Fellow countrymen! is such the tranquillity you desire—­is such the heritage you would leave to your children?  Suffer not the present outrage, by effecting its avowed object, to invite farther aggressions on your rights.  The chairman of the committee boasted that the number of petitioners the present session, for the abolition of slavery in the District, was only thirty-four thousand!  Let us resolve, we beseech you, that at the next session the number shall be A MILLION.  Perhaps our one hundred and seventeen representatives will then abandon in despair their present dangerous and unconstitutional expedient for tranquilizing the public mind.

The purpose of this address, is not to urge upon you our own views of the sinfulness of slavery, and the safety of its immediate abolition; but to call your attention to the conduct of your rulers.  Let no one think for a moment, that because he is not an abolitionist, his liberties are not and will not be invaded. We have no rights, distinct from the rights of the whole people.  Calumny, falsehood, and popular violence, have been employed in vain, to tranquilize abolitionists.  It is now proposed to soothe them, by despoiling them of their Constitutional rights; but they cannot be despoiled alone.  The right of petition and the freedom of debate are as sacred and valuable to those who dissent from our opinions, as they are to ourselves.  Can the Constitution at the same time secure liberty to you, and expose us to oppression—­give you freedom of speech, and lock our lips—­respect your right of petition, and treat ours with contempt?  No, fellow countrymen!—­we must be all free, or all slaves together.  We implore you, then, by all the obligations of interest, of patriotism, and of religion—­by the remembrance of your Fathers—­by your love for your children, to unite with us in maintaining our common, and till lately, our unquestioned political rights.

We ask you as men to insist that your servants acting as the local legislators of the District of Columbia, shall respect the common rights and decencies of humanity.—­We ask you as freemen, not to permit your constitutional privileges to be trifled with, by those who have sworn to maintain them.—­We ask you as Christian men, to remember that by sanctioning the sinful acts of your agents, you yourselves assume their guilt.

We have no candidates to recommend to your favor—­we ask not your support for any political party; but we do ask you to give your suffrages hereafter only to such men as you have reason to believe will not sacrifice your rights, and their own obligations, and the claims of mercy and the commands of God, to an iniquitous and mercenary COMPACT.  If we cannot have northern Presidents and other officers of the general government except in exchange for freedom of conscience, of speech, of the press and of legislation, then let all the appointments at Washington be given to the South.  If slaveholders will not trade with us, unless we consent to be slaves ourselves, then let us leave their money, and their sugar, and their cotton, to perish with them.