Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society

“ We are bound to the constant exercise of the only right we ourselves enjoy—the right which our physical weakness renders peculiarly appropriate—the right of petition. We are bound to try how much it can accomplish in the District of Columbia, or we are as verily guilty touching slavery as our brethren and sisters in the slaveholding States: for Congress possesses power 'to exercise exclusive legislation over the District of Columbia in all cases whatsoever,' by a provision of the Constitution; and by an act of the First Congress, the right of petition was secured to us. ”

“ As immortal souls, created by God to know and love him with all our hearts, and our neighbor as ourselves, we owe immediate obedience to his commands, respecting the sinful system of Slavery, beneath which 2,500,000 of our Fellow-Immortals, children of the same country, are crushed, soul and body, in the extremity of degradation and agony. ”

“ A detail of the mere physical particulars involved in the arrangements of a single Slave-dealer, would show the abolition of Slavery in the ten miles square, to be 'a cause worth dying for:' but while our whole country, by deliberately sanctioning such atrocities, stands before God and the world, as the strong hold of Slavery, while the institutions of the free are daily breaking down under operation of the Slave system; while in the best regulated parts of our country, the lives of the free are endangered by an avowal of the principles of the Declaration of Independence ”

“ As women, it is incumbent upon us, instantly and always, to labor to increase the knowledge and the love of God that such concentrated hatred of his character and laws may no longer be so intrenched in men's business and bosoms, that they dare not condemn and renounce it. ”

“ As wives and mothers, as sisters and daughters, we are deeply responsible for the influence we have on the human race. We are bound to exert it; we are bound to urge men to cease to do evil, and learn to do well. ”

“ Christian friends, again we conjure you, by all that woman holds dear and holy, to labor as woman has never yet done, in view of the unutterable destruction which waits visibly round about, to make our land a perpetual desolation, unless the people repent. ”