The Constitutions of all the slave States guarantee, in the most solemn and explicit terms, the Liberty of the Press; but it is well understood that there is one exception to its otherwise unbounded license--Property in human flesh is too…
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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Indeed, it is obvious to any person attentive to the movements of the South, that the slaveholders dread domestic far more than foreign interference with their darling system.
We have already quoted a Southern paper, which declares that the moment "any private individual attempts to lecture us on the evils and immorality of slavery, that very moment his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon the dunghill.
When so much malignity is manifested against the freedom of speech, in the very sanctuary of American liberty, it is not to be supposed that it will be tolerated in the house of bondage.
One of the most inestimable of constitutional privileges is TRIAL BY JURY; and this, as we have seen, is trampled under foot with impunity, at the mandate of the slaveholders.
We have said that the slaveholders hold their own laws and Constitutions in the same contempt as those of the Federal Government, whenever they conflict with the security and permanency of slavery.
But perhaps the most insolent attempt yet made to pervert the Federal Constitution to the support of slavery, was the expedient devised in Alabama to muzzle the Northern press.
Fortunately for Mahan, the Governor of Ohio, after surrendering him, discovered the imposition that had been practised, and officially informed the Governor of Kentucky, that he could not consent that a citizen of Ohio should be taken to…
Yet day after day was spent in endeavors to procure the conviction of a man who had committed no offence against the laws of the State, and whose person had been seized in consequence of a gross fraud, and a palpable and acknowledged…
The readiness with which Southern Governors prefer the most false and audacious claims, under color of Constitutional authority, exhibits a state of society in which truth and honor are but little respected.
But whenever this same Constitution can, by the grossest perversion, be made instrumental in upholding and perpetuating human bondage, then it acquires, for the time, a marvellous sanctity in their eyes, and they are seized with a holy…
Truly indeed have the slaveholders rendered the Constitution a blurred, obliterated, and tattered parchment.