The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 888 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4.

The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 888 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4.
assert, that Anti-Slavery publications have not overdrawn the monstrous features of slavery at all.  And many a Southerner knows this as well as I do.  A lady in North Carolina remarked to a friend of mine, about eighteen months since, “Northerners know nothing at all about slavery; they think it is perpetual bondage only; but of the depth of degradation that word involves, they have no conception; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown.”  She did not know how faithfully some Northern men and Northern women had studied this subject; how diligently they had searched out the cause of “him who had none to help him,” and how fearlessly they had told the story of the negro’s wrongs.  Yes, Northerners know every thing about slavery now.  This monster of iniquity has been unveiled to the world, her frightful features unmasked, and soon, very soon will she be regarded with no more complacency by the American republic than is the idol of Juggernaut, rolling its bloody wheels over the crushed bodies of its prostrate Victims.

But you will probably ask, if Anti-Slavery societies are not insurrectionary, why do Northerners tell us they are?  Why, I would ask you in return, did Northern senators and Northern representatives give their votes, at the last sitting of congress, to the admission of Arkansas Territory as a state?  Take those men, one by one, and ask them in their parlours, do you approve of slavery? ask them on Northern ground, where they will speak the truth, and I doubt not every man of them will tell you, no! Why then, I ask, did they give their votes to enlarge the mouth of that grave which has already destroyed its tens of thousands?  All our enemies tell us they are as much anti-slavery as we are.  Yes, my friends, thousands who are helping you to bind the fetters of slavery on the negro, despise you in their hearts for doing it; they rejoice that such an institution has not been entailed upon them.  Why then, I would ask, do they lend you their help?  I will tell you, “they love the praise of men more than the praise of God.”  The Abolition cause has not yet become so popular as to induce them to believe, that by advocating it in congress, they shall sit still more securely in their seats there, and like the chief rulers in the days of our Saviour, though many believed on him, yet they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue; John xii, 42, 43.  Or perhaps like Pilate, thinking they could prevail nothing, and fearing a tumult, they determined to release Barabbas and surrender the just man, the poor innocent slave to be stripped of his rights and scourged.  In vain will such men try to wash their hands, and say, with the Roman governor, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person.”  Northern American statesmen are no more innocent of the crime of slavery, than Pilate was of the murder of Jesus, or Saul of that of Stephen.  These are high charges, but I appeal to their hearts; I appeal to public opinion ten years from now.  Slavery then is a national sin.

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The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 1 of 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.