multiplied its
victims from seven hundred thousand to nearly three millions--a vast
amount of territory has been purchased, in order to give it extension
and perpetuity--several new slave States have been admitted into the
Union--the slave trade has been made one of the great branches of
American commerce--the slave population, though over-worked, starved,
lacerated, branded, maimed, and subjected to every form of deprivation
and every species of torture, have been overawed and crushed,--or,
whenever they have attempted to gain their liberty by revolt, they
have been shot down and quelled by the strong arm of the national
government; as, for example, in the case of Nat Turner's insurrection
in Virginia, when the naval and military forces of the government were
called into active service. Cuban bloodhounds have been purchased with
the money of the people, and imported and used to hunt slave fugitives
among the everglades of Florida. A merciless warfare has been waged
for the extermination or expulsion of the Florida Indians, because
they gave succor to these poor hunted fugitives--a warfare which has
cost the nation several thousand lives, and forty millions of dollars.
But the catalogue of enormities is too long to be recapitulated in the
present address.
We have thus demonstrated that the compact between the North and the
South embraces every variety of wrong and outrage,--is at war with God
and man, cannot be innocently supported, and deserves to be
immediately annulled. In behalf of the Society which we represent, we
call upon all our fellow-citizens, who believe it is right to obey God
rather than man, to declare themselves peaceful revolutionists, and to
unite with us under the stainless banner of Liberty, having for its
motto--"EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL--NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!"
It is pleaded that the Constitution provides for its own amendment;
and we ought to use the elective franchise to effect this object.
True, there is such a proviso; but, until the amendment be made, that
instrument is binding as it stands. Is it not to violate every moral
instinct, and to sacrifice principle to expediency, to argue that we
may swear to steal, oppress and murder by wholesale, because it may be
necessary to do so only for the time being, and because there is some
remote probability that the instrument which requires that we should
be robbers, oppressors and murderers, may at some future day be
amended in these particular
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