AN ADDRESS TO FREE COLORED AMERICANS. ISSUED BY AN ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF AMERICAN WOMEN, Held in the City of New-York, by adjournments from 9th to 12th May, 1837. NEW-YORK: PRINTED BY WILLIAM S. DORR, 123 FULTON STREET. 1837. AN ADDRESS TO FREE COLORED AMERICANS. BELOVED BRETHREN AND SISTERS-- The sympathy we feel for our oppressed fellow-citizens who are enslaved in these United States, has called us together, to devise by mutual conference the best means for bringing our guilty country to a sense of her transgressions; and to implore the God of the oppressed to guide and bless our labors on behalf of our "countrymen in chains." All of us have some idea what slavery is: we have formed some faint conceptions of the horrors of a system based on irresponsible power, violence, and injustice; but _to know_ what slavery is, we must see it worked out in practice--we must see the heart-strings severed one by one, and witness all the refinement of cruelty which is exercised on the body, soul, and mind of the enslaved. "Let any man of feeling," says a Southern gentleman, "cast his thoughts over this land of slavery, think of the nakedness of some, the hungry yearnings of others, the wailings and wo, the bloody cut of the keen lash, and the frightful scream that rends the very skies--and all this to gratify lust, pride, avarice, and other depraved feelings of the human heart. THE WORST IS NOT GENERALLY KNOWN. Were all the miseries and horrors of slavery to burst at once into view, a peal of seven-fold thunder could scarce strike greater alarm." (Swain's Address, 1830.)