Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

Passing to his second proposition, which affirmed the right of the free States to be in at the death of slavery, he pointed out that slavery was not sectional but national in its influence. If the consequences of slave-holding did not flow beyond the limits of the slave section, the right would still exist, on the principle that what affected injuriously one part must ultimately hurt the whole body politic. But it was not true that slavery concerned only the States where it existed — the parts where it did not exist were involved by their constitutional liability to be called on for aid in case of a slave insurrection, as they were in the slave representation clause of the national compact, through which the North was deprived of its “just influence in the councils of the nation.” And, furthermore, the right of the free States to agitate the question inhered in the principle of majority rule --the white population of the free States being almost double that of the slave States, “and the voice of this overwhelming majority should be potential.” He repelled in strong language the wrongfulness of allowing the South to multiply the votes of those freemen by the master's right to count three for every five slaves, “because it is absurd and anti-republican to suffer property to be represented as men, and vice versa, because it gives the South an unjust ascendancy over other portions of territory, and a power which may be perverted on every occasion.”

He looked without shrinking upon the possibility of disunion even then.

“ Now I say that, on the broad system of equal rights,” he declared, “this inequality should no longer be tolerated. If it cannot be speedily put ”