crowding in the short compass of a summer’s day, the joy of many
years, with the winding up with Home and all that makes it dear; no
tongue can tell, or pen of mine describe.
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CHAPTER XVI – SLAVERY
THE upholders of slavery in America – of the atrocities of which
system, I shall not write one word for which I have not had ample
proof and warrant – may be divided into three great classes.
The first, are those more moderate and rational owners of human
cattle, who have come into the possession of them as so many coins
in their trading capital, but who admit the frightful nature of the
Institution in the abstract, and perceive the dangers to society
with which it is fraught: dangers which however distant they may
be, or howsoever tardy in their coming on, are as certain to fall
upon its guilty head, as is the Day of Judgment.
The second, consists of all those owners, breeders, users, buyers
and sellers of slaves, who will, until the bloody chapter has a
bloody end, own, breed, use, buy, and sell them at all hazards:
who doggedly deny the horrors of the system in the teeth of such a
mass of evidence as never was brought to bear on any other subject,
and to which the experience of every day contributes its immense
amount; who would at this or any other moment, gladly involve
America in a war, civil or foreign, provided that it had for its
sole end and object the assertion of their right to perpetuate
slavery, and to whip and work and torture slaves, unquestioned by
any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when
they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and
to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his
own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a
sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun
Alraschid in his angry robe of scarlet.
The third, and not the least numerous or influential, is composed
of all that delicate gentility which cannot bear a superior, and
cannot brook an equal; of that class whose Republicanism means, ‘I
will not tolerate a man above me: and of those below, none must
approach too near;’ whose pride, in a land where voluntary
servitude is shunned as a disgrace, must be ministered to by
slaves; and whose inalienable rights can only have their growth in
negro wrongs.
It has been sometimes urged that, in the unavailing efforts which
have been made to advance the cause of Human Freedom in the
republic of America (strange cause for history to treat of!),
sufficient regard has not been had to the existence of the first
class of persons; and it has been contended that they are hardly
used, in being confounded with the second. This is, no doubt, the
case; noble instances of pecuniary and personal sacrifice have
already had their growth among them; and it is much to be regretted
that the gulf between them and the advocates of emancipation should
have been widened and deepened by any means: the rather, as there
are, beyond dispute, among these slave-owners, many kind masters
who are tender in the exercise of their unnatural power. Still, it
is to be feared that this injustice is inseparable from the state
of things with which humanity and truth are called upon to deal.
Slavery is not a whit the more endurable because some hearts are to
be found which can partially resist its hardening influences; nor
can the indignant tide of honest wrath stand still, because in its
onward course it overwhelms a few who are comparatively innocent,
among a host of guilty.
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The ground most commonly taken by these better men among the
advocates of slavery, is this: ‘It is a bad system; and for myself
I would willingly get rid of it, if I could; most willingly. But
it is not so bad, as you in England take it to be. You are
deceived by the representations of the emancipationists. The