After all, she has her glory. After all, in these free states a man is still a man. He knows his rights, he respects himself, and acknowledges the equal claim of his brother. We have order without the display of force. We have government without soldiers, spies, or the constant presence of coercion. The rights of thought, of speech, of the press, of conscience, of worship are enjoyed to the full without violence or dangerous excess. We are even distinguished by kindliness and good temper amidst this unbounded freedom. The individual is not lost in the mass, but has a consciousness of self-subsistence, and stands erect. That character which we call manliness is stamped on the multitude here as nowhere else. No aristocracy interferes with the natural relations of men to one another. No hierarchy weighs down the intellect, and makes the church a prison to the soul, from which it ought to break every chain. I make no boast of my country's progress, marvellous as it has been. I feel deeply her defects. But, in the language of Cowper, I can say to her,— "Yet, being free, I love thee; for the sake Of that one feature can be well content, Our country is free; this is its glory. How deeply to be lamented is it that this glory is obscured by the presence of slavery in any part of our territory! The distant foreigner, to whom America is a point, and who communicates the taint of a part to the whole, hears with derision our boast of liberty, and points with a sneer to our ministers in London not ashamed to plead the rights of slavery before the civilized world. He ought to learn that America, which shrinks in his mind into a narrow unity, is a league of sovereignties stretching from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Mexico, and destined, unless disunited, to spread from ocean to ocean; that a great majority of its citizens hold no slaves; that a vast proportion of its wealth, commerce, manufactures, and arts belongs to the wide region not blighted by this evil; that we of the free states cannot touch slavery, where it exists, with one of our fingers; that it exists without and against our will; and that our necessity is not our choice and crime. Still, the cloud hangs over us as a people, the only dark and menacing cloud. Can it not be dispersed? Will not the South, so alive to honor, so ardent and fearless, and containing so many elements of greatness, resolve on the destruction of what does not profit and cannot but degrade it? Must slavery still continue to exist, a firebrand at home and our shame abroad? Can we of the free states brook that it should be thrust perpetually by our diplomacy on the notice of a reproving world? that it should become our distinction among nations? that it should place us behind all? Can we endure that it should control our public councils, that it should threaten war, should threaten to assert its claims in the thunder of our artillery? Can we endure that our peace should be broken, our country exposed to inva sion, our cities stormed, our fields ravaged, our prosperity withered, our progress arrested, our sons slain, our homes turned into deserts, not for rights, not for liberty, not for a cause which humanity smiles on and God will bless, but to rivet chains on fellow-creatures, to extend the law of slavery throughout the earth? These are great questions for the free states. The duties of the free states in relation to slavery deserve the most serious regard. Let us implore Him who was the God of our fathers, and who has shielded us in so many perils, to open our minds and hearts to what is true and just and good, to continue our union at home and our peace abroad, and to make our country a living witness to the blessings of freedom, of reverence for right on our own shores and in our intercourse with all nations. THE LESSONS OF INDEPENDENCE DAY. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON. July 4, 1842. I present myself as the advocate of my enslaved countrymen, at a time when their claims cannot be shuffled out of sight, and on an occasion which entitles me to a respectful hearing in their behalf. If I am asked to prove their title to liberty, my answer is, that the fourth of July is not a day to be wasted in establishing "self-evident truths." In the name of the God who has made us of one blood, and in whose image we are created; in the name of the Messiah, who came to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of a prison to them that are bound; I demand the immediate emancipation of those who are pining in slavery on the American soil, whether they are fattening for the shambles in Maryland and Virginia, or are wasting, as with a pestilent disease, on the cotton and sugar plantations of Alabama and Louisiana; whether they are male or female, young or old, vigorous or infirm. I make this demand, not for the children merely, but the parents also; not for one, but for all; not with restrictions and limitations, but unconditionally. I assert their perfect equality with ourselves, as a part of the human race, and their inalienable right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That this demand is founded in justice, and is therefore irresistible, the whole nation is this day acknowledging, as upon oath at the bar of the world. And not until, by a formal vote, the people repudiate the declaration of independence as a false and dangerous instrument, and cease to keep this festival in honor of liberty, as unworthy of note or remembrance; not until they spike every cannon, and muffle every bell, and disband every procession, and quench every bonfire, and. gag every orator; not until they brand Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson, and Hancock, as fanatics and madmen; not until they place themselves again in the condition of colonial subserviency to Great Britain, or transform this republic into an imperial government; not until they cease pointing exultingly to Bunker Hill, and the plains of Concord and Lexington; not, in fine, until they deny the authority of God, and proclaim themselves to be destitute of principle and humanity, will I argue the question, as one of doubtful disputation, on an occasion like this, whether our slaves are entitled to the rights and privileges of freemen. That question is settled irrevocably. There is no man to be found, unless he has a brow of brass and a heart of stone, who will dare to contest it on a day like this. A state of vassalage is pronounced, by universal acclamation, to be such as no man, or body of men, ought to submit to for one moment. I therefore tell the American slaves, that the time for their emancipation is come; that, their own taskmasters being witnesses, they are created equal to the rest of mankind, and possess an inalienable right to liberty; and that no man has a right to hold them in bondage. I counsel them not to fight for their freedom, both on account of the hopelessness of the effort, and because it is rendering evil for evil; but I tell them, not less emphatically, it is not wrong for them to refuse to wear the yoke of slavery any longer. Let them shed no blood-enter into no conspiracies-raise no murderous revolts; but, whenever and wherever they can break their fetters, God give them courage to do so! And should they attempt to elope from their house of bondage, and come to the north, may each of them find a covert from the search of the spoiler, and an invincible public sentiment to shield them from the grasp of the kidnapper! Success attend them in their flight to Canada, to touch whose monarchical soil insures freedom to every republican slave! Is this preaching sedition? Sedition against what? Not the lives of the Southern oppressors for-I renew the solemn injunction, "Shed no blood!"-but against unlawful authority, and barbarous usage, and unrequited toil. If slave-holders are still obstinately bent upon plundering and starving their long-suffering victims, why, let them look well to consequences! To save them from danger, I am not obligated to suppress the truth, or to stop proclaiming liberty "throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof." No, indeed. There are two important truths, which, as far as practicable, I mean every slave shall be made to understand. The first is, that he has a right to his freedom now; the other is, that this is recognized as a selftruth in the Declaration of Independence. Sedition, forso what are the American people doing this day? In the ing the freedom and equality of the human race; a claring that all tyrants ought to be extirpated earth! We are giving to our slaves the follow tion:-If the principle involved in a threeper seven years' war, how much blood may be lawfully spilt in resisting the principle, that one human being has a right to the body and soul of another, on account of the color of his skin? Again, If the impressment of six thousand American seamen, by Great Britain, furnished sufficient cause for a bloody struggle with that nation, and the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of capital, in self-defence, how many lives may be taken, by way of retribution, on account of the enslavement, as chattels, of more than two millions of American laborers? Oppression and insurrection go hand in hand, as cause and effect are allied together. In what age of the world have tyrants reigned with impunity, or the victims of tyranny not resisted unto blood? Besides our own grand insurrection against the authority of the mother country, there have been many insurrections, during the last two hundred years, in various sections of the land, on the part of the victims of our tyranny, but without the success that attended our own struggle. The last was the memorable one in Southampton, Virginia, headed by a black patriot, nicknamed, in the contemptuous nomenclature of slavery, Nat Turner. The name does not strike the ear so harmoniously as that of Washington, or Lafayette, or Hancock, or Warren; but the name is nothing. It is not in the power of all the slave-holders upon earth, to render odious the memory of that sable chieftain. "Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God," was our revolutionary motto. We acted upon that motto-what more did Nat Turner? Says George McDuffie, "A people who deliberately submit to oppression, with a full knowledge that they are oppressed, are fit only to be slaves. No tyrant ever made a slave-no community, however small, having the spirit of freemen, ever yet had a master. It does not belong to men to count the costs, and calculate the hazards of vindicating their rights, and defending their liberties." So reasoned Nat Turner, and acted accordingly. Was he a patriot, or a monster? Do we mean to say to the oppressed of all nations, in the 62d year of our independence, and on the 4th of July, that our example in 1776 was a bad one, and ought not to be followed? As a Christian nonresident, I, for one, am prepared to say so; but are the people ready to say, no chains ought to be broken by the hand of violence, and no blood spilt in defence of inalienable human rights, in any quarter of the globe? If not, then our slaves will peradventure take us at our word, and there will be given unto us blood to drink, for we are worthy. Why accuse abolitionists of stirring them up to insurrection? The charge is false; but what if it were true? If any man has a right to fight for liberty, this right equally extends to all men subjected to bondage. In claiming this right for themselves, the American people necessarily concede it to all mankind. If, therefore, they are found tyrannizing over any part of the human race, they voluntarily seal their own death-warrant, and confess that they deserve to perish. "What are the banners ye exalt ?-the deeds That raised your fathers' pyramid of fame? And deeper feel their sorrow and their shame, Ye double all the fetters that they wore, And press them down to earth, till hope exults no more!" But, it seems, abolitionists have the audacity to tell the slaves, not only of their rights, but also of their wrongs! That must be a rare piece of information to them truly! Tell a man who has just had his back flayed by the lash, till a pool of blood is at his feet, that somebody has flogged him! Tell him who wears an iron collar upon his neck, and a chain upon his heels, that his limbs are fettered, as if he knew it not! Tell those who receive no compensation for their toil, that they are unrighteously defrauded! In spite of all their whippings, and deprivations, and forcible separations, like cattle in the market, it seems that the poor slaves realized a heaven of blissful ignorance, until their halcyon dreams were disturbed by the pictorial representations and exciting descriptions of the abolitionists! What! have not the slaves eyes? have they not hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Are they not fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as freemen are? "If we prick them, do they not bleed? if we tickle them, do they not laugh? if we poison them, do they not die? and if we wrong them, will they not be revenged?" "For the slaveholders," we are told, "there is no peace, by night or day; but every moment is a moment of alarm, and their enemies are of their own household !" It is the hand of a friendly vindicator, moreover, that rolls up the curtain! What but the most atrocious tyranny on the part of the masters, and the most terrible sufferings on the past of the slaves, can account for such alarm, such insecurity, such apprehensions that “ even a more horrible catastrophe" than that of arson and murder may transpire nightly? It requires all the villany that has ever been charged upon Southern oppressors, and all the wretchedness that has ever been ascribed to the oppressed, to work out so fearful a result;-and that the statement is true, the most distinguished slaveholders have more than once certified. That it is true, the entire code of slave laws-whips and yokes and fettersthe nightly patrol-restriction of locomotion on the part of the slaves, except with passes-muskets, pistols, and bowie knives in the bedchambers during the hours of rest-the fear of inter-communication of colored freemen and the slaves-the prohibition of even alphabetical instruction, under pains and penalties, to the victims of wrong-the refusal to admit their testimony against persons of a white com |