The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 7.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point. Need I refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloody insurrection of Etruria, the horrible servile wars of Sicily and Capua? Or, to come down to later times, to France in the fourteenth century, Germany in the sixteenth, to Malta in the last? Need I call to mind the untold horrors of St. Domingo, when that island, under the curse of its servile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven,—--an open hell? Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded,—the frequent slave insurrections of the South? One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must still be fresh in your recollection, —Southampton, with its fired dwellings and ghastly dead! Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the death struggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, the lamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence and beauty, and childhood, and hoary age!

‘The hour of emancipation,’ said Thomas Jefferson, ‘is advancing in the march of time. It will come. If not brought on by the generous energy of our own minds, it will come by the bloody process of St. Domingo’

To the just and prophetic language of your own great statesman I have but a few words to add. They shall be those of truth and soberness.

We regard the slave system in your section of the country as a great evil, moral and political,—an evil which, if left to itself for even a few years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of the blacks.