CONSTITUTION OF ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. 57

for the enactment of such laws as will protect the colored man, woinan, and child, from the fangs of the kidnapper, who is constantly walking about in the northern states, seeking whom he may devour. Let the northern churches refuse to receive slaveholders at their communion tables, or to permit slaveholding ministers to enter their pulpits. Let those northern ministers who go to the South "Cry aloud and spare not, lift up their voices like a trumpet and show the people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins ;"-let them refuse to countenance the system of slavery by owning slaves themselves, Let northern men who go to the South to make their fortunes, see to it, that those fortunes are not made out of the unrequited labor of the slave. Let northern merchants refuse to receive mortgages or take slaves, seeing that this is a virtual acknowledgement that man can hold man as property. Let them carefully avoid participating in any way in the African slave-trade. Let northern manufacturers refuse to purchase the cotton for the cultivation of which the laborer has re ceived no wages. Let the grocer refuse to buy the sugar and rice of the South, so long as "the hire of the laborers who have reaped down their fields is kept back by fraud." Let the merchant refuse to receive the articles manufactured out of slave-grown cotton, and let the consumer refuse to purchase either the rice, sugar, or cotton articles, to produce which has cost the slave his unpaid labor, his tears, and his blood. Every Northerner may in this way bear a faithful testimony against slavery at the South, by withdrawing his pecuinary support.

CONSTITUTION OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY

SOCIETY.

ART. II.—The object of this Society is the entire abolition of slavery in the United States. While it admits that each state in which slavery exists, has, by the Constitution of the United States, the exclusive right to legislate in regard to its abolition in said state, it shall aim to convince all our fellow-citizens, by arguments addressed to their understandings and consciences, that slaveholding is a heinous crime in the sight of God, and that the duty, safety, and best interests of all concerned, requires its immediate abandonment, without expatriation. The Society will also endeavor, in a constitutional way, to influence congress to put an end to the domestic slave-trade, and to abolish slavery in all those portions of our common country which come under its control, especially in the District of Columbia,—and likewise to prevent the extension of it to any state that may be hereafter admitted to the Union.

ART. III. This Society shall aim to elevate the character and condition of the people of color, by encouraging their intellectual, moral, and religious improvement, and by removing public prejudice, that thus they may, according to their intellectual and moral worth, share an equality with the whites, of civil and religious privileges; but this Society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical force.

58 NEW-ENG. A. s. SOCIETY—OHIO a. s. convention.

NEW-ENGLAND ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.

The constitution and the laws have left us the means to spread and to carry into effect the doctrine of human rights, of universal liberty. The law, at least, in the free states, allows the use of all means, except those which our own conscience would forbid; the constitution of the New-England Anti-Slavery Society permits no others than such as are sanctioned by law, humanity, and religion. It is enough that we have freedom to speak and to print; freedom peacefully to assemble, and associate, to consult, and to petition the government of the Union as well as the legislature of every state, and thus by individual and united exertion, to act upon the public mind. Thus armed with all the legitimate weapons of truth, we feel bound in conscience never to lay them down until the principle that man can hold property in man is effaced from our statute books, and held in abhorrence by public opinion. After the most careful examination, we are convinced that slavery is unjust in itself, and cannot be justified by any laws or circumstances; that it wars against Christianity, and is condemned by the Declaration of our Independence. We are convinced that it is injurious to every branch of industry, and more injurious still to the mind and character both of the master and the slave. Its existence is the chief cause of all our political dissensions; it tends to unsettle the groundwork of our government, so that every institution, founded on the common ground of our Union, is like an edifice on a volcanic soil, ever liable to have its foundation shaken, and the whole structure consunied by subterraneous fire. The danger of a servile and a civil war is gaining every year, every day; for the annual increase of the slave population is more than sixty thousand; and every day about two hundred children are born into slavery. As the more northern of the slave states, seeing the advantages of free labor, dispose of their slaves in a more southern market, and by degrees abolish servitude, the whole slave population, and with it the danger of a terrible revolution are crowded together in the more southern states. Under all these threatening circumstances, what have the southern states, what has congress done, to avert the impending calamity from the Union? Congress, which has full and exclusive power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and in the territories, and to abolish the domestic as well as the foreign slave-trade, shrinks from touching the subject.

OHIO ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION.

The influence of slavery upon slaveholders and the slave states are, an abiding sense of insecurity and dread; the press cowering under a censorship; freedom of speech struck dumb by proscription; a standing army of patrols to awe down insurrection; the mechanic arts and all vigorous enterprise crushed under an incubus; a thriftless agriculture, smiting the land with barrenness and decay; industry held up to scorn; idleness a badge of dignity; profligacy no barrier to favor; lust emboldened by impunity; concubinage encouraged by premium, the high price of the mixed race operating as a bounty upon amalgamation;

ROBERT J. BRECKENRIDGE-FRANCIS WAYLAND. 59

prodigality, in lavishing upon the rich the plundered earnings of the poor, accounted high-souled generosity; revenge regarded as the refinement of honor; aristocracy entitled republicanism, and despotism chivalry; sympathy deadened by scenes of cruelty rendered familiar; female amiableness transformed into fury by habits of despotic sway; conscience smothered by its own unheeded monitions; manhood effeminated by loose-reined indulgence, and a pervading degeneracy of morals and manners, resulting from a state of society where power has no restraint, and the weak have none to succor.

ROBERT J. BRECKENRIDGE.

Just and equal! what care I, whether my pockets are picked, or the proceeds of my labor are taken from me? What matters it whether my horse is stolen, or the value of him in my labor be taken from me? Do we talk of violating the rights of masters, and depriving them of their property in their slaves? And will some one tell us, if there be any thing in which a man has, or can have, so perfect a right of property, as in his own limbs, bones, and sinews? Out upon such folly! The man who cannot see that involuntary domestic slavery, as it exists among us, is founded upon the principle of taking by force that which is another's, has simply no moral sense.

We utter but the common sentiment of mankind when we say, none ever continue slaves a moment after they are conscious of their ability to retrieve their freedom. The constant tendency for fifty years has been to accumulate the black population upon the southern states; already in some of them the blacks exceed the whites, and in most of them increase above the increase of the whites in the same states, with a ratio that is absolutely startling; [the annual increase in the United States is sixty thousand;] the slave population could bring into action a larger portion of efficient men, perfectly inured to hardships, to the climate, and privations, than any other population in the world; and they have in distant sections, and on various occasions, manifested already a desperate purpose to shake off the yoke. In such an event we ask not any heart to decide where would human sympathy and earthly glory stand; we ask not in the fearful words of Jefferson, what attribute of Jehovah would allow him to take part with us; we ask only-and the answer settles the argument—which is like to be the stronger side?

Nature, and reason, and religion unite in their hostility to this system of folly and crime. How it will end, time only can reveal; but the light of heaven is not clearer than that it must end.—African Repository,

Jan. 1834.

FRANCIS WAYLAND.

Its effects must be disastrous upon the morals of both parties. By presenting objects on whom passion can be satisfied without resistance and without redress, it cultivates in the master, pride, anger, cruelty, selfishness, and licentiousness. By accustoming the slave to subject his moral principles to the will of another, it tends to abolish in him

60

ALONZO POTTER-WILLIAM E. CHANNING.

all moral distinction, and thus fosters in him, lying, deceit, hypocrisy, dishonesty, and a willingness to yield himself up to minister to the appetite of his master-Moral Science.

ALONZO POTTER.

Brethren, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. This is the argument on which I would rely, in asking your charity this evening. The neglected and ill-fated race for whom I plead, are brethren with us of one family. The hand of the Creator may have imprinted on their features, a hue and complexion less delicate than ours. Man's rapacity may have torn them from their native land, and reduced them to the condition of slaves and menials here. And weighed down by oppression, bereft of hope, and having none to care for their souls, they may, too often, have sunk into vice and debasement. But, my friends, standing in this holy place-in his immediate presence, who has made of one blood all the nations of the earth, and given his Son to be a ransom for the inhabitans of every one alike; I can listen to no such facts as an excuse for apathy or avarice. If this unfortunate people have a physical nature less perfect than ours, God forbid that this, their misfortune, should be imputed to them as their crime. Still they have all the attributes of men-"the same organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions. They are fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer," that a white man is.Discourse before the African School Society, Schenectady N. Y.

WILLIAM E. CHANNING.

With the free we are to plead his cause. And this is peculiarly our duty, because we have bound ourselves to resist his efforts for his own emancipation. We suffer him to do nothing for himself. The more, then, should be done for him. Our physical power is pledged against him in case of revolt. Then our moral power should be exerted for his relief. His weakness, which we increase, gives him a claim to the only aid we can afford, to our moral sympathy, to the free and faithful exposition of his wrongs. As men, as Christians, as citizens, we have duties to the slave, as well as to every other member of the community. On this point we have no liberty. The eternal law binds us to take the side of the injured; and this law is peculiarly obligatory, when we forbid him to lift an arm in his own defence.

There is, however, there must be, in slaveholding_communities a large class which cannot be too severely condemned. There are many we fear, very many, who hold their fellow-creatures in bondage, from selfish, base motives. They hold the slave for gain, whether justly or unjustly they neither ask nor care. They cling to him as property, and have no faith in the principles which will diminish a man's wealth. They hold him, not for his own good or the safety of the state, but with precisely the same views with which they hold a laboring horse, that is, for the profit which they can wring from him. They will not hear a word of his wrongs; for, wronged or not, they will not let him

JAMES G. BIRNEY.

61

go. He is their property, and they mean not to be poor for righteousness' sake. Such a class there undoubtedly is among slaveholders; how large their own consciences must determine. We are sure of it;

for under such circumstances human nature will and must come to this mournful result. Now, to men of this spirit, the explanations we have made do in no degree apply. Such men ought to tremble before the rebukes of outraged humanity and indignant virtue. Slavery, upheld for gain, is a great crime. He, who has nothing to urge against emancipation, but that it will make him poorer, is bound to immediate emancipation. He has no excuse for wresting from his brethren their rights. The plea of benefit to the slave and the state avails him nothing. He extorts, by the lash, that labor to which he has no claim, through a base selfishness. Every morsel of food, thus forced from the injured, ought to be bitterer than gall. His gold is cankered. The sweat of the slave taints the luxuries for which it streams. Better were it for the selfish wrong doer of whom I speak, to live as the slave, to clothe himself in the slave's raiment, to eat the slave's coarse food, to till his fields with his own hands, than to pamper himself by day, and pillow his head on down at night, at the cost of a wantonly injured fellow

creature.

I know it will be said, "You would make us poor." Be poor, then, and thank God for your honest poverty. Better be poor than unjust. Better beg than steal. Better live in an almshouse, better die than trample on a fellow-creature and reduce him to a brute, for selfish gratification. What! have we yet to learn that "it profits us nothing to gain the whole world, and lose our souls?"

JAMES G. BIRNEY.

There would be no danger of personal violence to the master from emancipation, brought about by Christian benevolence. Such an apprehension is the refuge of conscious guilt. Emancipation, brought about on the principle above mentioned, I hesitate not to say, would, in most instances, where the superior intelligence of the master was acknowledged, produce on the part of the beneficiaries, the most entire and cordial reliance on his counsel and friendship. I do not believe that I have any warmer friends than my manumitted slaves-none, I am sure, if sacrifices were called for, who would more freely make them, to promote my happiness.

The injustice which the slave feels as done him in taking the avails of his labor, leads him to take clandestinely, what he persuades himself he is entitled to. He has comparatively no character to lose, no ultimate object, for the attainment of which, the building up of a good character would contribute. As a freeman, character would be essential to him-his earnings would be his; his house, his furniture, his comforts would be his-his wife, his children would be his; the apprehension of forcible separation would depart, and he would have every motive that ordinarily influences men to build up a good name for worth and honesty. The depredations on the masters' property by slaves, I should suppose, are tenfold what they would be by the same slaves made freemen.-Reply to Queries of some Friends, 1835.