American Anti-Slavery Society

“ For twenty years after the adoption of the Constitution, the citizens of the United States were to be encouraged and protected in the prosecution of that infernal traffic—in sacking and burning the hamlets of Africa—in slaughtering multitudes of the inoffensive natives on the soil, kidnapping and enslaving a still greater proportion, crowding them to suffocation in the holds of the slave ships, populating the Atlantic with their dead bodies, and subjecting the wretched survivors to all the horrors of unmitigated bondage! ”

“ If we would escape torture and death, on visiting any of the slave States, we must stifle our conscientious convictions, hear no testimony against cruelty and tyranny, suppress the struggling emotions of humanity, divest ourselves of all letters and papers of an antislavery character, and do homage to the slaveholding power—or run the risk of a cruel martyrdom! These are appalling and undeniable facts.
Three millions of the American people are crushed under the American Union! They are held as slaves—trafficked as merchandise—registered as goods and chattels! ”

“ One slaveholder with whom I lived, whipped one of his slaves one day, as many, I should think, as one hundred lashes, and then turned the butt-end and went to beating him over the head and ears, and truly I was amazed that the slave was not killed on the spot. Not a few slaveholders whip their slaves to death, and then say that they died under a "moderate correction." I wonder that ten are not killed where one is! Were they not much hardier than the whites many more of them must die than do. ”

“ There they lie bleeding—we are prostrate by their side—in their sorrows and sufferings we participate—their stripes are inflicted on our bodies, their shackles are fastened on our limbs, their cause is ours! The Union which grinds them to the dust rests upon us, and with them we will struggle to overthrow it! The Constitution, which subjects them to hopeless bondage, is one that we cannot swear to support! Our motto is, "NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS," either religious or political. They are the fiercest enemies of mankind, and the bitterest foes of God! ”

“ Is abolitionism DEAD—or is it just awaking into life? Is the right of petition strangled and forgotten—or is it increasing in strength and force? These are serious questions for the gentleman's consideration, that may damp the ardor of his joy, if examined with an impartial mind, and looked at with an unprejudiced eye. Sir, when these paeans were sung over the death of abolitionists, and, of course, their right to liberty of speech and the press, at least in fancy's eye, we might have seen them lying in heaps upon heaps, like the enemies of the strong man in days of old. ”

“ We rise in rebellion against a despotism incomparably more dreadful than that which induced the colonists to take up arms against the mother country; not on account of a three-penny tax on tea, but because fetters of living iron are fastened on the limbs of millions of our countrymen, and our own sacred rights are trampled in the dust. As citizens of the State, we appeal to the State in vain for protection and redress. As citizen of the United States, we are treated as outlaws in one half of the country, and the national government consents to our destruction. ”

“ Shall all the States, then, be bound to defend each, and shall each be at liberty to introduce a weakness which will render defence more difficult? Shall one part of the United States be bound to defend another part, and that other part be at liberty, not only to increase its own danger, but to withhold the compensation for the burden? If slaves are to be imported, shall not the exports produced by their labor supply a revenue the better to enable the General Government to defend their masters? ”

“ A few persons, to be sure, of late years, to serve the purposes of a party, have tried to prove that the Constitution makes no compromise with slavery. Notwithstanding the clear light of history;—the unanimous decision of all the courts in the land, both State and Federal;—the action of Congress and the State Legislature;—the constant practice of the Executive in all its branches;—and the deliberate acquiescence of the whole people for half a century, still they contend that the Nation does not know its own meaning, and that the Constitution does not tolerate slavery! ”

“ A power, whose character is marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to rule over a free people. In our sufferings and our wrongs we have besought our fellow-citizens to aid us in the preservation of our constitutional rights, but, influenced by the love of gain or arbitrary power, they have sometimes disregarded all the sacred rights of man, and answered in violence, burnings, and murder. After all these transactions, which are now of public notoriety and matter of record, shall we of the free States tauntingly be asked what we have to do with slavery? ”

“ We should rejoice, indeed, if the evils of slavery were removed far from us, that it could be said with truth, that we have nothing to do with slavery. Our citizens have not entered its territories for the purpose of obstructing its laws, nor do we wish to do so, nor would we justify any individual in such act; yet we have been branded and stigmatized by its friends and advocates, both in the free and slave States, as incendiaries, fanatics, disorganizers, enemies to our country, and as wishing to dissolve the Union. ”

“ What! incredulous about the atrocities perpetrated by those who hold human beings as property, to be used for their pleasure, when history herself has done little else in recording human deeds, than to dip her blank chart in the blood shed by arbitrary power, and unfold to human gaze the great red scroll? That cruelty is the natural effect of arbitrary power, has been the result of all experience, and the voice of universal testimony since the world began. Shall human nature's axioms, six thousand years old, go for nothing? ”

“ Suppose the Legislature of the Senator's own State should pass a law declaring his wife, his children, his friends, indeed, any white citizen of Kentucky, property, and should they be sold and transferred as such, would the gentleman fold his arms and say, "Yes, they are property, for the law has made them such?" No, sir; he would denounce such law with more vehemence than he now denounces abolitionists, and would deny the authority of human legislation to accomplish an object so clearly beyond its power.
Human laws, I contend, cannot make human beings property, if human force can do it. ”

“ We charge upon the American Constitution, that it contains provisions, and enjoins duties, which make it unlawful for freemen to take the oath of allegiance to it, because they are expressly designed to favor a slaveholding oligarchy, and consequently, to make one portion of the people a prey to another.
We charge upon the existing national government, that it is an insupportable despotism, wielded by a power which is superior to all legal and constitutional restraints—equally indisposed and unable to protect the lives or liberties of the people—the prop and safeguard of American slavery. ”

“ But to clear our skirts of innocent blood—to give the oppressor no countenance—to signify our abhorrence of injustice and cruelty—to testify against an ungodly compact—to cease striking hands with thieves and consenting with adulterers—to make no compromise with tyranny—to walk worthily of our high profession—to increase our moral power over the nation—to obey God and vindicate the gospel of His Son—to hasten the downfall of slavery in America, and throughout the world!
We are not acting under a blind impulse. ”

“ Sir, no man, who is an American in feeling and in heart, but ought to repel this charge instantly, and without any reservation whatever, that if they fail at the ballot box they will resort to the bayonet. If such a fratricidal course should ever be thought of in our country, it will not be by those who seek redress of wrongs, by exercising the right of petition, but by those only who deny that right to others, and seek to usurp the whole power of the Government. If the ballot box fail them, the bayonet may be their resort, as mobs and violence now are. ”

“ In the course of my testimony I have entered somewhat into the minutiae of slavery, because this is a part of the subject often overlooked, and cannot be appreciated by any but those who have been witnesses, and entered into sympathy with the slaves as human beings. Slaveholders think nothing of them, because they regard their slaves as property, the mere instruments of their convenience and pleasure. One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognises a human being in a slave. ”

“ That those who can fasten steel spurs upon the legs of dunghill fowls, and goad the poor birds to worry and tear each other to death—and those who can crowd by thousands to witness such barbarity—that those who can throng the race-course and with keen relish witness the hot pantings of the life-struggle, the lacerations and fitful spasms of the muscles, swelling through the crimsoned foam, as the tortured steeds rush in blood-welterings to the goal—that such, should look upon the sufferings of their slaves with, indifference is certainly small wonder. ”

“ The total indifference of slaveholders to such a cold blooded proposition, their utter unconsciousness of the paralysis of heart, and death of sympathy, and every feeling of common humanity for the slave, which it reveals, is enough, of itself to show that the tendency of the spirit of slaveholding is, to kill in the soul whatever it touches. ”

“ Every principle of justice and equity requires, that, those who are totally unprotected by birth, station, wealth, friends, influence, and popular favor, and especially those who are the innocent objects of public contempt and prejudice, should be more vigilantly protected by law, than those who are so fortified by defence, that they have far less need of legal protection; yet the poor slave who is fortified by none of these personal bulwarks, is denied the protection of law, while the master, surrounded by them all, is panoplied in the mail of legal protection, even to the hair of his head ”

“ How can a slave prove outrages perpetrated upon him by his master or overseer, when his own testimony and that of all his fellow-slaves, his kindred, associates, and acquaintances, is ruled out of court? and when he is entirely in the power of those who injure him, and when the only care necessary, on their part, is, to see that no white witness is looking on. Ordinarily, but one white man, the overseer, is with the slaves while they are at labor; indeed, on most plantations, to commit an outrage in the presence of a white witness would be more difficult than in their absence. ”