An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism: With reference to the duty of American femalesBeecher, Catharine Esther
Philosophy
An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism: With reference to the duty of American females
Beecher, Catharine Esther
Abolitionists -- United States; Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
Fifthly. This effort was one to convince men of their _own_ obligations,
and not an effort to arouse public sentiment against the sinful
practices of another community over which they had no control.
I would now ask, why could not some southern gentleman, such for example
as Mr. Birney, whose manners, education, character, and habits give him
abundant facilities, have acted the part of Clarkson, and quietly have
gone to work at the South, collecting facts, exhibiting the impolicy and
the evils, to good men at the South, by the fire-side of the planter,
the known home of hospitality and chivalry. Why could he not have
commenced with the most vulnerable point, the _domestic slave-trade_,
leaving emancipation for a future and more favourable period? What right
has any one to say that there was no southern Wilberforce that would
have arisen, no southern Grant, Macaulay or Sharpe, who, like the
English philanthropists, would have stood the fierce beating of angry
billows, and by patience, kindness, arguments, facts, eloquence, and
Christian love, convinced the skeptical, enlightened the ignorant,
excited the benevolent, and finally have carried the day at the South,
by the same means and measures, as secured the event in England? All
experience is in favour of the method which the Abolitionists have
rejected, because it involves _danger to themselves_. The cause they
have selected is one that stands alone.--No case parallel on earth can
be brought to sustain it, with probabilities of good results. No
instance can be found, where exciting the public sentiment of one
community against evil practices in another, was ever made the means of
eradicating those evils. All the laws of mind, all the records of
experience, go against the measures that Abolitionists have taken, and
in favour of the one they have rejected. And when we look still farther
ahead, at results which time is to develope, how stand the probabilities,
when we, in judging, again take, as data, the laws of mind and the
records of experience?
What are the plans, hopes, and expectations of Abolitionists, in
reference to their measures? They are now labouring to make the North a
great Abolition Society,--to convince every northern man that slavery at
the South is a great sin, and that it ought immediately to cease.
Suppose they accomplish this to the extent they hope,--so far as we have
seen, the more the North is convinced, the more firmly the South rejects
the light, and turns from the truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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