No. 13.  Can Abolitionists Vote or Take Office Under the United
States Constitution?

Address to the Friends of Constitutional Liberty, on the Violation by the United States House of Representatives of the Right of Petition at the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

THE ANTI-SLAVERY EXAMINER

VOL.  I. AUGUST, 1836.  NO. 1.

TO THE

People of the united states;

OR, TO SUCH AMERICANS AS VALUE THEIR RIGHTS, AND

Dare to maintain them.

FELLOW COUNTRYMEN!

A crisis has arrived, in which rights the most important which civil society can acknowledge, and which have been acknowledged by our Constitution and laws, in terms the most explicit which language can afford, are set at nought by men, whom your favor has invested with a brief authority.  By what standard is your liberty of conscience, of speech, and of the press, now measured?  Is it by those glorious charters you have inherited from your fathers, and which your present rulers have called Heaven to witness, they would preserve inviolate?  Alas! another standard has been devised, and if we would know what rights are conceded to us by our own servants, we must consult the compact by which the South engages on certain conditions to give its trade and votes to Northern men.  All rights not allowed by this compact, we now hold by sufferance, and our Governors and Legislatures avow their readiness to deprive us of them, whenever in their opinion, legislation on the subject shall be “necessary[A].”  This compact is not indeed published to the world, under the hands and seals of the contracting parties, but it is set forth in official messages,—­in resolutions of the State and National Legislatures—­in the proceedings of popular meetings, and in acts of lawless violence.  The temples of the Almighty have been sacked, because the worshipers did not conform their consciences to the compact[B].  Ministers of the gospel have been dragged as criminals from the altar to the bar, because they taught the people from the Bible, doctrines proscribed by the compact[C].  Hundreds of free citizens, peaceably assembled to express their sentiments, have, because such an expression was forbidden by the compact, been forcibly dispersed, and the chief actor in this invasion on the freedom of speech, instead of being punished for a breach of the peace, was rewarded for his fidelity to the compact with an office of high trust and honor[D].

[Footnote A:  See the Messages of the Governors of New-York and Connecticut, the resolutions of the New-York Legislature, and the bill introduced into the Legislature of Rhode Island.]