previous next
[263] the Liberator observed their usual frequency and measure. ‘In attacking the principles, and exposing the evil1 tendency, of the Society, we wish no one to understand us as saying that all its friends are equally guilty, or actuated by the same motives. Nor let him suppose that we exonerate any of them from reprehension.’ When it was reported that certain persons, in a distant part of the State, scrupled to subscribe for the Liberator because they favored gradual emancipation with transportation to Liberia, ‘We are glad to learn,’ he said, ‘that some2 have even a perverted conscience in that place; for on the subject of slavery we feared they had none at all.’

The Quaker mode of extinguishing slavery by abstaining from its products still commended itself to Mr. Garrison. ‘The free States,’ he says, in the second3 number of the Liberator, ‘receive and consume the productions of slave labor! The District of Columbia is national property; slavery exists in that District! Yet the free States are not involved in the guilt of slavery!’ In subsequent discussions of the subject he urged that the receiver was as bad as the thief; that ‘a merchant4 who loads his vessel with the proceeds of slavery, does nearly as much at helping forward the slave trade as he that loads his vessel in Africa with slaves.’ Slaves are held in bondage ‘because they are profitable to their owners,’ and the reasons for giving up the use of what they produce ‘affect the very existence of slavery—none5 can possibly be more solemn and conclusive. The people of New England are daily fastening new and heavier fetters upon the slaves, and putting an immense bribe into the hands of the planters, by consuming those articles which have been raised at the expense of the bodies and souls of two millions of their fellow-beings.’ ‘Entire abstinence from the products of slavery is the duty of6 every individual.’ He desired the multiplication of freeproduce societies to ‘strike at the root of slavery,’ and7 one of the objects of an American Anti-Slavery Society should be ‘to encourage planters to cultivate their lands8

1 Lib. 1.65.

2 Lib. 1.117.

3 Lib. 1.5.

4 Lib. 1.66.

5 Lib. 1.29.

6 Lib. 1.121.

7 Lib. 1.49.

8 Lib. 1.121.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Quaker (West Virginia, United States) (1)
New England (United States) (1)
Liberia (Liberia) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Lib (8)
W. L. Garrison (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: