Female Abolitionists

FEMALE

ABOLITIONISTS

Phyllis Wheatley, Sarah Mapps Douglass,

Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Tubman,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Others

Edited by

Bob Blaisdell

Dover Publications

Garden City, New York

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

General Editor: Susan L. Rattiner

Editor of This Volume: Michael Croland

Copyright

Copyright © 2021 by Dover Publications

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2021, is a new selection reprinted from standard texts. Misspellings, minor inconsistencies, and other style vagaries derive from the original texts and have been retained for the sake of authenticity. Readers should be forewarned that the text contains racial and cultural references of the era in which it was written and may be deemed offensive by today’s standards. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for this edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blaisdell, Robert, editor.

Title: Female abolitionists / edited by Bob Blaisdell.

Description: Garden City, New York : Dover Publications, 2021. | Series: Dover thrift editions | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: Many women joined the abolitionist cause in the nineteenth century, became as active as men, and were critical to the movement’s success. Black and white women alike raised money and awareness and wrote and spoke passionately against slavery, becoming instrumental in spreading that message far and wide. Several of these women wrote essays for William Lloyd Garrison’s publication The Liberator, and others wrote books, created pamphlets, and made speeches. This collection of essays and speeches by a bold group of women will educate and inspire all who are interested in this era of American history—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021017076 | ISBN 9780486848648 (paperback) | ISBN 0486848647 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Antislavery movements—United States—History—Sources. |Women abolitionists—United States—History—Sources. | Women—Political activity—United States—History—Sources. | American literature—Women authors. | American literature—19th century. | BISAC: HISTORY / Women | POLITICAL SCIENCE / Civil Rights

Classification: LCC E441 .F45 2021 | DDC 320.082/0973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017076

Manufactured in the United States of America

84864701 2021

www.doverpublications.com

Note

We have given great offence on account of our womanhood, which seems to be as objectionable as our abolitionism.¹

—Angelina Grimké, 1838

Speaking out for the abolishment of slavery was not permitted to women in the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, but they did so anyway. The fearless abolitionist Angelina Grimké challenged her potential antislavery audience, that is, Christian women of the South: "But perhaps you will be ready to query, why appeal to women on this subject? We do not make the laws which perpetuate slavery. No legislative power is vested in us; we can do nothing to overthrow the system, even if we wished to do so. To this I reply, I know you do not make the laws, but I also know that you are the wives and mothers, the sisters and daughters of those who do; and if you really suppose you can do nothing to overthrow slavery, you are greatly mistaken."

In America and Europe, which were both heavily financially invested in African slavery, men and their institutions were not bravely facing the primary moral issue of the age. The British abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick, who would help reinspire the American anti­slavery movement in the 1830s, declared, The great men of this ­country will not do this work; the church will never do it. A desire to pleasethe world, to keep the favor of all parties and of all conditions, makes them dumb on this and every other unpopular subject.

Undaunted women stepped forward, uninvited, discouraged, pushed back against by men, and insisted that this appalling practice of slavery, which seemed wrong, inhumane, and unchristian, was indeed immoral from every angle. Successfully setting abolitionism on the path of immediate rather than gradual emancipation, Heyrick wrote, It matters not at all, how, or when, the planter acquired his pretended right to the slave; whether by violence or robbery,—by purchase or by inheritance. His claim always was, and always will be, ill-founded, because it is opposed to nature, to reason, and to religion.

* * *

I have included speeches, lectures, essays, and book excerpts by the women who organized and galvanized antislavery organizations as well as memoirs and a handful of poems that evoke slavery from the inside out. Women abolitionists found themselves with a presence and ability to affect public opinion. Speaking and writing and coming to life on these pages, the former slaves, free women of color, awakened Quakers, and other unsung American women all point straight at the hypocrisy that should have shamed every politician, church leader, and slaveholder into a call for immediate abolition. Let no one say that women are incapable of judging of this question because they are notpoliticians, wrote Eliza Lee Cabot Follen. They are on this very account more able to judge of it, for they regard it only in its true light, as a question of right or wrong. Being neither money-makers nor law-makers, they are more likely to look at it with the clear eye of justice, truth, and purity.

But as we see at different crossroads of history, the Devil incites the shameless to become bold in their defense of injustice. One of the most incisive abolitionist authors, Lydia Maria Child, addressed such hypocrites in her history of slavery: Just ask yourself the question where you could find a set of men, in whose power you would be willing to placeyourself, if the laws allowed them to sin against you withimpunity? To remind ourselves, in 1776, American patriots, offended by Great Britain’s refusal to allow American self-governance, fought the Revolutionary War for liberty, for the idea that all men are created equal. We know that their demand for equality did not extend to equality for women, much less for Black men or Native Americans. The independence of the United States from England should have caused a revolution in American attitudes about slavery, but thenew nation’s slave powers had their way and locked in slavery as a state’s legal right. Child quoted the Virginia judge St. George Tucker on this hypocrisy: While we proclaimed our resolution to live free or die, we imposed on our fellow-men, of different complexion, a Slavery ten thousand times worse than the utmost extremity of the oppressions of which we complained.

Interestingly, two of the most important white evangelists for abolition were Sarah and Angelina Grimké, daughters of a South Carolina slave owner. The Grimkés became members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, after moving to Pennsylvania. They were especially influential and relentless in their fight against slavery, a fight that put them in mortal danger, as the slave-owning interests whipped up violent mobs who believed only white men should have public voices. Such reactionary behavior of course led to the treasonous secession of the Southern states after Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, thus instigating the Civil War, for which the primary motivation was the continuation of slavery.

American women saw how unjust the slave powers’ arguments were, and although women themselves did not have the right to vote, they knew how to petition, publish, sermonize, and lecture. With the great political awakening of American women came their recognition of their own obviously second-class rights. Abolitionists were pioneers in developing the modern concept of human rights, wrote the scholar Manisha Sinha.² In her most famous speech, the former slave Sojourner Truth declared, As for intellect, all I can say is, if women have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full? You need not be afraid to give us our rights for fear we will take too much, for we can’t take more than our pint’ll hold. Inspired by Heyrick, American women also recognized the power of economic boycott. Slavery had contaminated, among other products, sugar and cotton, in which European countries and Northern states had deep financial interests and thereby a stake in supporting the South’s peculiar institution. Angelina Grimké, rallying a boycott, remarked, "The Northern merchants and manufacturers are making their fortunes out of the produce of slave labor ; the grocer is selling your rice and sugar; how then can these men bear a testimony against slavery without condemning themselves?"

The slave powers so infiltrated the federal government that eventually there was no state that was free of slavery’s long-armed tentacles; an escaped slave was not safe from recapture until he or she set foot outside America. The former slave Harriet A. Jacobs, who suffered years of abuse before her escape, pointed out that she was a "human beingsoldin the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of theChristian religion. There was also everyday American racism. Free women of color regularly described the violations of rights and dignity they faced in the North, which led to Mary Ann Shadd, the editor of her own newspaper in Canada, to advocate for emigration to British territory in Canada West." (Great Britain had finally outlawed slavery in 1833.)

Two renowned abolitionists, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, understood that this issue of abolition included the broader issue of female rights and enfranchisement. A privileged class can never conceive the feelings of those who are born to contempt, to inferiority, to degradation, wrote Stanton. Herein is woman more fully identified with the slave than man can possibly be, for she can take the subjective view. She early learns the ­misfortune of being born an heir to the crown of thorns, to martyrdom, to womanhood. For while the man is born to do whatever he can, for the woman and the negro there is no such privilege.

There were, of course, good men commanding the abolition fight, most notably William Lloyd Garrison, whose publications, among them The Liberator, helped spread the word of abolitionism by printing accounts by enlightened women and from former slaves. He encouraged women to write and speak against slavery and saw their poweras individuals and collectively. Frederick Douglass, the most famous escaped slave and abolitionist, also appreciated and supported these women’s bravery and power. Women were abolition’s most effective foot soldiers, Sinha reminds us. The best answer to anti-abolitionist violence came from black and white women who marched arm in arm to shield each other from the howling mobs.³

There is nothing to be said for the Southern slaveholders’ position; they felt abolitionists were violating their rights by condemning the abominable practice of enslaving human beings. Yielding to the hydra-headed slaveholding interests, Congress outlawed the dissemination of abolitionist literature in the South; many state legislatures outlawed teaching slaves to read. The despotic measures you take to silence investigation, and shut out the light from your own white population, Lydia Maria Child wrote to the governor of Virginia, prove how little reliance you have on the strength of your cause. Why or how could anyone have argued for slavery? Child quoted Thomas Jefferson, the former president and one of the most important framers of the Declaration of Independence, who found himself confessing an obvious point: "Onedayof American Slavery is worse than athousand yearsof that which we rose in arms to oppose. As for insurrections, Jefferson admitted, The Almighty has no attribute that can take side with us in such a contest."

After the horrors of the Civil War, who could have denied women the right to vote, when they had done so much to change public opinion on slavery and win the war? What we see in these brilliant and spirited writings is that doing the right thing and demanding of others that they do the right thing take no end of effort. Elizabeth Cady Stanton reminded us that rights never clash or interfere; and where no individual in a community is denied his rights, the mass are the more perfectly protected in theirs; for whenever any class is subject to fraud or injustice, it shows that the spirit of tyranny is at work, and no one can tell where or how or when the infection will spread.

* * *

For her help in directing and focusing this anthology, I would like to thank Fiona Hallowell at Dover Publications. I have included a bibliography of some excellent books and websites that will lead readers deeper into the rich and impressive history of abolitionism and abolitionist heroes.

Bob Blaisdell

New York City

February 8, 2021

1Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885), 193.

Note: All of the quotations in this introductory Note come from the contents of this anthology, unless otherwise specified.

2Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 249.

3Sinha, 266.

Contents

PHILLIS WHEATLEY

Letter to Reverend Samson Occum: 1774

ELIZABETH HEYRICK

Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition: 1824

SARAH LOUISA FORTEN

The Grave of the Slave: 1831

The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother: 1831

MARY PRINCE

The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (Excerpts): 1831

SARAH MAPPS DOUGLASS

Held in Bondage: June 1832

MARIA W. STEWART

Lecture Delivered at Franklin Hall, Boston: September 21, 1832

LYDIA MARIA CHILD

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Preface and Chapter 1): 1833

ELIZABETH MARGARET CHANDLER

Letters to Isabel: 1836

ANGELINA E. GRIMKÉ

Appeal to Christian Women of the South: 1836

SARAH M. GRIMKÉ

An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States: December 1836/p>

ANGELINA E. GRIMKÉ

Speech at Pennsylvania Hall (May 16, 1838)

ABBY KELLEY

What Is Real Anti-Slavery Work?: 1839

ELIZA LEE CABOT FOLLEN

Women’s Work: 1842

HARRIET TUBMAN

Liberty or Death: c. 1845

LUCRETIA MOTT

The Law of ProgressMay 8, 1848

WILLIAM AND ELLEN CRAFT

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Excerpts):

December 1848>

LUCY STANTON

A Plea for the Oppressed: August 27, 1850

SOJOURNER TRUTH

Speech (Ain’t I a Woman) - May 29, 1851>

MARY ANN SHADD

Notes of Canada West (Introductory and Concluding Remarks): 1852

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

An Appeal to the Women of the Free States of America on the Present Crisis in Our Country: February 23, 1854

CHARLOTTE FORTEN

Journal of Charlotte Forten: Free Woman of Color (Excerpts): May–June 1854

FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

The Slave Mother:1854

The Slave Auction: 1854

MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN

How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery? or, Counsels to the Newly Converted: 1855

SUSAN C. CABOT

What Have We, As Individuals, to Do with Slavery? May 9, 1855

HARRIET A. JACOBS

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (Excerpts): 1859

LYDIA MARIA CHILD, GOVERNOR OF VIRGINIA HENRY A. WISE, & MRS. MARIA JEFFERSON CARR RANDOLPH MASON

Correspondence Regarding the Prisoner John Brown: October–December 1859>

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON

Speech to the Anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society: >May 8, 1860>

SARAH PARKER REMOND

The Negroes in the United States of America: January 1, 1862>

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

Speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society:December 4, 1863>

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

PHYLLIS WHEATLEY

Letter to Reverend Samson Occum: 1774

In one of her poems, Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784), the black female icon of the Anglo-American abolition movement,¹ reflects on the kidnapping from Africa that brought her to America, the pain this caused her parents, and her prayer for the end of slavery:

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?²

She was no longer a slave when she wrote the following letter of appreciation to the Presbyterian minister Samson Occum, a member ofthe Mohegan tribe, for speaking out against slavery. She points out thehypocrisy of Americans’ demand to England for the very same liberty that they deny to their slaves: How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher todetermine.

Rev’d and honor'd Sir,

I have this Day received your obliging kind Epistle, and am greatly satisfied with your Reasons respecting the Negroes, and think highly reasonable what you offer in Vindication of their natural Rights: Those that invade them cannot be insensible that the divine Light is chasing away the thick Darkness which broods over the Land of Africa; and the Chaos which hasreign’dso long, is converting into beautiful Order, and revealsmore and more clearly, the glorious Dispensation of civil and religious Liberty, which are so inseparably Limited, that there is little or no Enjoyment of one Without the other: Otherwise, perhaps, the Israelites had been less solicitous for their Freedom from Egyptian slavery; I do not say they would have been contented without it, by no means, for in every human Breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that thesame Principle lives in us. God grant Deliverance in his own Way and Time, and get himhonourupon all those whose Avarice impels them to countenance and help forward the Calamities of their fellow Creatures. This I desire not for their Hurt, but to convince them of the strange Absurdity of their Conduct whose Words and Actions are so diametrically, opposite. How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree, I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher todetermine.

SOURCE: Phillis Wheatley, Letter to Reverend Samson Occum, The Connecticut Gazette (March 11, 1774).

1Sinha, 33.

2Phillis Wheatley, To the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth, in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: A. Bell, 1773).

ELIZABETH HEYRICK

Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition: 1824

This tract, first published in England by Elizabeth Heyrick (1769–1831), helped bring about Great Britain’s emancipation of its West Indian slaves in 1833. Before Heyrick made her steady and fierce argument for immediate emancipation by exposing the futility of gradual emancipation, British politicians had bowed down to the representatives of the slave trade’s economic interests: The enemies of slavery have hitherto ruined their cause by the senseless cry of gradual emancipation. It is marvellous that the wise and the good should have suffered ­themselves to have been imposed upon by this wily artifice of the slave holder, for with him must the project of gradual emancipation have first ­originated. The slave holder knew very well that his prey would be secure, so long as the abolitionists could be cajoled into a demand for gradual instead of immediate abolition. In 1838, Heyrick’s tract was republished and promoted in the United States, where it informed and inspired American abolitionists.

It is now seventeen years since the Slave Trade was abolished by the Government of this country¹ —but Slavery is still perpetuated in our West India Colonies, and the horrors of the Slave Trade are aggravated rather than mitigated. By making it felony for British subjects to be concerned in that inhuman traffic, England has only transferred her share of it to other countries. She has, indeed, by negotiation and remonstrance, endeavoured to persuade them to follow her example. But has she succeeded? How should she while there is so little consistency in her conduct? Who will listen to her pathetic declamations on the injustice and cruelty of the Slave Trade—whilst she rivets the chains upon her own slaves, and subjects them to all the injustice and cruelty which she so eloquently deplores, when her own interest is no longer at stake? Before we can have any rational hope of prevailing on our guilty neighbors to abandon this atrocious commerce—to relinquish the gain of oppression,—the wealth obtained by rapine and violence,—by the deep groans, the bitter anguish of our unoffending fellow creatures;—we must purge ourselves from these pollutions;—we must break the iron yoke from off the neck of our own slaves ,—and let the wretched captives in our own islands go free. Then, and not till then, we shall speak to the surrounding nations with the all-commanding eloquence of sincerity and truth, —and our persuasions will be backed by the irresistible argument of consistent example . But to invite others to be just and merciful whilst we grasp in our own hands the rod of oppression,—to solicit others to relinquish the wages of iniquity whilst we are putting them into our own pockets; what is it but cant and hypocricy? Do such preachers of justice and mercy ever make converts? On the contrary, do they not render themselves ridiculous and contemptible?

But let us, individually, bring this great question closely home to our own bosoms. We that hear, and read, and approve, and applaud the powerful appeals, the irrefragable arguments against the slave trade, and against slavery,—are we ourselves sincere, or hypocritical. Are we the true friends of justice, or do we only cant about it? To which party do we really belong?—to the friends of emancipation, or of perpetual slavery? Every individual belongs to one party or the other; not speculatively, or professionally merely, but practically. Theperpetuation of slavery in our West India colonies, is not an abstract question, to be settled between the Government and the Planters,—it is a question in which we are all implicated;—we are all guilty, (with shame and compunction let us admit the ­opprobrious truth) of supporting and perpetuating slavery. The West Indian planter and the people of this country, stand in the same moral relation to each other, as the thief and the receiver of stolen goods. The planter refuses to set his wretched captive at liberty,—treats him as a beast of burden,—compels his reluctant, unremunerated labour under the lash of a cart whip,—why?—because we furnish the stimulant to all this injustice, rapacity, and cruelty, by PURCHASING ITS PRODUCE. Heretofore, it may have been thoughtlessly and unconsciously, but now this palliative is removed; the veil of ­ignorance is rent aside; the whole nation must now divide itself into the active supporters and the active opposers of slavery; there is no longer any ground for a neutral party to stand upon.

The state of slavery in our West Indian islands, is now become notorious; the secret is out; the justice and humanity, the veracity also, of slave owners, is exactly ascertained; the credit due to their assertions, that their slaves are better fed, better clothed,—are more ­comfortable, more happy than our English peasantry, is now universally understood. The tricks and impostures practiced by the colonial assemblies, to hoodwink the people, to humbug the government; and to bamboozle the saints, (as the friends of emancipation are scornfully termed,) have all been detected, and the cry of the nation has been raised, from one end to the other, against this complicated system of knavery and imposture,—of intolerable oppression, of relentless and savage barbarity.

But is all this knowledge to end in exclamations, in petitions, and remonstrances? Is there nothing to be done, as well as said? Are there no tests to prove our sincerity,—no sacrifices to be offered in confirmation of our zeal? Yes, there is one, (but it is in itself so small and insignificant that it seems almost burlesque to dignify it with the name of sacrifice)—it is abstinence from the use of West Indian productions, sugar especially, in the cultivation of which slave labor is chiefly occupied. Small, however, and insignificant as the sacrifice may appear, it would, at once, give the death blow to West Indian slavery. When there is no longer a market for the productions of slave labor, then, and not till then, will the slaves be emancipated.

Many had recourse to this expedient about thirty years ago, when the public attention was so generally roused to the enormities of the Slave Trade. But when the trade was abolished by the British legislature, it was too readily concluded that the abolition of slavery, in the British dominions, would have been an inevitable consequence; this species of abstinence was therefore unhappily discontinued.

But (it will be objected) if there be no market for West Indian produce, the West Indian proprietors will be ruined, and the slaves, instead of being benefitted, will perish by famine. Not so,—the West Indian proprietors understand their own interest better. Themarket, though shut to the productions of slave labour, would still be open to the productions of free labor, and the planters are not such devoted worshippers of slavery as to make a voluntary sacrifice of their own interests upon her altar; they will not doom the soil to perpetual barrenness rather than suffer it to be cultivated by free men. It has been abundantly proved that voluntary labour is more productive, more advantageous to the employer than compulsory labour. The experiments of the venerable and philanthropic Joshua Steele have established the fact beyond all doubt; but the planter shuts his eyes to such facts, though clear and evident as the sun at noon day. None are so blind as those who will not see. The conviction then must be forced upon these infatuated men. It is often asserted, that slavery is too deeply rooted an evil to be eradicated by the exertions of any principles less potent and active than self interest; if so, the resolution to abstain from West Indian produce, would bring this potent and active principle into the fullest operation,—would compel the planter to set his slaves at liberty.²

But were such a measure to be ultimately injurious to the interest of the planter, that consideration ought not to weigh a feather in the scale against emancipation. The slave has a right to his liberty, a right which it is a crime to withhold, let the consequences to the planters be what they may. If I have been deprived of my rightful inheritance, and the usurper, because he has long kept possession, asserts his right to the property of which he has defrauded me; are my just claims to it at all weakened by the boldness of his pretensions, or by the plea that restitution would impoverish and involve him in ruin? And to what inheritance, or birthright, can any mortal have pretentions so just, (until forfeited by crime,) as to liberty? What injustice and rapacity can be compared to that which defrauds a man of his best earthly inheritance; tears him from his dearest connections, and condemns him and his posterity to the degradation and misery of interminable slavery?

In the great question of emancipation, the interests of two parties are said to be involved; the interest of the slave and that of the planter. But it cannot for a moment be imagined that these two interests have an equal right to be consulted, without confounding all moral ­distinctions, all difference between real and pretended, between substantial and assumed claims. With the interest of the planters,thequestion of emancipation has (properly speaking) nothing to do. The right of the slave, and the interest of the planter, are distinct questions; they belong to separate departments, to different provinces of consideration. If the liberty of the slave can be secured not only without injury, but with advantage to the planter, so much the better, certainly; but still the liberation of the slave ought ever to be regarded as an independent object; and if it be deferred till the planter is sufficiently alive to his own interest to co-operate in the measure, we may for ever despair of its accomplishment. The cause of emancipation has been long and ably advocated. Reason and eloquence, persuasionand argument have been powerfully exerted; experiments have been fairly made,—facts broadly stated in proof of the impolicy as well as iniquity of slavery,—to little purpose; even the hope of its extinction, with the concurrence of the planter, or by any enactment of the colonial or British legislature, is still seen in very remote ­perspective,—so remote that the heart sickens at the cheerless prospect. All that zeal and talent could display in the way of argument, has been exerted in vain. All that an accumulated mass of indubitable evidence could effect in the way of conviction, has been brought to no effect.

It is high time, then, to resort to other measures, to ways and means more summary and effectual. Too much time has already been lost in declamation and argument,—in petitions, and remonstrances against British slavery. The cause of emancipation calls for something more decisive, more efficient than words. It calls upon the real friends of the poor degraded and oppressed African to bind themselves by a solemn engagement, an irrevocable vow, to participate no longer in the crime of keeping him in bondage. It calls upon them to wash their own hands in innocency,—to abjure for ever the miserable hypocrisy of pretending to commiserate the slave, whilst by purchasing the productions of his labour, they bribe his master to keep him in slavery. The great apostle of the Gentiles declared, that he would eat no flesh whilst the world stood, rather than make his brother to offend. Do you make a similar resolution respecting West Indian produce? Let your resolution be made conscientiously, and kept inviolably; let no plausible argument, which may be urged against itfrom without, no solicitations of appetite from within, move you from your purpose,—and in the course of a few months slavery in the British dominions will be annihilated.

Yes, (it may be said) if all would unite in such a resolution,—but what can the abstinence of a few individuals, or a few families do, towards the accomplishment of so vast an object? It can do wonders. Great effects often result from small beginnings. Your resolution will influence that of your friends and neighbors; each of them will, in like manner, influence their friends and neighbors; the example will spread from house to house, from city to city, till, among those who have any claim to humanity, there will be but one heart, and one mind,—one resolution, one uniform practice. Thus by means the most simple and easy, would West Indian slavery be most safely and speedily abolished.

"But, (it will be objected) it is not an immediate, but a gradual emancipation, which the most enlightened and judicious friends of humanity call for, as a measure best calculated, in their judgment, to promote the real interests of the slave, as well as his master; the former, not being in a condition to make a right use of his freedom, were it suddenly restored to him." This, it must be admitted, appears not only the general, but almost universal sentiment of the abolitionists; to oppose it, therefore, may seem a most presumptuous, as well as hopeless attempt. But truth and justice are stubborn and inflexible; they yield neither to numbers or authority.

The history of emancipation in St. Domingo, and of the conduct of the emancipated slaves for thirty years subsequent to that event (as detailed in Clarkson’s admirable pamphlet, on the necessity of improving the condition of our West Indian slaves) is a complete refutation of all the elaborate arguments which have been artfully advanced to discredit the design of immediate emancipation. No instance has been recorded in these important annals, of the emancipated slaves (not the gradually, but the immediately emancipated slaves) having abused their freedom. On the contrary, it is frequently asserted in the course of the narrative, that the negroes continued to work upon all the plantations as quietly as before emancipation. Through the whole of Clarkson’s diligent and candid investigations of the conduct of emancipated slaves, comprising a body of more than five hundred thousand persons, under a great variety of circumstances, a considerable proportion of whom had been suddenly emancipated—with all the vicious habits of slavery upon them; many of them accustomed to the use of arms; he has not, throughout this vast mass of emancipated slaves, found a single instance of bad behaviour, not even a refusal to work, or of disobedience to orders; much less,had he heard of frightful massacres, or of revenge for past injuries, even when they had it amply in their power. Well might this benevolent and indefatigable abolitionist arrive at the conclusion, "that emancipation, (why did he not say immediate emancipation?) was not only practicable, but practicable without danger." All the frightful massacres and conflagrations which took place in St. Domingo, 1791 and 1792, occurred during the days of slavery. They originated, too, not with the slaves, but with the white and coloured planters; between the royalists and the revolutionists, who, for purposes of mutual vengeance, called in the aid of the slaves. Colonel Malenfant, in his history of the emancipation, written during his residence in St.Domingo, ridicules the notion that the negroes would not work without compulsion,—and asserts, that in one plantation, more immediately under his own observation, on which more than four hundred negroes were employed, not one in the number refused to work after their emancipation.

In the face of such a body of evidence, the detaining our West Indian slaves in bondage, is a continued acting of the same atrocious injustice which first kidnapped and tore them from their kindred and native soil, and robbed them of that sacred unalienable right which no considerations, how plausible soever, can justify the withholding. We have no right, on any pretext of expediency or pretended humanity, to say,—because you have been made a slave, and thereby degraded and debased,—therefore, I will continue to hold you in bondage until you have acquired a capacity to make a right use of your liberty. As well might you say to a poor wretch, gasping and languishing in a pest house, here will I keep you, till I have given you a capacity for the enjoyment of pure air.

You admit that the vices of the slave, as well as his miseries—his intellectual and moral, as well as corporeal degradation are consequent on his slavery;—remove the cause then, and the effect will cease. Give the slave his liberty,—in the sacred name of justice, give it him at once. Whilst you hold him in bondage, he will profit little from your plans of amelioration. He has not, by all his complicated injuries and debasements, been disinherited of his sagacity;—this will teach him to give no credit to your admonitory lessons—your Christian instructions will be lost upon him, so long as he both knows and feels that his instructors are grossly violating their own lessons.

The enemies of slavery have hitherto ruined their cause by the senseless cry of gradual emancipation. It is marvellous that the wise and the good should have suffered themselves to have been imposed upon