Lewis Tappan

“ The institution which oppresses you is suffering from the decrepitude of age, and is the scorn and loathing of the world. Out of the slave region, patriots and philanthropists, and Christians of every name and sect abhor and execrate it. Do you pant for liberty and equality, more substantial than such as is now found only in your obliterated and tattered bills of right? Do you ask that your children may be rescued from the ignorance and irreligion to which they are now doomed, and that avenues may be opened for you and for them to honest and profitable employment? ”

“ Having gained the liberty of speech and of the press, you will go on, conquering and to conquer. Political action on your part will lead to new triumphs. The State legislatures and the public offices will no longer be the exclusive patrimony of the holders of slaves. Having once obtained a footing in your legislative halls, you will have secured in a quiet, peaceable, constitutional mode, the downfall of slavery, the recovery of your rights, and the prosperity and happiness of your country. ”

“ If then the fetters of the slave are not to be broken by the master, by whom is he to be liberated? In the course of time, a hostile army, invited by the weakness or the arrogance of the South, may land on your shores. Then, indeed, emancipation will be given, but the gift may be bathed in the blood of yourselves and of your children. Or the People—for they will be the People—may resolve to be free, and you and all you hold dear may be sacrificed in the contest. ”

“ No Southern man can journey (as he had lately done) through the Northern States, and witness the prosperity, the industry, the public spirit which they exhibit—the sedulous cultivation of all those arts by which life is rendered comfortable and respectable—without feelings of deep sadness and shame as he remembers his own neglected and desolate home. There, no dwelling is to be seen abandoned—not a farm uncultivated. Every person and every thing performs a part towards the grand result ”

“ By conversing freely among yourselves, and proclaiming your hostility to slavery in public meetings, you will create an influence that will soon reach the Press. The bands with which the slaveholders have bound this Leviathan will then be snapped asunder. Once establish a free press, and the fate of slavery is sealed. Such a press will advocate your rights, will encourage education and industry, will point out the true cause of the depravation of morals, the prevalence of violence, and the depression of the public welfare. ”

“ When compelled to acknowledge the superior prosperity of the free States, the slaveholders are fond of imputing the difference to tariffs, or to government patronage, or to any other than the true cause.
Let us then inquire, whether the inferior and unhappy condition of the slave States can indeed be ascribed to any natural disadvantage under which they are laboring, or to any partial or unjust legislation by the Federal Government? ”

“ We find at the South no one element of military strength. Slavery, as we have seen, checks the progress of population, of the arts, of enterprise, and of industry. But above all, the laboring class, which in other countries affords the materials of which armies are composed, is regarded among you as your most deadly foe; and the sight of a thousand negroes with arms in their hands, would send a thrill of terror through the stoutest hearts, and excite a panic which no number of the veteran troops of Europe could produce. ”

“ The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare. Thus have the landed proprietors of England declaimed loudly on the blessings of dear bread, because the corn laws keep up rents and the price of land. The wealth and influence of your aristocracy, together with your own poverty, have led you to look up to them with a reverence bordering on that which is paid to a feudal nobility by their hereditary dependents. ”

“ The enemy is waxing faint and losing his courage. He is terrified by the echo of his own threats, and the very proposal to dissolve the Union and leave him to his fate, throws him into paroxysms. The North, so long submissive to his mandates, and awed by his insolence, laughs at his impotent rage; and all his hopes now rest upon a few profligate politicians whom he purchases with his votes, while their baseness excites his contempt, and their principles his fears. Now is the time, fellow-citizens, to assail the foe. ”

“ You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged. The great staple of the South is cotton; and we have no desire to undervalue its importance. It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing. Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders. ”

“ THE NON-SLAVEHOLDERS OF THE SLAVE STATES.
Fellow-Citizens:
We ask your attention to the injuries inflicted upon you and your children, by an institution which lives by your sufferance, and will die at your mandate. Slavery is maintained by you whom it impoverishes and degrades, not by those upon whom it confers wealth and influence. ”

“ It rests with you to relieve your country of its most dangerous enemy, to render it invulnerable to foreign assaults, and to dissipate that fearful anticipation of wrath and tribulation, which now broods over and oppresses the mind of every white who resides in a slave country. ”

“ Think you your planting nobility will ever grant freedom to their serfs, from sentiments of piety or patriotism? Remember that your clergy of all sects and ranks, many of them "Christian brokers in the trade of blood," unite in bestowing their benediction on the system as a Christian institution, and in teaching the slaveholders that they wield the whip as European monarchs the sceptre, "by the grace of God." ”

“ Without some powerful and certain remedy, our streets will become butcheries, overflowing with the blood of our citizens!"
While the slaveholders are terrified at the idea of the "great democratic rabble," and rejoice in human bondage as superseding the necessity of an "order of nobility, and all the appendages of a hereditary government," they have established a reign of terror, as insurrectionary and as sanguinary in principle, as that created by the sans culottes of the French revolution. We indulge in no idle declamation, but speak the words of truth and soberness. ”

“ In a debate in the Kentucky Legislature, in 1841, Mr. Harding, opposing the repeal of the law prohibiting the importation of slaves from other States, and looking forward to the time when the blacks would greatly out-number the whites, exclaimed:
"In such a state of things, suppose an insurrection of the slaves to take place. The master has become timid and fearful, the slave bold and daring—the white men, overpowered with a sense of superior numbers on the part of the slaves, cannot be embodied together; every man must guard his own hearth and fireside. ”

“ The causes which now retard the increase of your population must continue to operate, so long as slavery lasts. Emigrants from the North, and from foreign countries, will, as at present, avoid your borders, within which no attractions will be found for virtue and industry. On the other hand, many of the young and enterprising among you will flee from the lassitude, the anarchy, the wretchedness engendered by slavery, and seek their fortunes in lands where law affords protection, and where labor is honored and rewarded. ”

“ In plain language, an invading enemy would strike the first blow at the slave system, and thus aim at revolution,—a revolution that would give liberty to two and a half millions of human beings; and that such a war would be very embarrassing to the slaveholders, and the more horrible, because, as formerly in South Carolina, a large share of their military force would necessarily be employed, not in fighting the enemy, but in guarding the social, that is, the "patriarchal system." ”

“ Hence you know white laborers at the South are styled "mean whites." At the North, on the contrary, labor is regarded as the proper and commendable means of acquiring wealth; and our most influential men would in no degree suffer in public estimation, for holding the plough, or even repairing the highways. Hence no poor man is deterred from seeking a livelihood by honest labor from a dread of personal degradation. The different light in which labor is viewed at the North and the South is one cause of the depression of industry in the latter. ”

“ Hence with them slavery is the institution of the south, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south. It is their craft to magnify and extol the importance and advantages of their institution; and hence we are told by Gov. McDuffie, that slavery "is the CORNER STONE of our republican institutions." To defend this corner stone from the assaults of truth and reason, he audaciously proposed to the legislature, that abolitionists should be punished "with death without benefit of clergy." ”

“ VII. DISREGARD FOR HUMAN LIFE. We have already seen that one of the blessings which the slaveholders attribute to their favorite institution, is exemption from popular tumults, and from encroachments by the democracy upon the rights of property. Their argument is, that political power in the hands of the poor and laboring classes is always attended with danger, and that this danger is averted when these classes are kept in bondage. With these gentlemen, life and liberty seem to be accounted as the small dust of the balance, when weighed against slavery and plantations ”

“ Think you that the majority of the People in the cotton States, cheered and encouraged as they will be by the sympathy of the world, and the example of the West Indies, will forever tamely submit to be beasts of burden for a few lordly planters? And remember, we pray you, that the number and physical strength of the negroes will increase in a much greater ratio than that of their masters. ”

“ The value of land, other things being equal, is in proportion to the density of the population. Now the population of Ohio is 38.8 to a square mile, while the free population of Kentucky is but 14.2 to a square mile—and probably the price of land in the two States is much in the same proportion. You are told, much of the wealth is invested in negroes—yet it obviously is a wealth that impoverishes; and no stronger evidence of the truth of this assertion is needed, than the comparative price of land in the free and slave States. ”

“ We have said that the slaveholders hold their own laws and Constitutions in the same contempt as those of the Federal Government, whenever they conflict with the security and permanency of slavery. One of the most inestimable of constitutional privileges is trial by jury; and this, as we have seen, is trampled under foot with impunity, at the mandate of the slaveholders. Even John Tyler, as it appears, is for inflicting summary punishment on abolitionists, by a Lynch club, "without resorting to any other tribunal." ”

“ We, of the South, are emphatically surrounded by a dangerous class of beings—degraded and stupid savages, who, if they could but once entertain the idea, that immediate and unconditional death would not be their portion, would re-act the St. Domingo tragedy. But a consciousness, with all their stupidity, that a ten-fold force, superior in discipline, if not in barbarity, would gather from the four corners of the United States, and slaughter them, keeps them in subjection. ”

“ Every measure of policy may be advocated, except that of free labor; every question of right may be examined, except that of a man to himself; every dogma in theology may be propagated, except that of the sinfulness of the slave code. ”

“ It is impossible with us, that the conflict can take place between labor and capital, which makes it so difficult to establish and maintain free institutions in all wealthy and highly civilized nations where such institutions do not exist. Every plantation is a little community with the master at its head, who concentrates in himself the united interests of capital and labor, of which he is the common representative."— (Mr. Calhoun, of South Carolina, in the U. S. Senate, Jan. 10th, 1840.) ”

“ But admitting, what we know is not the fact, that all the other productions of the soil are raised exclusively by free labor, we learn from the census, that the agricultural products of the North exceed those of the South, cotton excepted, $226,219,714. Here then we have an appalling proof of the paralyzing influence of slavery on the industry of the whites.
In every community a large portion of the inhabitants are debarred from drawing their maintenance directly from the cultivation of the earth. Other and lucrative employments are reserved for them. ”

“ We hazard little in the assertion, that in no civilized Christian community on earth is human life less protected by law, or more frequently taken with impunity, than in the slave States of the Federal Union. ”

“ Education elevates the inferior classes of society, teaches them their rights, and points out the means of enforcing them. Of course, it tends to diminish the influence of wealth, birth, and rank. In 1671, Sir William Berkley, then Governor of Virginia, in his answer to the inquiries of the Committee of the Colonies, remarked, "I thank God that there are no free schools nor printing presses, and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years." The spirit of Sir William seems still to preside in the councils of his own Virginia, and to actuate those of the other slave States. ”

“ The Senate has a veto on every law; and as one half of that body are slaveholders, it follows, of course, that no law can be passed without their consent. Nor has any bill passed the Senate, since the organization of the government, but by the votes of slaveholders. It is idle, therefore, for them to impute their depressed condition to unjust and partial legislation, since they have from the very first controlled the action of Congress. Not a law has been passed, not a treaty ratified, but by their votes. ”