greater part of my slaves are much attached to me. You will say
that I do not allow them to be severely treated; but I will put it
to you whether you believe that it can be a general practice to
treat them inhumanly, when it would impair their value, and would
be obviously against the interests of their masters.’
Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his
health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear
himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No.
All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them?
Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of
mankind. Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of
human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of
irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult
to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will
inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the
slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!
But again: this class, together with that last one I have named,
the miserable aristocracy spawned of a false republic, lift up
their voices and exclaim ‘Public opinion is all-sufficient to
prevent such cruelty as you denounce.’ Public opinion! Why,
public opinion in the slave States IS slavery, is it not? Public
opinion, in the slave States, has delivered the slaves over, to the
gentle mercies of their masters. Public opinion has made the laws,
and denied the slaves legislative protection. Public opinion has
knotted the lash, heated the branding-iron, loaded the rifle, and
shielded the murderer. Public opinion threatens the abolitionist
with death, if he venture to the South; and drags him with a rope
about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city
in the East. Public opinion has, within a few years, burned a
slave alive at a slow fire in the city of St. Louis; and public
opinion has to this day maintained upon the bench that estimable
judge who charged the jury, impanelled there to try his murderers,
that their most horrid deed was an act of public opinion, and being
so, must not be punished by the laws the public sentiment had made.
Public opinion hailed this doctrine with a howl of wild applause,
and set the prisoners free, to walk the city, men of mark, and
influence, and station, as they had been before.
Public opinion! what class of men have an immense preponderance
over the rest of the community, in their power of representing
public opinion in the legislature? the slave-owners. They send
from their twelve States one hundred members, while the fourteen
free States, with a free population nearly double, return but a
hundred and forty-two. Before whom do the presidential candidates
bow down the most humbly, on whom do they fawn the most fondly, and
for whose tastes do they cater the most assiduously in their
servile protestations? The slave-owners always.
Public opinion! hear the public opinion of the free South, as
expressed by its own members in the House of Representatives at
Washington. ‘I have a great respect for the chair,’ quoth North
Carolina, ‘I have a great respect for the chair as an officer of
the house, and a great respect for him personally; nothing but that
respect prevents me from rushing to the table and tearing that
petition which has just been presented for the abolition of slavery
in the district of Columbia, to pieces.’ – ‘I warn the
abolitionists,’ says South Carolina, ‘ignorant, infuriated
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barbarians as they are, that if chance shall throw any of them into
our hands, he may expect a felon’s death.’ – ‘Let an abolitionist
come within the borders of South Carolina,’ cries a third; mild
Carolina’s colleague; ‘and if we can catch him, we will try him,
and notwithstanding the interference of all the governments on
earth, including the Federal government, we will HANG him.’
Public opinion has made this law. – It has declared that in
Washington, in that city which takes its name from the father of