Henry Clarke Wright

“ She is ever sounding in the ears of the slaves—"Give me liberty or give me death!"—"Resistance to slaveholders is obedience to God." All the slaveholders and white men and women in Virginia are ever saying to the slaves, "If you, or any others, were to do unto us as we are daily and hourly doing unto you, we would kill, slay and destroy you. If we were in your places, we would kill every man, woman and child that should attempt to prevent us from getting and maintaining our freedom." Thus your State appeals to the slaves, to incite them to a bloody insurrection. ”

“ Yet before it is born, but one feeling fills her soul,—a feeling of deep, settled hostility against its existence,—a feeling that it has no right to be. Its existence is unsanctioned and unconsecrated by its mother. The child struggles into life against the spirit of murder in her heart. Talk of a mother’s joy over such a birth! It is blasphemy against Maternity.
Pause, my friend, and let your thoughts dwell on this subject. You would exalt and perfect human nature. You live but to people this earth with nobler types of men and women. It is the only true and great end of life. ”

“ It is the cry of anguish from woman’s riven heart to man, to save her from the agony and blighting curse of a maternity whose sufferings she is not prepared joyfully to meet, and from which her entire nature shrinks with dread and loathing; to save her from the revolting alternative of killing her child before it is born, or of giving life to one whose very existence is loathed by her. Several times, the crime of an undesired maternity had been perpetrated upon her by her husband, and each time the child had been killed by herself or by a doctor, before its birth. ”

“ He sought to arouse the soul of this nation, the intellect, the conscience, the sympathy and will, to a state of resistance, rebellion, insurrection against slaveholders, and against every law. Constitution, Bible or religion that sanctions and sustains them in turning men, women, and children into beasts and chattels. He sought to accomplish this chief end of his existence by running off slaves or by death. He has triumphed by the gallows! The blood of John Brown appeals to God and Humanity against slaveholders and their confederates in crime. ”

“ Consider well the power your wife holds over your child, and over its destiny as a man or woman, and ask—Shall that power be for good or evil? Shall it be exerted to give your child a beautiful, healthy, vigorous body, or a body corrupted and deformed by a painful and loathsome disease? Shall it be used to secure to your child’s soul tenderness, truth, justice, generosity and nobleness, or wrath, revenge, meanness and falsehood?—to impress on its moral nature the stamp of Divinity, or the stamp of a thief, a slaveholder, a pirate, a murderer, or an assassin? ”

“ The resolution, as you will see, simply affirms the right and duty of resistance, not merely to slavery as a principle or an abstraction, but to slaveholders, the living embodiment of slavery. The South embody slavery and resistance to liberty in their whole life. We would arouse the North to embody liberty and resistance to slavery in their whole life. Wherever the people of the South live, whether in domestic, social, ecclesiastical, political or commercial life, they embody death to liberty. We would stir up the people of the North to embody death to slavery wherever they live. ”

“ Let the North cut loose from their bloody alliance with slaveholders, imitate John Brown, and form a league of offence and defence with the slaves against their enslavers. Let them do in defence of freedom to the slaves whatever they would do in defence of their own freedom. Let the North use all their power to give liberty to the slaves, which they would use to secure freedom to themselves. If they would use the torch and sabre to obtain and secure freedom to themselves, let them use the same weapons to give freedom to the slaves of Virginia. ”

“ To that husband who shall embody your Ernest, the love, the respect and trust of his wife, will be as the sun and dew of heaven to the opening buds of spring; they will expand and beautify his manly soul, and cause his manhood to give out all its beauty and fragrance, and shed a bright and steady light on the pathway of his wife, and bring enduring rest to her heart in the home of her wedded love. We would live in and for each other, and in and for our offspring. ”

“ Your soul promptly answers, “That of the HUSBAND and the FATHER.” No man who has lived in those relations can doubt the truth of your answer. God speaks to you through your wife and child, as through no other being of the past or present. Through those loved ones, He, as it were, renders himself visible, audible, tangible to you, and you meet him and talk with him face to face. They are his natural prophets and messiahs to you—the media through which the God-element of the universe flows into you, quickening and vitalizing, and arousing to energetic activity, all the powers of your manhood. ”

“ The blessings of the God of the oppressed rest upon you! This is the prayer of thousands who have known you for years, and entirely sympathize with you in the one great object of your life—i.e., to arouse this nation to look the sin, the shame and danger of slavery in the face. We have felt the deepest interest in your plans and movements, as we have known and watched them the last four years; and we have wondered that those who hold to armed resistance to tyrants have not more cheerfully and numerously gathered around your standard of insurrection against slaveholders. ”

“ The people of the North, in the family and social circle, in the church, at the ballot-box, in the market, and in all places where they think it their right and duty to live, were to be made to regard and treat slaveholders as they do burglars, thieves, robbers, murderers, midnight assassins, and ravishers of helpless innocence, and to feel that, as such, they have no right to breathe God's air, to see his light, or to live in his universe; that, as slaveholders, they have no rights which any man is bound to respect. ”

“ Will man ever be pure, noble and strong enough to protect woman, in or out of legal marriage, against his own passion? Must woman always put herself on the defensive, to protect herself against man? Will man never see the fact as it is, that all that is manly, true, great and noble in his nature, must be preserved and perpetuated only by the protection of woman against being victimized to his sensual gratification? O man! thou art all noble and God-like, to the loving and trusting heart of woman! ”

“ Thirty years ago, the entire North, in its domestic, social, religious, political, commercial and military life, was in the same state of abject subserviency to slaveholders. The people seemed not only to have lost the power to resist them, but actually to feel honored that slave-breeders and slave-catchers counted them worthy to do their work of shame and infamy. The very life of their souls to resist seemed to have become extinct. So far as insurrection against them was concerned, the nation was dead and buried in an ignominious grave of servile submission. ”

“ When I was married, I was most lamentably ignorant of the laws of my nature, especially of those designed to govern Maternity. But my husband, in regard to maternity, and the relation that leads to it, is a most kind and considerate man, and I love and honor him all the more for it. I wish your book on ‘Marriage and Parentage’ had fallen into our hands before our children were born; we might have given them more loving hearts, and nobler natures, in body and soul, by understanding better how surrounding influences affect us before birth. ”

“ Let them be assured there are tens of thousands of John Browns now hovering on the confines of slavery, ready to enter in and scatter themselves all over the South, to incite slaves to insurrection against their masters, and to guide them on their way to Canada, bidding defiance to slaveholders, and all slaveholding and slave-catching constitutions and laws; being ready to meet the alternative of a slaveholder's gallows. That instrument of torture has lost its terrors. It is the right and duty of slaves to gain and defend their freedom. ”

“ To maintain your self-respect in your relations with her, to perfect your growth and happiness as a husband, you must cause your physical nature to be tenderly cherished and reverenced by her in all the sacred intimacies of home. No matter how much she reverences your intellectual, or your social power, if she shrinks with disgust from all contact with your person, if by reason of your uncalled-for passional manifestations, you have made your physical manhood disagreeable, and all personal contact painful, how can you, in her presence, preserve a sense of manly pride and dignity as a husband? ”

“ To John Brown it says, "Hasten to Harper's Ferry; incite the slaves to run away, and help them to exterminate all who shall attempt to impede their exodus!"
Thus, in the very death-warrant under which Brown is hung, you and Virginia pronounce him innocent of all evil, and justify the very deed for which you hang him. In every way, you pronounce him guiltless. Yet, you have hung him! Are you not a murderer? Yes! Henry A. Wise and Virginia being witnesses. Yes! the heart, the conscience, the reason and history of the nation being witnesses. ”

“ You murdered your own child, not, indeed, with your own hands,—you drove another to do the desperate deed, and that other, your wife, who came to you with a loving and trusting heart, to save and to be saved; and you, to gratify your selfish passion, drove her to the commission 62of the crime of ante-natal child-murder,—a crime that must forever weigh upon her soul like a mountain of guilt and shame; a deed, after the doing of which, no true woman can ever, in this life, stand proud and stainless, in conscious innocence and dignity, before the tribunal of her womanhood. ”

“ Sir, the unceasing labor he has given to the cause of liberty and humanity for these twenty past years will cause his name and his memory to be cherished and revered ages after the stone which shall lie upon his grave shall crumble and mingle with the dust. [Hear! hear!] And when that great day comes, as surely it will come,—for God reigns,—when three millions of men, held in slavery in this republic, shall be free, the friends of liberty will acknowledge, what many now deny, the patriotism of William Lloyd Garrison. ”

“ But how crushed, intellectually and socially, must that wife become, on whom an ignorant, a thoughtless, or a brutal husband, is ever imposing a maternity from which her soul recoils! Her intellect becomes dwarfed and her social nature dead. How can it be otherwise, especially when driven to the deed of ante-natal murder, to escape the horror of giving birth to children accursed by the mother that bore them? Hope becomes extinct, and the light of her soul goes out in utter darkness! ”

“ As to armed or military resistance to slaveholders, or to any evil-doers, my soul has ever resisted it, and ever must, as inexpedient, unjust and inhuman. Life or liberty can never be protected by killing men. Man-killing is the basis of man-stealing. Human liberty can never be made sacred by the taking of human life. Respect for liberty can never result from contempt for life. Liberty will be safe, only as life is reverenced. The inviolability of life is the only foundation of absolute safety to liberty. ”

“ I would make my Womanhood a crown of glory to your life, your Manhood to mine. Shall we allow the very life-essence of our being to be exhausted in sensual indulgence, till we lose the power to feel and appreciate a pure spiritual love? My heart is reaching out to you for life, at the same time that my body is suffering untold agonies from the outrages perpetrated on my nature to escape the anguish and horror of an unwelcome maternity ”

“ They say the North sympathizes with Brown and his deeds, and in so doing seeks to incite insurrection, rebellion, and resistance among their slaves. It is true. Their fears are well founded. Why seek to lull them into security till the storm shall burst upon them in a way they dream not of,—as it surely will, and deluge their homes and their plantations with blood, unless they escape by repentance and emancipation? Why should you seek to quiet their guilty consciences and awakened terrors?
The masses of the North are in sympathy with Brown and his deeds. ”