Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Yes, the rebellion has been raging near a century on every cotton
field and rice plantation. Every vice, hardship, and abomination,
suffered by our soldiers in the war, has been the daily life in
slavery. Yet no Northern volunteers marched to the black man's
help, though he stood alone against such fearful odds, until John
Brown and his twenty-three men threw themselves into the deadly
breach. What a sublime spectacle! Behold! the black man,
forgetting all our crimes, all his wrongs for generations, now
nobly takes up arms in our defence. Look not to Greece or Rome
for heroes--to Jerusalem or Mecca for saints--but for the highest
virtues of heroism, let us worship the black man at our feet.
Mothers, redeem the past by teaching your children the limits of
human rights, with the same exactness that you now teach the
multiplication table. That "all men are created equal" is a far
more important fact for a child to understand, than that twice
two makes four.
Had we during the past century as fondly guarded the tree of
liberty, with its blessed fruits of equality, as have Southern
mothers the deadly upas of slavery, the blood of our sires and
sons, mingled with the sweat and tears of slaves, would not now
enrich the tyrant's soil, our hearthstones would not all be
desolate, nor we, with shame, behold our Northern statesmen in
the nation's councils overwhelmed with doubt and perplexity on
the simplest question of human rights. A mariner without chart or
compass, ignorant of the starry world above his head, drifting on
a troubled sea, is not more hopeless than a nation, in the throes
of revolution, without faith in the immutability and safety of
truth and justice.
Behold in the long past the endless wreck of nations--Despotisms,
Monarchies, Republics--alike, they all sprang up and
bloomed--then drooped and died, because not planted with the
seeds of life; and on their crumbling ruins the black man now
plants his feet, and as he proudly breaks his chains declares,
"MAN ABOVE ALL HUMAN GOVERNMENT."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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