"How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery?" or, Counsels to the Newly ConvertedChapman, Maria Weston
Philosophy
"How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery?" or, Counsels to the Newly Converted
Chapman, Maria Weston
Abolitionists; American Anti-Slavery Society; Antislavery movements -- United States
“Establish free-labor warehouses.” Indeed! is that a good business
calculation that leads to expend in search of the products of free labor
the time and money that would make all labor free? While wrong exists in
the world, you cannot (short of suicide) but draw your every life breath
in involuntary connection with it; nor is conscience to be satisfied
with any thing short of a complete devotion to the anti-slavery cause of
the life that is sustained by slavery. We _may_ draw good out of evil:
we _must not_ do evil, that good may come. Yet I counsel you to honor
those who eat no sugar, as _you_ ask no questions for conscience’s sake;
while you despise those who thrust forward such a call upon conscience,
_impossible_, in the nature of things, to be obeyed, and therefore not
binding, as if it were the end of the law for righteousness, in order to
injure Garrison, the great and good founder of the American Anti-Slavery
Society. I have seen men stand drawing bills of exchange between England
and the United States, while uttering maledictions against the American
Anti-Slavery Society, because it does not, as such, occupy itself with
the free produce question. This I brand as pro-slavery in disguise—sheer
hypocrisy.
You see, my friend, that I have replied to your question in the
conviction that you desire the abolition of slavery above all other
things in this world; as one assured that it is the great work of
Christianity in our age and country, as the conflict with idolatry was
in other times and climes. Thus you see the salvation of the souls, the
maintenance of the rights, the fulfilment of the duties, and the
preservation of the free institutions of Americans, to depend upon the
extirpation of this accursed and disgraceful disease which is destroying
them. If I had reason to think you merely desirous to make sectarian and
political capital out of a holy thought and a sacred purpose originated
by others—if you were merely contriving defences for what is
indefensible, and trying to save the credit of what is disgraceful,
trying to throw dust, and change the issue, and pay tithes of cumin to
delay justice, in order to spare your own insignificant self in this
greatest conflict of light and darkness, good and evil, which the world
has now to show—if you had been trying how to _seem_ creditably
interested in what ought to be an American’s first business, and
calculating _how little_ instead of _how much_ you might sacrifice to
the soul-exalting cause of freedom—if you were but trying to get
yourself or some friend into office by the judicious use of ideas which,
as a republican and a Christian, you ought to give yourself wholly to be
used by—if you were the hired agent of some demisemiquaver of a movement
which tacked anti-slavery to its other titles, in order to establish a
claim on the purses of abolitionists—in any of these cases I would not
have stopped to talk with you. Your interest being the thing you had at
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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