Slaveholding Weighed in the Balance of Truth, and Its Comparative Guilt IllustratedFitch, Charles
Philosophy
Slaveholding Weighed in the Balance of Truth, and Its Comparative Guilt Illustrated
Fitch, Charles
Antislavery movements -- United States; Slavery -- United States
But the Romish Church does not, ordinarily, strip the whole multitude of
its victims, of everything that bears the name of property, and take the
ownership of themselves out of their hands, and drive them by the
scourge to hard labor from the beginning to the end of the year. She
does not measure out to them their scanty pittance of food, nor name
every rag of clothing which they are permitted to put on, nor mock at
all the relations of social life--stealing the child out of the father's
arms, or off the mother's breast; and the wife out of the bosom of her
husband; and separating them for life, depriving them of all the
protection of law, and subjecting them daily to every injury and
suffering, which avarice and passion and lust can load upon them. Nor
are men, women and children under her influence, like cattle, raised to
sell. Such enormities as these are left to be practiced by slavery; and
to be legalized in the statute books of a people, who have boastingly
regarded themselves, as the most thoroughly christianized nation on
which the sun ever shines. I say then, there are points, in which
slavery far outdoes the Romish Church in cruelty and guilt; binds
heavier burdens, and more grievous to be borne, and lays them on men's
shoulders, and will not touch them with a finger. Slavery also like
Romanism, cries out against free discussion, and the liberty of the
press, and does not hesitate to silence both, so far as she has the
power; and to make every possible advance toward it where the power is
not possessed. Hence the outrages committed on peaceful citizens,
travelling in slaveholding States; and the efforts to put down
discussion, in almost all the States which call themselves free. Hence
the destruction of Birney's press in Cincinnati, and the stones cast in
the streets of Troy, at the hero Weld, who, like his Master, goes about
doing good. Hence all the shameful outrages by which that place has been
disgraced, and the still more shameful neglect of the proper authorities
to protect peaceful, respectable, high-minded, and pious men, in the
exercise of the most noble of all their rights, that of publicly
expressing and defending their own opinions. Hence all the excesses
practiced in this and several adjoining States, to lay the heaven-born
spirit of liberty asleep, even among her own New-England hills. Hence
the long, loud, and repeated threats of dissolving the Union, which
Southern men have sent up on our ears, and which even some of our
Governors have echoed back, in declarations that it is felony for a man
to speak what he thinks on a particular subject. Who doubts, that
slavery if she could, would go so far in locking up the opinions of men
within their own breasts, as ever popery went in the height of her
power. She had already, well nigh, taken away the power of free
discussion, from those who dare to assert the rights of their fellow
men, and would soon have completed the _work_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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