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ready with fresh resolutions, offered on behalf of the business committee:
Resolved, That the principles of anti-slavery forbid us, as1 abolitionists, to continue in the American Union, or to swear to support the Federal Constitution.2
Resolved, That so long as the South persists in slaveholding, abolitionists are bound to persist in urging a dissolution of the Union, as one of the most efficient means “to establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
One may still, with
Edmund Quincy, prefer this axiomatic formula to the more extended display of motives which
Mr. Garrison thought proper in the following resolves from his pen, introduced also through the business committee.
They had originally been prepared for the
Essex County Anti-Slavery Society in February, 1842:
3
Whereas, the existence of slavery is incompatible with the4 enjoyment of liberty in any country;
And whereas, it is morally and politically impossible for a just or equal union to exist between Liberty and Slavery;
And whereas, in the adoption of the American Constitution and in the formation of the Federal Government, a guilty and fatal compromise was made between the North and the South, by which slavery has been nourished, protected, and enlarged up to the present hour, to the impoverishment and disgrace of the nation, the sacrifice of civil and religious freedom, and the crucifixion of humanity;
And whereas, the South makes even moral opposition to her slave system a heinous crime, and avows her determination to perpetuate that system at all hazards, and under all circumstances;
And whereas, the right of petition has been repeatedly
