William Wells Brown

“ There are in the United States of America, at the present time, between three and four millions of persons, who are held in a state of slavery which has no parallel in any other part of the world; and whose numbers have, within the last fifty years, increased to a fearful extent. These people are not only deprived of the rights to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, but every avenue to knowledge is closed against them. The laws do not recognise the family relation of a slave, and extend to him protection in the enjoyment of domestic endearments. ”

“ Yet one-sixth of the inhabitants of the great Republic are slaves. Thus they give the lie to their own professions. No one forfeits his or her character or standing in society by being engaged in holding, buying or selling a slave; the details of which, in all their horror, can scarcely be told.
Although the holding of slaves is confined to fifteen of the thirty-one States, yet we hold that the non-slave-holding States are equally guilty with the slave-holding. ”

“ But the abolition of Slavery in the West Indies, was a blow struck in the right direction, at that most inhuman of all traffics, the slave trade—a trade which would never cease so long as slavery existed, for where there was a market there would be merchandise ”

“ Fugitive Slaves in England.
THE love of freedom is one of those natural impulses of the human breast which cannot be extinguished. Even the brute animals of the creation feel and show sorrow and affection when deprived of their liberty. Therefore is a distinguished writer justified in saying, "Man is free, even were he born in chains." The Americans boast, and justly, too, that Washington was the hero and model patriot of the American Revolution—the man whose fame, unequalled in his own day and country, will descend to the end of time, the pride and honour of humanity. ”

“ There was a band of fearless men and women in the city of Boston, whose labours for the slave had resulted in good beyond calculation. This noble and heroic class had created an agitation in the whole country, until their principles have taken root in almost every association in the land, and which, with God's blessing, will, in due time, cause the Americans to put into practice what they have so long professed. (Hear, hear.) He wished it to be continually held up before the country, that the northern States are as deeply implicated in the guilt of slavery as the South. ”

“ No education, no marriage, everything done to keep the mind of the slave in darkness. There was a wish on the part of the people of the northern States to shield themselves from the charge of slave-holding, but as they shared in the guilt, he was not satisfied with letting them off without their share in the odium. ”

“ The shrieks and agonies of the slave are heard in the markets at the seat of government, and within hearing of the American Congress, as well as on the cotton, sugar and rice plantations of the far South.
The history of the negroes in America is but a history of repeated injuries and acts of oppression committed upon them by the whites. It is not for ourselves that we make this appeal, but for those whom we have left behind.
In their Declaration of Independence, the Americans declare that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights ”

“ WE consider it just, both to the people of the United States and to ourselves, in making an appeal to the inhabitants of other countries, against the laws which have exiled us from our native land, to state the ground upon which we make our appeal, and the causes which impel us to do so. ”

“ It was on the first of August, 1851, that a number of men, fugitives from that boasted land of freedom, assembled at the Hall of Commerce in the City of London, for the purpose of laying their wrongs before the British nation, and at the same time, to give thanks to the God of Freedom for the liberation of their West India brethren, on the first of August, 1834. ”

“ In different parts of the hall were men and women from nearly all parts of the kingdom, besides a large number who, drawn to London by the Exhibition, had come in to see and hear these oppressed people plead their own cause. ”