accomplished.[11]

To

WE the American Convention of Delegates for promoting the
Abolition of Slavery, feeling the importance of the business
which you have committed to our deliberation, deem it our duty to
address you, and to communicate some of the subjects which have
claimed our particular attention.

We learn that in some parts of the United States, there are yet
men so lost to all honourable feelings, so deeply depraved as to
violate those laws of their country which were intended to
protect the rights of free persons of colour. Those who have any
knowledge of the heart of man, his selfish attachments, and the
firm grasp with which he seizes and holds all that he calls his
own, cannot be surprized at the reluctance which individuals
evince, in resigning their claims to those people of colour who
are legally their slaves: but at this period when the rights of
man are so well understood, in a country where the highest degree
of civil liberty is enjoyed by the white citizens, it appears
astonishing that the kidnapper should be permitted to carry on
his depredations; that his audacious encroachments on the rights
and happiness of the suffering people of colour should, for a
moment, be tolerated. We hope our feelings on this subject, will
not be considered as the offspring of misguided zeal. Every one
in whose heart the pulse of benevolence beats, whose sentiments
are not degraded beneath the dignity of man _must feel_ on this
occasion; he must be sensible of the deep crime which the
kidnapper commits against the laws of his country, and the
violent nature of his trespass on the dearest rights of humanity.
The man of colour whom our country has declared _free_; around
whose liberty the law has thrown its protecting arms, in defiance
of the voice of that country and that law, is torn from his
family by the midnight robber, and transported to the mournful
regions of perpetual slavery, while his wife and his little ones
are left to struggle alone, in poverty, for the bread of mere
existence. This is a melancholy but a faithful picture of the
miseries occasioned by the detestable kidnapper. Let us exert our
best faculties for the purpose of eradicating such evils. Those
societies who form the line of demarcation between the states in