In both instances the increase has been chiefly owing to immigration; but the ratio shows the influence of slavery in retarding immigration.
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
We surely need not detain you with farther details on this head, to convince you what an enormous sacrifice of happiness and prosperity you are offering on the altar of slavery.
Education elevates the inferior classes of society, teaches them their rights, and points out the means of enforcing them.
The power of the slaveholders, as we have already showed you, depends on the acquiescence of the major part of the white inhabitants in their domination.
It cannot be, therefore, the interest or the inclination of the sagacious and reflecting among them, to promote the intellectual improvement of the inferior class.
You have lamentable experience, that such is not the case where slaveholders bear rule.
But what a commentary on slavery and slaveholders is afforded by the gross ignorance prevailing in the old States of South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina!
But we have some official confessions, which give a still more deplorable account of Southern ignorance.
In 1837, Governor Clarke, in his message to the Kentucky Legislature, remarked, "By the computation of those most familiar with the subject, ONE THIRD OF THE ADULT POPULATION OF THE STATE ARE UNABLE TO WRITE THEIR NAMES.
In a community so unenlightened as yours, it is a matter of course, that the arts and sciences must languish, and the industry and enterprise of the country be oppressed by a general torpor.
Hence multitudes will be without regular and profitable employment, and be condemned to poverty and numberless privations.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.