Slavery moreover is monopolizing in its tendency, and leads to the accumulation of property in few hands.
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.
gutenberg.org
There is not a State or Territory in the Union in which you, fellow-citizens, have not an overwhelming majority over the slaveholders; and the majority is probably the greatest in those in which the slaves are the most numerous, because in…
It has been the policy of the slaveholders to keep entirely out of sight their own numerical inferiority, and to speak and act as if their interests were those of the whole community.
They are the nobility of the south, and they find it expedient to forget that there are any commoners.
Hence with them slavery is the INSTITUTION of the SOUTH, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south.
The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare.
No other cause can be assigned than slavery, which drives from your borders many of the virtuous and enterprising, and at the same time deters emigrants from other States and from foreign countries from settling among you.
The influence of slavery on population is strikingly illustrated by a comparison between Kentucky and Ohio.
You are told, much of the wealth is invested in negroes--yet it obviously is a wealth that impoverishes; and no stronger evidence of the truth of this assertion is needed, than the comparative price of land in the free and slave States.
Statesmen may differ about policy, or the means to be employed in the promotion of the public good, but surely they ought to be agreed as to what prosperity means.
The clog that has stayed the march of her people, the incubus that has weighed down her enterprise, strangled her commerce, kept sealed her exhaustless fountains of mineral wealth, and paralyzed her arts, manufactures and improvement, is…
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.