Or the People--for they will be THE PEOPLE--may resolve to be free, and you and all you hold dear may be sacrificed in the contest.
Lewis Tappan
The Public Record
Lewis Tappan was an American abolitionist who in 1841 helped to secure freedom for the enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad. He was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, into a Calvinist household.
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Once establish a FREE PRESS, and the fate of slavery is sealed.
We ask your attention to the injuries inflicted upon you and your children, by an institution which lives by your sufferance, and will die at your mandate.
Slavery is maintained by you whom it impoverishes and degrades, not by those upon whom it confers wealth and influence.
It is also a matter of notoriety, that the price of slaves has been and still is such as to confine their possession almost exclusively to the rich.
We might as well talk of poor men owning herds of cattle and studs of horses, as gangs of negroes.
When an infant will bring one hundred, and a man from four hundred to a thousand dollars in the market, slaves are not commodities to be found in the cabins of the poor.
You are moreover aware that the great capitalists of the South have their wealth chiefly invested in plantations and slaves, and not as with us in commerce and manufactures.
We know that this result is so startling and unexpected, that you will scarcely credit the testimony of figures themselves.
It is so commonly taken for granted, that every white man at the South is a slaveholder, that many will doubtingly inquire, where are these non-slaveholding citizens to be found?
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.