[72]
The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than two millions of our fellowbeings as your property; not, indeed, morally, really, de facto, but still legally your property!
We acknowledge that you have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this ‘property,’ but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantage of that power.
For truth will not allow us to admit that any human law or compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God and the eternal laws of Nature.
We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holding states to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must be dangerous to themselves in time and eternity, and full of injustice to their slaves and to their brethren of the free states.
Because the slave has never forfeited his right to freedom, and the continuance of his servitude is a continuance of robbery; and because, in the event of a servile war, the people of the free states would be called upon to take a part in its unutterable horrors.
New England would obey that call, for she will abide unto death by the Constitution of the land.
Yet what must be the feelings of her citizens, while engaged in hunting down like wild beasts their fellow-men—--brutal and black it may be, but still oppressed, suffering human beings, struggling madly and desperately for their liberty, if they feel and know that the necessity of so doing has resulted from a blind fatality on the part of the
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Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and company, 1888-89.
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