No one who did not vote for the Resolution is responsible for it. No
one is asked to quit our platform. We, the majority, only ask him to
extend to our opinions the same toleration that we extend to him,
and agreeing to differ on this point, work together where we can. We
proscribe no man for difference of opinion.
It is said, that having refused in 1840, to say that a man _ought to
vote_, on the ground that such a resolution would be tyrannical and
intolerant, the Society is manifestly inconsistent now in taking
upon itself to say that no abolitionist _can_ consistently vote. But
the inconsistency is only apparent and not real.
There may he a thousand reasons why a particular individual ought
not to do an act, though the act be innocent in itself. It would be
tyranny therefore in a society which can properly take notice of but
one subject, slavery, to promulgate the doctrine that all its
members ought to do any particular act, as for instance, to vote, to
give money, to lecture, to petition, or the like. The particular
circumstances and opinions of each one must regulate his actions.
All we have a right to ask is, that he do for the slave's cause as
much as he does for any other of equal importance. But when an act
is wrong, it is no intolerance to say to the whole world that it
ought _not to be done_. After the abolitionist has granted that
slavery is wrong, we have the right to judge him by his own
principles, and arraign him for inconsistency that, so believing, he
helps the slaveholder by his oath.
The following pages have been hastily thrown together in explanation
of the vote above recited. They make no pretension to a full
argument of the topic. I hope that in a short time I shall get
leisure sufficient to present to our opponents, unless some one does
it for me, a full statement of the reasons which have led us to this
step.
I am aware that we non-voters are rather singular. But history, from
the earliest Christians downwards, is full of instances of men who
refused all connection with government, and all the influence which
office could bestow, rather than deny their principles, or aid in
doing wrong. Yet I never heard them called either idiots or
over-scrupulous. Sir Thomas More need never have mounted the scaffold,
had he only consented to take the oath of supremacy. He had only to
tell a lie with solemnity, as we are asked to do, and he might not
only have saved his life, but, as the trimmers of his day would have
told him, doubled his influence. Pitt resigned his place as Prime
Minister of England, rather than break faith with the Catholics of
Ireland. Should I not resign a petty ballot rather than break faith
with the slave? But I was specially glad to find a distinct
recognition of the principle upon which we have acted, applied to a
different point, in the life of that Patriarch of the Anti-Slavery
enterprise, Granville Sharpe. It is in a late number of the
Edinburgh Review. While an underclerk in the War Office, he
sympathized with our fathers in their struggle for independence.
"Orders reached his office to ship munitions of war to the revolted
colonies. If his hand had entered the account of such a cargo, it
would have contracted in his eyes the stain of innocent blood. To
avoid this pollution, he resigned his place and his means of
subsistence at a period of life when be could no longer hope to find
any other lucrative employment." As the thoughtful clerk of the War
Office takes his hat down from the peg where it has used to hang for
twenty years, methinks I hear one of our opponents cry out,
"Friend Sharpe, you are absurdly scrupulous." "You may innocently
aid Government in doing wrong," adds another. While Liberty Party
yelps at his heels, "My dear Sir, you are quite losing your influence!"
And indeed it is melancholy to reflect how, from that moment the
mighty underclerk of the War Office(!) dwindled into the mere
Granville Sharpe of history! the man of whom Mansfield and Hargrave
were content to learn law, and Wilberforce, philanthropy.
One friend proposes to vote for men who shall be pledged not to take
office unless the oath to the Constitution is dispensed with, and
who shall then go on to perform in their offices only such duties as
we, their constituents, approve. He cites, in support of his view,
the election of O'Connell to the House of Commons, in 1828, I believe,
just one year before the "Oath of Supremacy," which was the
objectionable one to the Catholics, was dispensed with. Now, if we
stood in the same circumstances as the Catholics did in 1828, the
example would be in point. When the public mind is thoroughly
revolutionized, and ready for the change, when the billow has
reached its height and begins to crest into foam, then such a
measure may bring matters to a crisis. But let us first go through,
in patience, as O'Connell did, our twenty years of agitation.
Waiving all other objections, this plan seems to me mere playing at
politics, and an entire waste of effort.
It loses our high position as moral reformers; it subjects us to all
that malignant opposition and suspicion of motives which attend the
array of parties; and while thus closing up our access to the
national conscience, it wastes in fruitless caucussing and party
tactics, the time and the effort which should have been directed to
efficient agitation.
The history of our Union is lesson enough, for every candid mind, of
the fatal effects of every, the least, compromise with evil. The
experience of the fifty years passed under it, shows us the slaves
trebling in numbers;--slaveholders monopolizing the offices and
dictating the policy of the Government;--prostituting the strength
and influence of the Nation to the support of slavery here and
elsewhere;--trampling on the rights of the free States, and making
the courts of the country their tools. To continue this disastrous
alliance longer is madness. The trial of fifty years only proves
that it is impossible for free and slave States to unite on any terms,
without all becoming partners in the guilt and responsible for the
sin of slavery. Why prolong the experiment? Let every honest man
join in the outcry of the American Anti-Slavery Society,