Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada WestSteward, Austin
History
Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West
When strangers pass hastily through this country, and after a careless
glance at the colored population, report them to be "an indolent,
improvident, and vicious class of persons," they should consider some of
the many obstacles thrown in the way of the most favored of that race.
Knowing as they do, the rigor of the law, and feeling as they do, the
oppressive power of prejudice, it becomes almost impossible for them
to rise to that station they were designed to fill, and for which their
natural abilities as certainly qualify them, as though they had never
been robbed of their God-given rights. But let us return to our tried
friends in Cincinnati.
They finally resolved to collect what they could of their possessions and
establish a colony in Canada. In accordance with this resolution, they
agreed to first send an agent to obtain liberty to settle there, and if
successful to select and purchase a large tract of land, making such
arrangements as he thought best for their speedy removal to their new
home. Israel Lewis was their appointed agent, who departed immediately for
Upper Canada to perform his mission; and there for the present we will
leave him and return to Rochester.
Our more favored brethren in New York felt a deep sympathy for their
outraged countrymen in Cincinnati; a sympathy equaled only by their
indignation at the cause of such demand.
A meeting expressive of their views and feelings on that subject, was
convened in the city of Rochester during which, the following preamble and
resolutions were read and unanimously adopted:
_Whereas_, The city of Cincinnati has again become the scene of another
dreadful mob and bloodshed, where nothing but terror and confusion reigned
for a number of hours together.
_And Whereas_, Our brethren and fellow citizens were left exposed to the
fury of an ungovernable mob, made up of the base, the ignorant, and vile,
the very dregs of society; and probably led on by slaveholders, who of all
men are the most execrable; while boasting of liberty, he tramples on the
dearest rights of men and in the greatest robber of it on earth.
_Resolved_, That we deprecate an appeal to arms by any class of our fellow
citizens, except in extreme cases, and we think that such a case has been
presented in the late outrage at Cincinnati.
_Resolved_, That when a class of men so far forget the duty they owe to
God, their fellow men, and their country, as to trample under their feet
the very laws they have made, and are in duty bound to obey and execute,
we believe it to be the duty of our brethren and fellow citizens, to
protect their lives against such lawless mobs; and if in the conflict,
any of the mobocrats perish, every good citizen should say Amen.
_Resolved_, That we do truly sympathize with the friends of God's poor;
the friends of the oppressed, throughout this boasted land of liberty, in
the losses they have sustained in consequence of the mob.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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