Maria Weston Chapman

“ From the commencement of our sacred struggle, we have been resisted by every religious sect, and made by turns the foot-ball of every political party. As among all sects and all parties, there are some who will never bow the knee to Baal, but are resolved to follow Right and Truth through flood and fire, come what may—these, by the irresistible affinity of principle, have come into our ranks, repudiating every sectarian distinction, every party badge, and refusing to march under any other banner than that of Humanity. ”

“ I may, then, say to you, with all the confidence, nay, certainty, which is inseparable from experience, knowledge, and utter self-abnegation in the matter, Work with the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lavish your time, your money, your labors, your prayers, in that field, which is the world, and you will reap a thousand fold, now and hereafter. This movement moves. It is alive. Hear how every thing mean and selfish struggles, hisses, and dies under its influence. ”

“ There are so many persons who will assent to an abstractly righteous proposition, though they start back in alarm from righteousness personified, that it was fortunate for the cause, if such were prevented by his faithfulness from clogging it with their useless numbers.
The most delightful and at the same time the most surprising feature of the Anti-Slavery cause was the harmonious co-operation of all engaged in its advancement. Delightful, because rare in any circumstances,—surprising, because the materials of which the Society was formed, were, to human eye, so discordant. ”

“ My disgust was unutterable, as yours, too, will be, if you desire the abolition of slavery more than the temporary triumph of sect or party, at the stupid schemes by which selfish men were then, as now, trying to make capital for themselves out of the sacred cause of human rights—seeking to sell the gift of the Holy Ghost for money. Hear them clamorously and meanly taking advantage of ignorance, for the promotion of self-interest. ”

“ For this they give all—wealth, youth, health, strength, life. Worldly success, obtained by slackening their labors against slavery, (and it is easy to have it on those terms at any moment, so placable a monster is the world,) strikes them like failure and disgrace. They have “scorned delights, and lived laborious days,” till at length they feel it no sacrifice, but the highest joy. All this the American Anti-Slavery Society demands of you. Do it! and be most grateful for the opportunity of fulfilling a work which is its own exceeding great reward. ”

“ Well! these must, by the Constitution of the Society, conjunctively agree upon the means to be employed, and each man was of course to be his own judge of their requisitions; for there never would have been a Constitution or a Society on any other understanding. Law! Well; the law sanctions my restoration of a fugitive slave, should I deem such a propitiation of the master likely to produce a happy effect in hastening a general emancipation. Am I therefore bound to do it? No! for my humanity and religion interpose their veto. ”

“ Those sacred and fundamental principles found a response in the land, though the hearts from which it came, were few and far between. The New England Anti-Slavery Society was formed; and as man after man planted himself by the side of Garrison and Knapp, a sense of duty seemed to pervade the soul of each—the duty of promulgating the truth of whose beauty and necessity his soul was then made sensible. The Liberator was not their organ, in an official sense,—but how could they conscientiously do otherwise than sustain the instrumentality which their own experience had proved so effectual? ”

“ Yes; to make slavery stronger by exalting prejudice as an ordination of divine Providence; to make slavery safer by eliminating that dangerous element, the free black; to make its term longer by stultifying national conscience. See that society making the laws of slave States more cruel, the men of the free States more obdurate, the situation of the free men of color more difficult and insupportable, as a part of its plan. ”

“ The time has come for men to look their terrors for the future in the face. A little thought will show them thus much at least;—that it is no sin against an anti-slavery society, to apply, in another association, the peaceful principles by which it is proposed to abolish slavery, to the sins involved in existing governments or sacerdocies. If institutions, religious or political, are unable to stand the test of such an application, that, in the opinion of some, is the fault of the institutions. ”

“ Do it, and find yourself the chosen of God, to keep alive in this nation, degraded and corrupted by slavery, the noble flame of Christian faith, the sentiment of honor and fidelity, the instinct of high-mindedness, the sense of absolute, immutable duty, the charm of chivalrous and poetic feeling, which would make of the poorest Americans the Christian gentlemen of the world. ”

“ Torrey and Mr. Phelps, had most inconsistently labored to vote away the freedom and the rights of the female members of that Convention. So indefinite were their ideas on the whole great subject of rights, that they overlooked the obvious thought, that no general anti-slavery convocation could take such ground without denying the fundamental principle that brought them together. In the horror of their great darkness on the subject of “woman’s rights,” they trampled on human rights, and the rights of membership, in the persons of those women whom they labored to exclude. ”

“ Every body was, in some way or other, actively or passively, sustaining slavery; yet every body disclaimed all responsibility for its existence, opposed all efforts for its extinction, and was ‘as much anti-slavery as any body else.’ Even the natural and kindly tide of human sympathy for [Pg 4] suffering, was turned away from the service of Freedom by the Colonization Society. The moving principles of Northern and Southern life, had become inseparably mingled below the surface of events, like the roots of giant trees beneath the soil. ”

“ Strive in the first place not to abolish slavery, but to get one set of men out of office and another in, to learn by the event that the last are as incapable to turn back the whirlpool that masters the government as the first were. ”

“ The hostility of its founders to the Massachusetts Society—the difference it had made as to the fundamental principles, the exclusiveness of its foundation—its mathematical position, working the same derangement in the anti-slavery system as a new planet in the orbit of the earth might do in the solar system,—all forbade it fraternal greeting or long life.
The course the New York Committee should take in action, would be the measure of their own worth to the cause. So opposite were these two Societies, that one or the other must needs be unworthy of the affiliation. ”

“ Article III.—This society shall aim to elevate the character and condition of the people of color, by encouraging their intellectual, moral, and religious improvement, and by removing public prejudice, that thus they may, according to their intellectual and moral worth, share an equality with the whites of civil and religious privileges; but this society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical force. ”

“ But every thoughtful and honest mind, whether its anchor have “entered into that which is within the veil” or not, feels called by its allegiance to freedom, instantly to resist any attempt to make one man accountable to another for the progress of his mind. This same allegiance to the foundation principle of inalienable human rights, warns a man against laboring to prevent woman from standing upon it, if such should be her determination. ”

“ You, who are smitten by the sacred beauty of the great cause, should serve it greatly. Don’t drag the engine, like an ignoramus, but bring wood and water and flame, like an engineer. The American Anti-Slavery Society has laid the track. ”

“ She may, in his opinion, be sinning against propriety—sinning against Paul, by acting in anti-slavery societies: but he himself sins against freedom in striving for her exclusion; and any act against freedom, is treason to the slave.
Men whose principles, thus imperfectly developed, are at war with each other, will, in all probability, become worse in their last state than [Pg 157] in their first, especially if they are yielding not so much to their own convictions as to the pretexts in which a public abstractly opposed to slavery, is fain to clothe its hatred to a real opposition. ”

“ It would not, if it could; for slavery has no intention of parting with its three millions of victims; unless induced to free them out of generosity, it will keep them on speculation. Its forty years of colonization labor, and its million of gold and silver, have exiled fewer to Liberia than have escaped into Canada in spite of it—less in that period than the monthly increase of the slaves! ”

“ All attentive beholders, whether friends or foes, were taught, by the observation of this period, that the machinery of organization, with all its systematized and mechanical helps, must be utterly unequal to obtain emancipation, unless freedom be the moving “spirit within the wheels;”—that, however efficient may be the appliances and means that money can set in motion, there are moments when one trumpet-blast of victorious truth, were worth them all. ”

“ Even “more Anti-Slavery than any one, but hate Mr. Garrison.” Through all their various phases of Colonizationists, American Unionists, Clerical Appellants, new organizationists, their moving spirit is the same;—hatred of the freedom that defies their control. Even while professing to be laboring for emancipation, they have always been careful to express their hatred of the free spirit in which abolitionists carry on the enterprize. It must needs be so. There is eternal enmity between the spirit which prompts a man to strive for the mastery, and the spirit which calls no man master. ”

“ They must always be sacrificing the end to the means. Call them to the witness box in their capacity of philosophical observers, and out of their little circumventing political characters, and themselves will tell you that the effect of electioneering on anti-slavery is most unfavorable, adding to the existing opposition to right the fury of party antagonism, throwing away the balance of power, lowering the tone of moral and religious feeling and action, and thus letting a sacred enterprise degenerate into a scramble for office. ”

“ Custom is never, by her nature, the handmaid of freedom; and therefore in a struggle for the extinction of slavery, if we speak only according to custom, we shall lose the unhesitating distinctness which the occasions of the cause demand. ”

“ Whereas the Most High God “hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth,” and hath commanded them to love their neighbors as themselves; and whereas our national existence is based upon this principle, as recognized in the Declaration of Independence, “that all mankind are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” ”

“ May every one of them yet be enabled to see that any infringement of the principles of Freedom, is a hindrance to the emancipation of the slave, not to be removed by thousands of gold and silver, or the mightiest physical array. ”

“ These are its principles;—frank, fearless single-heartedness, the utmost freedom of thought and speech, its characteristics. If we fail to impress these on each abolition heart, our efforts are paralyzed, and our cause is lost. Pride of settled opinion, love of lifeless forms, undue attachments to sect, are its foes.
With the fullest charity for all conscientious [Pg 89] scruples, and dissenting, as I do, from the peace-views of the Liberator, I cannot see how their discussion, conducted in a Christian spirit, and with sincere love of truth, can offend the conscience of any man. ”

“ One spark of true love of Freedom—the feeblest real desire to impart it to the enslaved, would have overpowered, in his heart, this spirit of the clerical appeal, and forbade him to identify himself with any such effort to subvert the broad foundations of the cause or to exclude any who had borne the burden and heat of the earlier abolition day. ”

“ The faithful, undismayed by treachery, undeterred by obloquy and persecution, unshaken by abuse, strengthened by experience, relying neither on a pro-slavery church, government, or ministry, but on GOD, and themselves as his ready instruments, have bound themselves more firmly to the cause and to each other, and are laboring with increased ardor in the promulgation of the truth which alone can save this slaveholding people. ”

“ We have all denied that might makes right, and asserted the supremacy of moral power; and yet some are standing in terror-stricken astonishment that the “woman question” is stirred in every heart; and “other some” are persecuting and forsaking their brethren, because the examination and application of principles, though limited in the anti-slavery society by the terms of association, cannot be stayed in men’s minds or individual lives. ”

“ President, is an arduous and thankless one. He must shield his friends by movements for which they will be apt to censure him. He must save the cause by the very blows from which the apparently judicious will anticipate its annihilation. He must stand on an eminence from which he can see what other men cannot see. He must be eyes to the blind, whose want of eye-sight will lead them to make war upon their benefactor. ”

“ They had never said more, during their whole eight years’ existence as a Society, than that they would not vote for slavery; and they saw too plainly the motives of this novel demand for a resolution worded affirmatively. Neither had they been so bitterly reproached with the introduction of foreign subjects, without learning that the word “duty” or the word “ought,” in relation to forms of civil or church government, on which abolitionists so widely differ, must necessarily open the discussion of the whole vast subject of human society in all its aspects. ”

“ The minority of the Society, who were neither ignorant nor unprepared, and who neither grudged their time nor themselves wholly, when the Anti-Slavery cause called for the sacrifice, were much pained to find that into this little sluice, opened at the time of the clerical appeal, had rushed the cold and bitter waters of indifference, and sectarism and chicanery, in a flood that threatened to sink the little vessel that had, in earlier days, done good service to the cause. ”

“ It is astonishing that these men should not have been aware that on the abolition platform their own sect stood but on a level with others, and that Sabbatarian or Anti-Sabbatarian, man or woman, clergyman or layman, voter or non-voter, warrior or non-resistant, must be measured by their consistency and energy in applying each his own religious views, to effect the abolition of slavery. ”