Antislavery movements -- United States; Swisshelm, Jane Grey Cannon, 1815-1884; Women's rights -- United States
The same community of interests which arrayed the mass of the clergy on
the side of Southern slaveholders, arrayed that same clergy on the side
of the Western slave holder, and against the men who seek, with plows
and hoes, to get a living out of the ground. Under this arrangement we
have the spectacle of a Christian people arrayed in open hostility to
those who plant Christian churches, schools and libraries on the lair of
the wolf; and in alliance with the savage who coolly unjoints the feet
and hands of little children, puts them in his hunting pouch as evidence
of his valor, and leaves the victim to die at leisure; of those who
thrust Christian babies into ovens, and deliberately roast them to
death; of those who bind infants, two by two, by one wrist, and throw
them across a fence to die; of those who collect little children in
groups and lock them up in a room, to wail out their little lives; of
those who commit outrages on innocent men and women who the pen must
forever refuse to record. The apology with which piety converts the
crimes of its pets into virtues, is that its own agents have failed to
carry out its own contract with its own friends.
The men and women who take their lives in their hands to lead the
westward march of civilization, are held as foes by the main body of the
army, who conspire with the enemy, and hand them over as scapegoats
whose tortures and death are to appease divine wrath for the crimes
which this same main body say it has itself committed against Indians.
No one pretends that Western settlers have injured Indians, but Eastern
philanthropists, through the government they control, have, according to
their own showing, been guilty of no end of frauds; and as they do not,
and cannot, stop the stealing, they pay their debts to the noble red man
by licensing him to outrage women, torture infants and burn homes. When
gold is scarce in the East, they substitute scalps and furnish Indians
with scalping-knives by the thousand, that they may collect their dues
at their own convenience.
This may seem to-day a bitter partisan accusation, but it must be the
calm verdict of history when this comes to be written by impartial pens.
Under the pretense that America belonged, in fee simple, and by special
divine right, to that particular hoard of savages, who, by killing off
some other hoard of savages, were in possession when Columbus first saw
the Great West, the Eastern States, which had already secured their land
by conquest, have become more implacable foes to civilization than the
savages themselves.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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