Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South: on the Social and Political Evils of SlaveryTappan, Lewis
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Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South: on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery
Tappan, Lewis
Slavery -- United States
"No Southern man can journey (as he had lately done) through the
Northern States, and witness the prosperity, the industry, the
public spirit which they exhibit--the sedulous cultivation of
all those arts by which life is rendered comfortable and
respectable--without feelings of deep sadness and shame as he
remembers _his own neglected and desolate home_. There, no
dwelling is to be seen abandoned--not a farm uncultivated. Every
person and every thing performs a part towards the grand result;
and the whole land is covered with fertile fields, with
manufactories, and canals, and rail-roads, and edifices, and
towns, and cities. We of the South are mistaken in the character
of these people, when we think of them only as pedlars in horn
flints and bark nutmegs. Their energy and enterprise are
directed to all objects great and small within their reach. The
number of rail-roads and other modes of expeditious
intercommunication knit the whole country into a closely
compacted mass, through which the productions of commerce and of
the press, the comforts of life, and the means of knowledge, are
universally diffused; while the close intercourse of travel and
of business makes all neighbors, and promotes a common interest
and a common sympathy. How different the condition of these
things in the South! _Here_ the face of the country wears the
aspect of premature old age and decay. NO IMPROVEMENT IS SEEN
GOING ON, nothing is done for posterity. No man thinks of
anything beyond the present moment."
Yet this same Mr. Preston, thus sensitively alive to the superior
happiness and prosperity of the free States, declared in the United
States Senate, "Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South
Carolina, if we can catch him we will try him, and notwithstanding all
the interference of all the governments of the earth, including the
Federal Government, we will HANG him."[7] In other words, the
slaveholders, rather than part with their slaves, are ready to murder,
with all the formalities of law, the very men who are laboring to confer
on them the envied blessings of the North.
[7] We are well aware that Mr. Preston has denied, what no one
asserted, that he had said an abolitionist, if he came into
South Carolina, would be executed by Lynch law. He used the
words we have quoted. (See "New York Journal of Commerce,"
Jan. 6th, 1838).
IV. FEELINGS OF THE SLAVEHOLDERS TOWARDS THE LABORING CLASSES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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