Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

I present myself as the advocate of my enslaved countrymen, at a time when their claims cannot be shuffled out of sight, and on an occasion which entitles me to a respectful hearing in their behalf. If I am asked to prove their title to liberty, my answer is, that the Fourth of July is not a day to be wasted in establishing “self-evident truths.” In the name of the God who has made us of one blood, and in whose image we are created; in the name of the Messiah, who came to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of a prison to them that are bound—I demand the immediate emancipation of those who are pining in slavery on the American soil, whether they are fattening for the shambles in Maryland and Virginia, or are wasting, as with a pestilent disease, on the cotton and sugar plantations of Alabama and Louisiana; whether they are male or female, young or old, vigorous or infirm. I make this demand, not for the children merely, but the parents also; not for one, but for all; not with restrictions and limitations, but unconditionally. I assert their perfect equality with ourselves, as a part of the human race, and their inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That this demand is founded in justice, and is therefore irresistible, the whole ration is this day acknowledging, as upon oath at the bar of the world. And not until, by a formal vote, the people repudiate the Declaration of Independence as a false and dangerous instrument, and cease to keep this festival in honor of liberty, as unworthy of note or remembrance; not until they spike every cannon, and muffle every bell, and disband every procession, and quench every bonfire, and gag every orator; not until they brand Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson, and Hancock as fanatics and madmen; not until they place themselves again in the [31] condition of colonial subserviency to Great Britain, or transform this republic into an imperial government; not until they cease pointing exultingly to Bunker Hill, and the plains of Concord and Lexington; not, in fine, until they deny the authority of God, and proclaim themselves to be destitute of principles and humanity, will I argue the question, as one of doubtful disputation, on an occasion like this, whether our slaves are entitled to the rights and privileges of freemen. That question is settled irrevocably. There is no man to be found, unless he has a brow of brass and a heart of stone, who will dare to contest it on a day like this. A state of vassalage is pronounced, by universal acclamation, to be such as no man, or body of men, ought to submit to for one moment. I therefore tell the American slaves that the time for their emancipation is come; that, their own task-masters being witnesses, they are created equal to the rest of mankind, and possess an inalienable right to liberty; and that no man has a right to hold them in bondage. I counsel them not to fight for their freedom, both on account of the hopelessness of the effort, and because it is rendering evil for evil; but I tell them, not less emphatically, it is not wrong for them to refuse to wear the yoke of slavery any longer. Let them shed no blood—enter into no conspiracies —raise no murderous revolts; but, however and wherever they can break their fetters, God give them courage to do so! And should they attempt to elope from their house of bondage, and come to the North, may each of them find a covert from the search of the spoiler, and an invincible public sentiment to shield them from the grasp of the kidnapper! Success attend them in their flight to Canada, to touch whose monarchical soil insures freedom to every republican slave!

Is this preaching sedition? Sedition against what? Not the lives of the Southern oppressors, for I renew the solemn injunction, “Shed no blood!” —but against unlawful authority, and barbarous usage, and unrequited toil. If slaveholders are still obstinately bent upon plundering and starving their long-suffering victims, let them look well to consequences! To save them from danger, I am not obligated to suppress the truth, or to stop proclaiming liberty “throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” No, indeed. There are two important truths, which, as far as practicable, I mean every slave shall be made to understand. The first is, that he has a right to his freedom now; the other is, that this is recognized as a self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence. Sedition, forsooth. Why, what are the American people doing this day? In theory, maintaining the freedom and equality of the human race; and, in practice, declaring that all tyrants ought to be extirpated from the face of the earth! We are giving to our slaves the following easy sums for resolution: If the principle involved in a threepenny tax on tea justified a seven years war, how much blood may be lawfully spilt in resisting the principle that one human being has a right to the body and soul of another, on account of the color of the skin? Again, if the impressment of 6,000 American seamen by Great Britain furnished sufficient cause for a bloody struggle with that nation, and the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of capital in self-defence, how many lives may be taken, by way of retribution, on account of the enslavement as chattels of more than 2,000,000 of American laborers?

Oppression and insurrection go hand-inhand, as cause and effect are allied together. In what age of the world have tyrants reigned with impunity, or the victims of tyranny not resisted unto blood? Besides our grand insurrection against the authority of the mother country, there have been many insurrections, during the last 200 years, in various sections of the land, on the part of the victims of our tyranny, but without the success that attended our own struggle. The last was the memorable one in Southampton, Va., headed by a black patriot, nicknamed, in the contemptuous nomenclature of slavery, “Nat” Turner. The name does not strike the ear so harmoniously as that of Washington, or Lafayette, or Hancock, or Warren; but the name is nothing. It is not in the power of all the slave-holders upon earth to render odious the memory of [32] that sable chieftain. “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God” was our Revolutionary motto. We acted upon that motto—what more did Nat Turner? Says George McDuffie: “A people who deliberately submit to oppression, with a full knowledge that they are oppressed, are fit only to be slaves. No tyrant ever made a slave; no community, however small, having the spirit of freedom, ever yet had a master. It does not belong to men to count the costs and calculate the hazards of vindicating their rights and defending their liberties.” So reasoned Nat Turner, and acted accordingly. Was he a patriot, or a monster? Do we mean to say to the oppressed of all nations, in the sixty-third year of our independence, and on July 4, that our example in 1776 was a bad one, and ought not to be followed? As a Christian non-resident I, for one am prepared to say so; but are the people ready to say no chains ought to be broken by the hands of violence, and no blood spilt in defence of inalienable human rights, in any quarter of the globe? If not then our slaves will peradventure take us at our word and there will be given unto us blood to drink, for we are worthy. Why accuse abolitionists of stirring them up to insurrection? The charge is false; but what if it were true? If any man has a right to fight for liberty, this right equally extends to all men subjected to bondage. In claiming this right for themselves, the American people necessarily concede it to all mankind. If, therefore, they are found tyrannizing over any part of the human race, they voluntarily seal their own death-warrant, and confess that they deserve to perish.

What are the banners ye exalt?—the deeds

That raised your fathers' pyramid of fame?
Ye show the wound that still in history bleeds,
And talk exulting of the patriot's name—
Then, when your words have waked a kindred flame
And slaves behold the freedom ye adore,
And deeper feel their sorrow and their shame,
Ye double all the fetters that they wore,
And press them down to earth, till hope exults no more!

But, it seems, abolitionists have the audacity to tell the slaves, not only of their rights, but also of their wrongs! That must be a rare piece of information to them, truly. Tell a man who has just had his back flayed by the lash, till a pool of blood is at his feet, that somebody has flogged him! Tell him who wears an iron collar upon his neck, and a chain upon his heels, that his limbs are fettered, as if he knew it not! Tell those who receive no compensation for their toil that they are unrighteously defrauded! In spite of all their whippings, and deprivations, and forcible separations, like cattle in the market, it seems that the poor slaves realized a heaven of blissful ignorance, until their halcyon dreams were disturbed by the pictorial representations and exciting descriptions of the abolitionists! What! have not the slaves eyes? Have they not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Are they not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as freemen are? “If we prick them, do they not bleed? If we tickle them, do they not laugh? If we poison them, do they not die? And if we wrong them, will they not be revenged?”

“For the slave-holders,” we are told, “there is no peace, by night or by day; but every moment is a moment of alarm, and their enemies are of their own household.” It is the hand of a friendly vindicator, moreover, that rolls up the curtain! What but the most atrocious tyranny on the part of the masters, and the most terrible sufferings on the part of the slaves, can account for such alarm, such insecurity, such apprehensions that “even a more horrible catastrophe” than that of arson and murder may transpire nightly? It requires all the villany that has ever been charged upon Southern oppressors, and all the wretchedness that has ever been ascribed to the oppressed, to work out so fearful a result—and that the statement is true, the most distinguished slave-holders have more than once certified. That it is true, the entire code of slave laws—whips and yokes and fetters—the nightly patrol—restriction of locomotion on the part of the slaves, except with passes—muskets, pistols, and bowie-knives in the bed-chambers during [33] the hours of rest—the fear of intercommunication of colored freemen and the slaves—the prohibition of even alphabetical instruction, under pains and penalties, to the victims of wrong—the refusal to admit their testimony against persons of a white complexion—the wild consternation and furious gnashing of teeth exhibited by the chivalric oppressors at the sight of an anti-slavery publication—the rewards offered for the persons of abolitionists—the whipping of Dresser, and the murder of Lovejoy—the plundering of the United States mail—the application of lynch law to all who are found sympathizing with the slave population as men, south of the Potomac—the reign of mobocracy in place of constitutional law— and, finally, the Pharaoh-like conduct of the masters, in imposing new burdens and heavier fetters upon their down-trodden vassals—all these things, together with a long catalogue of others, prove that the abolitionists have not “set aught down in malice” against the South; that they have exaggerated nothing. They warn us, as with miraculous speech, that, unless justice be speedily done, a bloody catastrophe is to come, which will roll a gory tide of desolation through the land, and may, peradventure, blot out the memory of the scenes of Santo Domingo. They are the premonitory rumblings of a great earthquake—the lava token of a heaving volcano! God grant that, while there is time and a way to escape, we may give heed to these signals of impending retribution!

One thing I know full well. Calumniated, abhorred, persecuted as the abolitionists have been, they constitute the body-guard of the slave-holders, not to strengthen their opposition, but to shield them from the vengeance of their slaves.

Instead of seeking their destruction, abolitionists are endeavoring to save them from midnight conflagration and sudden death, by beseeching them to remove the cause of insurrection; and by holding out to slaves the hope of a peaceful deliverance. We do not desire that any should perish. Having a conscience void of offence in this matter, and cherishing a love for our race which is “without partiality and without hypocrisy,” no impeachment of our motives, or assault upon our character, can disturb the serenity of our minds; nor can any threats of violence, or prospect of suffering, deter us from our purpose. That we manifest a bad spirit is not to be denied on the testimony of the Southern slave-driver, or his Northern apologist. That our philanthropy is exclusive, in the favor of but one party, is not proved by our denouncing the oppressor, and sympathizing with his victim. That we are seeking popularity, is not apparent from our advocating an odious and unpopular cause, and vindicating, at the loss of our reputation, the rights of a people who are reckoned among the offscouring of all things. That our motives are disinterested, they who swim with the popular current, and partake of the gains of unrighteousness, and plunder the laborers of their wages, are not competent to determine. That our language is uncharitable and un-Christian, they who revile us as madmen, fanatics, incendiaries, traitors, cut-throats, etc., cannot be allowed to testify. That our measures are violent is not demonstrated by the fact that we wield no physical weapons, pledge ourselves not to countenance insurrection, and present the peaceful front of non-resistance to those who put our lives in peril. That our object is chimerical or unrighteous is not substantiated by the fact of its being commenced by Almighty God, and supported by His omnipotence, as well as approved by the wise and good in every age and in all countries. If the charge, so often brought against us, be true, that our temper is rancorous, and our spirit turbulent, how has it happened that, during so long a conflict with slavery, not a single instance can be found in which an abolitionist has committed a breach of the peace, or violated any law of his country? If it be true that we are not actuated by the highest principles of rectitude, nor governed by the spirit of forbearance, I ask once more how it has come to pass that, when our meetings have been repeatedly broken up by lawless men, our property burned in the streets, our dwellings sacked, our persons brutally assailed, and our lives put in imminent peril, we have refused to lift a finger in self-defence, or to maintain our rights in the spirit of worldly patriotism? [34]

If it must be so, let the defenders of slavery still have all the brick-bats, bowie-knives, and pistols, which the land can furnish; but let us possess all the arguments, facts, warnings, and promises which insure the final triumph of our holy cause.

Nothing is easier than for the abolitionists, if they were so disposed, as it were in the twinkling of an eye, to “cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,” and fill this whole land with the horrors of a civil and servile commotion. It is only for them to hoist but one signal, to kindle but a single torch, to give but a single bugle-call, and the 3,000,000 of colored victims of oppression, both bond and free, would start up as one man, and make the American soil drunk with the blood of the slain. How fearful and tremendous is the power, for good and evil, thus lodged in their hands! Besides being stimulated by a desire to redress the wrongs of their enslaved countrymen, they could plead in extenuation of their conduct for resorting to arms (and their plea would be valid, according to the theory and practice of republicanism), that they had cruel wrongs of their own to avenge, and sacred rights to secure, inasmuch as they are thrust out beyond the pale of the Constitution, excluded from one-half of the Union by the fiat of the lynch code, deprived of the protection of the law, and branded as traitors, because they dare to assert that God wills all men to be free! Now, I frankly put it to the understandings of Southern men, whether, in view of these considerations, it is adding anything to their safety, or postponing the much-dreaded catastrophe a single hour—whether, in fact, it is not increasing their peril, and rendering an early explosion more probable—for them to persevere in aggravating the condition of their slaves, by tightening their chains and increasing the heavy burdens —or wreaking their malice upon the free people of color or in adopting every base and unlawful measure to wound the character, destroy the property, and jeopard the lives of abolitionists, and thus leaving no stone unturned to inflame them to desperation? All this Southern men have done, and are still doing, as if animated by an insane desire to be destroyed.

The object of the Anti-slavery Association is not to destroy men's lives, despots though they be, but to prevent the spilling of human blood. It is to enlighten the understanding, arouse the conscience, affect the heart. We rely upon moral power alone for success. The ground upon which we stand belongs to no sect or party—it is holy ground. Whatever else may divide us in opinion, in this one thing we are agreed, that slave-holding is a crime under all circumstances, and ought to be immediately and unconditionally abandoned. We enforce upon no man either a political or a religious test as a condition of membership; but at the same time we expect every abolitionist to carry out his principles consistently, impartially, faithfully, in whatever station he may be called to act, or wherever conscience may lead him to go. I hail this union of hearts as a bright omen that all is not lost. To the slave-holding South it is more terrible than a military army with banners. It is indeed a sublime spectacle to see men forgetting their jarring creeds and party affinities, and embracing each other as one and indivisible in a struggle in behalf of our common Christianity and our common nature. God grant that no root of bitterness may spring up to divide us asunder! “United we stand, divided we fall,” and if we fall what remains for our country but a fearful looking for of judgment and of fiery indignation that shall consume it? Fall we cannot if our trust be in the Lord of Hosts and in the power of His might—not in man, nor any body of men. Divided we cannot be if we truly “remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,” and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Genuine abolitionism is not a hobby got up for personal or associated aggrandizement; it is not a political ruse; it is not a spasm of sympathy which lasts but for a moment, leaving the system weak and worn; it is not a fever of enthusiasm; it is not the fruit of fanaticism; it is not a spirit of faction. It is of Heaven, not of men. It lives in the heart as a vital principle. It is an essential part of Christianity, and aside from it there can be no humanity. Its scope is not confined to the slave population of the United [35] States, but embraces mankind. Opposition cannot weary it out, force cannot put it down, fire cannot consume it. It is the spirit of Jesus who was sent “to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God.” Its principles are self-evident, its measures rational, its purposes merciful and just. It cannot be diverted from the path of duty, though all earth and hell oppose; for it is lifted far above all earth-born fear. When it fairly takes possession of the soul, you may trust the soul-carrier anywhere, that he will not be recreant to humanity. In short, it is a life, not an impulse—a quenchless flame of philanthropy, not a transient spark of sentimentalism.

Will it be retorted that we dare not resist—that we are cowards? Cowards! no man believes it. They are the dastards who maintain might makes right; whose arguments are brick-bats and rotten eggs; whose weapons are dirks and bowieknives; and whose code of justice is lynch law. A love of liberty, instead of unnerving men, makes them intrepid, heroic, invincible. It was so at Thermopylaelig;—it was so on Bunker Hill.

Who so tranquil, who so little agitated, in storm or sunshine, as the abolitionists? But what consternation, what running to and fro like men at their wits' end, what trepidation, what anguish of spirit, on the part of their enemies! How Southern slave-mongers quake and tremble at the faintest whisperings of an abolitionist? For, truly, “the thief doth fear each bush an officer.” Oh! the great poet of nature is right-

Thrice is he arm'd that hath his quarrel just;
And he but naked, though lock'd up in steel,
Whose conscience with injustice is corrupted.

A greater than Shakespeare certifies the “wicked flee when no man pursueth; but the righteous are bold as a lion.” In this great contest of right against wrong, of liberty against slavery, who are the wicked, if they be not those who, like vultures and vampires, are gorging themselves with human blood; if they be not the plunderers of the poor, the spoilers of the defenceless, the traffickers in “slaves and the souls of men” ? Who are the cowards, if not those who shrink from manly argumentation, the light of truth, the concussion of mind, and a fair field; if not those whose prowess, stimulated by whiskey potations or the spirit of murder, grows rampant as the darkness of night approaches; whose shouts and yells are savage and fiend-like; who furiously exclaim: “Down with free discussion! down with the liberty of the press! down with the right of petition! down with constitutional law!” ; who rifle mail-bags, throw type and printing-presses into the river, burn public halls dedicated to “virtue, liberty, and independence,” and assassinate the defenders of inalienable human rights?

And who are the righteous, in this case, if they be not those who will “have no fellowship with the unfruitful words of darkness, but rather reprove them” ; who maintain that the laborer is worthy of his hire, that the marriage institution is sacred, that slavery is a system cursed of God, that tyrants are the enemies of mankind, and that immediate emancipation should be given to all who are pining in bondage? Who are the truly brave, if not those who demand for truth and error alike free speech, a free press, an open arena, the right of petition, and no quarter? If not those, who, instead of skulking from the light, stand forth in the noontide blaze of day, and challenge their opponents to emerge from their wolf-like dens, that, by a rigid examination, it may be seen who has stolen the wedge of gold, in whose pocket are the thirty pieces of silver, and whose garments are stained with the blood of innocence?

The charge, then, that we are beside ourselves, that we are both violent and cowardly, is demonstrated to be false, in a signal manner. I thank God that the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but spiritual. I thank Him that, by His grace, and by our deep concern for the oppressed, we have been enabled, in Christian magnanimity, to pity and pray for our enemies, and to overcome their evil with good. Overcome, I say: not merely [36] suffered unresistingly, but conquered gloriously.