5. To give no countenance to any political party which is in2 favor of continuing in alliance with the slaveholding States, or which is for allowing slaveholders to act [sit?] in the national3 halls of legislation, or for entrusting them with any of the interests of freemen. 6. To persuade Northern voters, that the strongest political influence which they can wield for the overthrow of slavery, is, to cease sustaining the existing compact, by withdrawing from the polls, and calmly waiting for the time when a righteous government shall supersede the institutions of tyranny. 8. To endeavor to effect, by all just and peaceful means, such a change in the public sentiment of the North as shall convince the South that nothing but the immediate abolition of slavery can make us a united people.4This paper, together with Mr. Phillips's resolutions,5 was adopted by the Society by a large majority, after vigorous opposition from all quarters—Ellis Gray Loring, David Lee Child, Joseph Southwick, Abner Sanger,
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Mr. Garrison's part was a written address to the Friends1 of Freedom in the United States.
his document, in view of the first decade of the Society's existence, undertook a fresh declaration of its principles-first, as regards slavery, ‘that it ought to be immediately and forever abolished;’ and as regards the existing national compact, ‘that it is “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” ’ and that ‘henceforth, therefore, until slavery be abolished, the watchword, the rallying-cry, the motto on the banner of the American Anti-Slavery Society shall be, “no Union with slaveholders!”
’ ‘To accomplish this sublime resolution, the Society registers its sacred pledge’—to continue its agitation on the above lines:
3 Ante, p. 33.
4 So Washington, in a conversation at Mt. Vernon in 1798 with John Bernard, a highly intelligent English comedian, remarked of (gradual) emancipation: ‘Not only do I pray for it on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our Union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle’ (Bernard's “Retrospections of America,” New York, 1887, p. 91).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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