American Eloquence, Volume 2: Studies In American Political History (1896)
History
American Eloquence, Volume 2: Studies In American Political History (1896)
Speeches, addresses, etc., American; United States -- History; United States -- Politics and government
The influence of the Colonization Society on the welfare of the colored
race was the first question our movement encountered. To the close
logic, eloquent appeals, and fully sustained charges of Mr. Garrison's
letters on that subject no answer was ever made. Judge Jay followed
with a work full and able, establishing every charge by the most patient
investigation of facts. It is not too much to say of these two volumes,
that they left the Colonization Society hopeless at the North. It dares
never show its face before the people, and only lingers in some few
nooks of sectarian pride, so secluded from the influence of present
ideas as to be almost fossil in their character.
The practical working of the slave system, the slave laws, the treatment
of slaves, their food, the duration of their lives, their ignorance and
moral condition, and the influence of Southern public opinion on their
fate, have been spread out in a detail and with a fulness of evidence
which no subject has ever received before in this country. Witness the
words of Phelps, Bourne, Rankin, Grimke, the _Anti-slavery Record_, and,
above all, that encyclopaedia of facts and storehouse of arguments, the
_Thousand Witnesses_ of Mr. Theodore D. Weld. He also prepared that full
and valuable tract for the World's Convention called _Slavery and the
Internal Slave-Trade_ in the United States, published in London in 1841.
Unique in antislavery literature is Mrs. Child's _Appeal_, one of the
ablest of our weapons, and one of the finest efforts of her rare genius.
_The Princeton Review_, I believe, first challenged the Abolitionists
to an investigation of the teachings of the Bible on slavery. That field
had been somewhat broken by our English predecessors. But in England the
pro-slavery party had been soon shamed out of the attempt to drag the
Bible into their service, and hence the discussion there had been short
and some-what superficial. The pro-slavery side of the question has been
eagerly sustained by theological reviews and doctors of divinity without
number, from the half-way and timid faltering of Wayland up to the
unblushing and melancholy recklessness of Stuart. The argument on the
other side has come wholly from the Abolitionists; for neither Dr. Hague
nor Dr. Barnes can be said to have added any thing to the wide research,
critical acumen, and comprehensive views of Theodore D. Weld, Beriah
Green, J. G. Fee, and the old work of Duncan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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