HAVERHILL, MASS., 22d 7th Mo., 1833.
II.
The abolitionists of the North have been grossly misrepresented. In attacking the system of slavery, they have never recommended any measure or measures conflicting with the Constitution of the United States.
They have never sought to excite or encourage a spirit of rebellion among the slaves: on the contrary, they would hold any such attempt, by whomsoever made, in utter and stern abhorrence.
All the leading abolitionists of my acquaintance are, from principle, opposed to war of all kinds, believing that the benefits of no war whatever can compensate for the sacrifice of one human life by violence.
Consequently, they would be the first to deprecate any physical interference with your slave system on the part of the general government.
They are, without exception, opposed to any political interposition of the government, in regard to slavery as it exists in the states. For, although they feel and see that the canker of the moral disease is affecting all parts of the confederacy, they believe that the remedy lies with yourselves alone. Any such interference they would consider unlawful and unconstitutional; and the exercise of unconstitutional power, although sanctioned by the majority of a republican government, they believe to be a tyranny as monstrous and as odious as the despotism of a Turkish Sultan.
Having made this disclaimer on the part of myself and my friends, let me inquire from whence this charge of advocating the interference of the general government with the sovereign jurisdiction of the states has arisen? Will you, gentlemen, will the able editors of the United States Telegraph and the Columbian Telescope, explain? For myself, I have sought in vain among the writings of our "Northern Enthusiasts," and among the speeches of the Northern statesmen and politicians, for some grounds for the accusation.
The doctrine, such as it is, does not belong to us. I think it may be traced home to the South, to Virginia, to her Convention of 1829, to the speech of Ex-President Monroe, on the white basis question.
"As to emancipation," said that distinguished son of your state, "if ever that should take place, it cannot be done by the state; it must be done by the Union."
Again, "If emancipation can ever be effected, it can only be done with the aid of the general government."
Gentlemen, you are welcome to your doctrine. It has no advocates among the abolitionists of New England.
We aim to overthrow slavery by the moral influence of an enlightened public sentiment;
By a clear and fearless exposition of the guilt of holding property in man;
By analyzing the true nature of slavery, and boldly rebuking sin;
By a general dissemination of the truths of political economy, in regard to free and slave labor;
By appeals from the pulpit to the consciences of men;
By the powerful influence of the public press;
By the formation of societies whose object shall be to oppose the principle of slavery by such means as are consistent with our obligations to law, religion, and humanity;
By elevating, by means of education and sympathy, the character of the free people of color among us.
Our testimony against slavery is the same which has uniformly, and with so much success, been applied to prevailing iniquity in all ages of the world, the truths of divine revelation.
Believing that there can be nothing in the Providence of God to which His holy and eternal law is not strictly applicable, we maintain that no circumstances can justify the slave-holder in a continuance of his system.
That the fact that this system did not originate with the present generation is no apology for retaining it, inasmuch as crime cannot be entailed; and no one is under a necessity of sinning because others have done so before him;
That the domestic slave-trade is as repugnant to the laws of God, and should be as odious in the eyes of a Christian community, as the foreign;
That the black child born in a slave plantation is not "an entailed article of property;" and that the white man who makes of that child a slave is a thief and a robber, stealing the child as the sea pirate stole his father!
We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say to slaveholders, "Repent now, to-day, immediately;" just as we say to the intemperate, "Break off from your vice at once; touch not, taste not, handle not, from henceforth forever."
Besides, the plan of gradual abolition has been tried in this country and the West Indies, and found wanting. It has been in operation in our slave states ever since the Declaration of Independence, and its results are before the nation. Let us see.
THE ABOLITIONISTS 79
In 1790 there were in the slave states south of the Potomac and the Ohio 20,415 free blacks. Their increase for the ten years following was at the rate of sixty per cent., their number in 1800 being 32,604. In 1810 there were 58,046, an increase of seventy-five per cent. This comparatively large increase was, in a great measure, owing to the free discussions going on in England and in this country on the subject of the slave-trade and the rights of man. The benevolent impulse extended to the slave-masters, and manumissions were frequent. But the salutary impression died away; the hand of oppression closed again upon its victims; and the increase for the period of twenty years, 1810 to 1830, was only seventy-seven per cent., about one half of what it was in the ten years from 1800 to 1810. And this is the practical result of the much-lauded plan of gradual abolition.
In 1790, in the states above mentioned, there were only 550,604 slaves, but in 1830 there were 1,874,098! And this, too, is gradual abolition.
"What, then!" perhaps you will ask, "do you expect to overthrow our whole slave system at once? to turn loose to-day two millions of negroes?"
No, gentlemen; we expect no such thing. Enough for us if in the spirit of fraternal duty we point to your notice the commands of God; if we urge you by every cherished remembrance of common sacrifices upon a common altar, by every consideration of humanity, justice, and expediency, to begin now, without a moment's delay, to break away from your miserable system,--to begin the work of moral reformation, as God commands you to begin, not as selfishness, or worldly policy, or short-sighted political expediency, may chance to dictate.
Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded on God's eternal truth, plain, simple, and perfect,--the doctrine of immediate, unprocrastinated repentance applied to the sin of slavery.
Of this doctrine, and of our plan for crrrying it into effect, I have given an exposition, with the most earnest regard to the truth. Does either embrace anything false, fanatical, or unconstitutional? Do they afford a reasonable protext for your fierce denunciations of your Northern brethren? Do they furnish occasion for your newspaper chivalry, your stereotyped demonstrations of Southern magnanimity and Yankee meanness?--things, let me say, unworthy of Virginians, degrading to yourselves, insulting to us.
Gentlemen, it is too late for Virginia, with all her lofty intellect and nobility of feeling, to defend and advocate the principle of slavery.
The death-like silence which for nearly two centuries brooded over her execrable system has been broken; light is pouring in upon the minds of her citizens; truth is abroad, "searching out and overturning the lies of the age." A moral reformation has been already awakened, and it cannot now be drugged to sleep by the sophistries of detected sin. A thousand intelligences are at work in her land; a thousand of her noblest hearts are glowing with the redeeming spirit of that true philanthropy, which is moving all the world. No, gentlemen; light is spreading from the hills of Western Virginia to the extremest East. You cannot arrest its progress. It is searching the consciences; it is exercising the reason; it is appealing to the noblest characteristics of intelligent Virginians.
It is no foreign influence. From every abandoned plantation where the profitless fern and thistle have sprung up under the heel of slavery; from every falling mansion of the master, through whose windows the fox may look out securely, and over whose hearth-stone the thin grass is creeping, a warning voice is sinking deeply into all hearts not imbruted by avarice, indolence, and the lust of power.
Abolitionist as I am, the intellectual character of Virginia has no warmer admirer than myself. Her great names, her moral trophies, the glories of her early day, the still proud and living testimonials of her mental power, I freely acknowledge and strongly appreciate. And, believe me, it is with no other feelings than those of regret and heartfelt sorrow that I speak plainly of her great error, her giant crime, a crime which is visibly calling down upon her the curse of an offended Deity.
But I cannot forget that upon some of the most influential and highly favored of her sons rests the responsibility at the present time of sustaining this fearful iniquity. Blind to the signs of the times, careless of the wishes of thousands of their white fellow-citizens and of the manifold wrongs of the black man, they have dared to excuse, defend, nay, eulogize, the black abominations of slavery.
Against the tottering ark of the idol these strong men have placed their shoulders. That ark must fall; that idol must be cast down; what, then, will be the fate of their supporters?
When the Convention of 1829 had gathered in its splendid galaxy of talents the great names of Virginia, the friends of civil liberty turned their eyes towards it in the earnest hope and confidence that it would adopt some measures in regard to slavery worthy of the high character of its members and of the age in which they lived. I need not say how deep and bitter was our disappointment. Western Virginia indeed spoke on that occasion, through some of her delegates, the words of truth and humanity.
But their counsels and warnings were unavailing; the majority turned away to listen to the bewildering eloquence of Leigh and Upshur and Randolph, as they desecrated their great intellects to the defence of that system of oppression under which the whole land is groaning. The memorial of the citizens of Augusta County, bearing the signatures of many slave- holders, placed the evils of slavery in a strong light before the convention. Its facts and arguments could only be arbitrarily thrust aside and wantonly disregarded; they could not be disproved.
"In a political point of view," says the memorial, "we esteem slavery an evil greater than the aggregate of all the other evils which beset us, and we are perfectly willing to bear our proportion of the burden of removing it. We ask, further, What is the evil of any such alarm as our proposition may excite in minds unnecessarily jealous compared with that of the fatal catastrophe which ultimately awaits our country, and the general depravation of manners which slavery has already produced and is producing?"
I cannot forbear giving one more extract from this paper. The memorialists state their belief
"That the labor of slaves is vastly less productive than that of freemen; that it therefore requires a larger space to furnish subsistence for a given number of the former than of the latter; that the employment of the former necessarily excludes that of the latter; that hence our population, white and black, averages seventeen, when it ought, and would under other circumstances, average, as in New England, at least sixty to a square mile; that the possession and management of slaves form a source of endless vexation and misery in the house, and of waste and ruin on the farm; that the youth of the country are growing up with a contempt of steady industry as a low and servile thing, which contempt induces idleness and all its attendant effeminacy, vice, and worthlessness; that the waste of the products of the land, nay, of the land itself, is bringing poverty on all its inhabitants; that this poverty and the sparseness of population either prevent the institution of schools throughout the country, or keep them in a most languid and inefficient condition; and that the same causes most obviously paralyze all our schemes and efforts for the useful improvement of the country."
Gentlemen, you have only to look around you to know that this picture has been drawn with the pencil of truth. What has made desolate and sterile one of the loveliest regions of the whole earth? What mean the signs of wasteful neglect, of long improvidence around you: the half-finished mansion already falling into decay, the broken-down enclosures, the weed- grown garden the slave hut open to the elements, the hillsides galled and naked, the fields below them run over with brier and fern? Is all this in the ordinary course of nature? Has man husbanded well the good gifts of God, and are they nevertheless passing from him, by a process of deterioration over which he has no control? No, gentlemen. For more than two centuries the cold and rocky soil of New England has yielded its annual tribute, and it still lies green and luxuriant beneath the sun of our brief summer. The nerved and ever-exercised arm of free labor has changed a landscape wild and savage as the night scenery of Salvator Rosa into one of pastoral beauty,--the abode of independence and happiness.
Under a similar system of economy and industry, how would Virginia, rich with Nature's prodigal blessings, have worn at this time over all her territory the smiles of plenty, the charms of rewarded industry! What a change would have been manifest in your whole character! Freemen in the place of slaves, industry, reputable economy, a virtue, dissipation despised, emigration unnecessary!
(A late Virginia member of Congress described the Virginia slave- holder as follows: "He is an Eastern Virginian whose good fortune it has been to have been born wealthy, and to have become a profound politician at twenty-one without study or labor. This individual, from birth and habit, is above all labor and exertion. He never moves a finger for any useful purpose; he lives on the labor of his slaves, and even this labor he is too proud and indolent to direct in person. While he is at his ease, a mercenary with a whip in his hand drives his slaves in the field. Their dinner, consisting of a few scraps and lean bones, is eaten in the burning sun. They have no time to go to a shade and be refreshed such easement is reserved for the horses"!--Speech of Hon. P. P. Doddridge in House of Delegates, 1829.)
All this, you will say, comes too late; the curse is upon you, the evil in the vitals of your state, the desolation widening day by day. No, it is not too late. There are elements in the Virginian character capable of meeting the danger, extreme as it is, and turning it aside. Could you but forget for a time partisan contest and unprofitable political speculations, you might successfully meet the dangerous exigencies of your state with those efficient remedies which the spirit of the age suggests; you might, and that too without pecuniary loss, relinquish your claims to human beings as slaves, and employ them as free laborers, under such restraint and supervision as their present degraded condition may render necessary. In the language of one of your own citizens, "it is useless for you to attempt to linger on the skirts of the age which is departed. The action of existing causes and principles is steady and progressive. It cannot be retarded, unless you would blow out all the moral lights around you; and if you refuse to keep up with it, you will be towed in the wake, whether you will or not."--(Speech in Virginia legislature, 1832.)
The late noble example of the eloquent statesman of Roanoke, the manumission of his slaves, speaks volumes to his political friends. In the last hour of existence, when his soul was struggling from his broken tenement, his latest effort was the confirmation of this generous act of a former period. Light rest the turf upon him beneath his own patrimonial oaks! The prayers of many hearts made happy by his benevolence shall linger over his grave and bless it.
Gentlemen, in concluding these letters, let me once more assure you that I entertain towards you and your political friends none other than kindly feelings. If I have spoken at all with apparent harshness, it has been of principles rather than of men. But I deprecate no censure. Conscious of the honest and patriotic motives which have prompted their avowal, I cheerfully leave my sentiments to their fate. Despised and contemned as they may be, I believe they cannot be gainsaid. Sustained by the truth as it exists in Nature and Revelation, sanctioned by the prevailing spirit of the age, they are yet destined to work out the political and moral regeneration of our country. The opposition which they meet with does not dishearten me. In the lofty confidence of John Milton, I believe that "though all the winds of doctrine be let loose upon the earth, so Truth be among them, we need not fear. Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew her to be put to the worst in a free and open encounter?"