputed
possession of its detestable preeminence."
So fearful an evil should have its remedies. The following are among the
many which have been from time to time proposed:--
1. Placing the slaves in the condition of the serfs of Poland and
Russia, fixed to the soil, and without the right on the part of the
master to sell or remove them. This was intended as a preliminary to
complete emancipation at some remote period, but it is impossible to
perceive either its justice or expediency.
2. Gradual abolition, an indefinite term, but which is understood to
imply the draining away drop by drop, of the great ocean of wrong;
plucking off at long intervals some, straggling branches of the moral
Upas; holding out to unborn generations the shadow of a hope which the
present may never feel gradually ceasing to do evil; gradually refraining
from robbery, lust, and murder: in brief, obeying a short-sighted and
criminal policy rather than the commands of God.
3. Abstinence on the part of the people of the free states from the use
of the known products of slave labor, in order to render that labor
profitless. Beyond a doubt the example of conscientious individuals may
have a salutary effect upon the minds of some of the slave-holders; I but
so long as our confederacy exists, a commercial intercourse with slave
states 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 to
the second article of its constitution, is to colonize the free people of
color residing among us, in Africa or such other place as Congress may
direct. Steadily adhering to this object it has nothing to do with
slavery; and I allude to it as a remedy only because some of its friends
have in view an eventual abolition or an amelioration of the evil.
Let facts speak. The Colonization Society was organized in 1817. It has
two hundred and eighteen auxiliary societies. The legislatures of
fourteen states have recommended it. Contributions have poured into its
treasury from every quarter of the United States. Addresses in its favor
have been heard from all our pulpits. It has been in operation sixteen
years. During this period nearly one million human beings have died in
slavery: 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 in
conveying the slaves to Africa; in other words, abolishing slavery. In
this very charitable occupation it has carried away of manumitted slaves
613
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 bloody
as the code of Draco, violating the laws of Cod and the unalienable
rights of His children?--(It will be seen that the society approves of
these laws.)--But why talk of amelioration? Amelioration of what? of
sin, of crime unutterable, of a system of wrong and outrage horrible in
the eye of God Why seek to mark the line of a selfish policy, a carnal
expediency between the criminality of hell and that repentance and its
fruits enjoined of heaven?
For the principles and views of the society we must look to its own
statements and admissions; to its Annual Reports; to those of its
auxiliaries; to the speeches and writings of its advocates; and to its
organ, the African Repository.