tts, the mother of the
Revolution, every league of whose soil swells with the tomb of some
heroic patriot, shall make pilgrimages through the South, and, after
surveying the lot of slaves under a system that turns them out of
manhood, pronounces them chattles, denies them marriage, makes their
education a penal and penitentiary offence, makes no provision for
their religious culture, leaving it to the stealth of good men, or the
interest of those who regard religion as a currycomb, useful in making
sleek and nimble beasts--a system which strikes through the
fundamental instincts of humanity, and wounds nature in the core of
the human heart, by taking from parents all right in their children,
and leaving the family, like a bale of goods, to be unpacked, and
parceled out and sold in pieces, without any other protection than the
general good nature of easy citizens; what shall be thought of the
condition of the public mind in Boston, when one of her most revered,
and personally, deservedly beloved pastors, has come up so profoundly
ignorant of what we thought every child knew, that he comes home from
this pilgrimage, to teach old New-England to check her repugnance to
Slavery, to dry up her tears of sympathy, and to take comfort in the
assurance that Slavery, on the whole, is as good or better for three
millions of laboring men as liberty. He has instituted a formal
comparison between the state of society and the condition of a
laboring population in a slave system and those in a free State, and
left the impression on every page that Liberty works no better results
than servitude, and that it has mischiefs and inconveniences which
Slavery altogether avoids.
Read that book in Faneuil Hall, and a thousand aroused and indignant
ghosts would come flocking there, as if they heard the old roll-call
of Bunker Hill. Yea, read those doctrines on Bunker Hill--and would it
flame or quake? No. It would stand in silent majesty, pointing its
granite finger up to Heaven and to God--an everlasting witness against
all Slavery, and all its abettors or defenders.
At this moment, the former parties that have stood in counterpoise
have fallen to pieces. And we are on the eve, and in the very act, of
reconstructing our parties. One movement there is that calls itself
American. Oh, that it were or or would be! Never was an opening so
auspicious for a true American party that, embracing the _principles_
of American institutions, should enter
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