[144] with suitable regulations, and they will make peaceable citizens. One million of degraded slaves are more dangerous to the welfare of the country than would be two millions of degraded freemen. 4. That, as a very large proportion of our colored population were born on American soil, they are at liberty to choose their own dwelling-place, and we possess no right to use coercive measures in their removal. Cherishing these views, therefore, I shall give no quarter to the open advocates of slavery, nor easily excuse those pseudophilanthropists who find an apology for its continuance in the condition of the slaves. It would give me pleasure, in concluding these remarks, to pass an elaborate eulogium upon the zealous and amiable philanthropist with whom I am associated; but, for obvious reasons, I forbear. Elsewhere I have not hesitated to bear testimony to his worth, and witnesses thereto are multiplying in every quarter. Two republics will assist in building his monument, which no time shall crumble. For myself, whatever else I may lack, I bring to this great cause a warm heart and a willing hand; nor shall I spare any efforts, in conjunction with the senior editor, to make the Genius of Universal Emancipation worthy of extensive partronage.
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1 The only direct appeal for immediate, as opposed to gradual, emancipation which appears to have been made in the United States prior to the above declaration of Garrison's, was in “A Treatise on Slavery, in which is shown forth the Evil of Slaveholding, both from the Light of Nature and Divine Revelation, by [Rev.] James Duncan.” This was a small volume printed at the Indiana Register office, in Vevay, Indiana, in the year 1824, in which the author showed the fallacy of gradualism, at the very outset, in his preface. The work is a remarkable one, and indicates that Mr. Duncan possessed great powers of reasoning, and rare clearness of vision, for that day, on the subject of slavery. He devoted much space to proving slavery to be a violation of all the Commandments, and of the Divine Law, opposed to republicanism, and hurtful to masters as well as slaves. Slaveholders were warned that they could not escape perdition for their sins, if they failed to repent and release their captives. The book, written from the extreme orthodox standpoint, bore evidence on every page of the vigor and earnestness of the writer, though he weakened it by an Appendix, in which he assented that the blacks should be kept under a certain tutelage for a time after emancipation, subject to patrols, obliged to bear passes, etc. It seems strange that so masterly an argument should have fallen dead, making no stir or impression, and being consigned to a speedy oblivion, in which it remained until discovered and reprinted in 1840 by the American Anti-Slavery Society; but the writer had the disadvantage of publishing his work in an obscure town and a remote State, where he had no facilities for forcing it upon the attention of the country at large. Nor did he follow it up by dedicating his life to the cause.
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