Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Europe -- Description and travel
"We rejoice to find that the great principles upon which our society is
based are so fully and so cordially recognized by yourself and your
beloved husband and brother--First, that personal slavery, in all its
varied forms, is a direct violation of the blessed, precepts of the
gospel, and therefore a sin in the sight of God; and secondly, that
every victim of this unjust and sinful system is entitled to immediate
and unconditional freedom. For, however we might acquiesce in the course
of a nation which, under a sense of its participation in the guilt of
slavery, should share the pecuniary loss, if such there were, of its
immediate abolition, yet we repudiate the right to demand compensation
for human flesh and blood, as (to employ the emphatic words of Lord
Brougham) we repudiate and abhor 'the wild and guilty fantasy that man
can hold property in man.' And we do not hesitate to express our
conviction, strengthened by the experience of emancipation in our own
colonies, that on the mere ground of social or political expediency, the
immediate termination of slavery would be far less dangerous and far
less injurious than, any system of compromise, or any attempt at gradual
emancipation.
"Let it be borne in mind, however,--and we record it with peculiar
interest on the present occasion,--that it was the pen of a woman that
first publicly enunciated the imperative duty of immediate emancipation.
Amid vituperation and ridicule, and, far worse, the cold rebuke of
Christian friends, Mrs. Elizabeth Heyrick boldly sent forth the
thrilling tract which taught the abolitionists of Great Britain this
lesson of justice and truth; and we honor her memory for her deeds.
Again we are indebted to the pen of a woman for pleading yet more
powerfully the cause of justice to the slave; and again we have to
admire and honor the Christian heroism which has enabled you, dear
madam, to brave the storm of public opinion, and to bear the frowns of
the church in your own land, while you boldly sent forth your matchless
volume to teach more widely and more attractively the same righteous
lesson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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