No man thinks of anything beyond the present moment.
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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Hence no poor man is deterred from seeking a livelihood by honest labor from a dread of personal degradation.
The different light in which labor is viewed at the North and the South is one cause of the depression of industry in the latter.
Another cause is the ever-wakeful jealousy of your aristocracy.
They fear the PEOPLE; they are alarmed at the very idea of power and influence being possessed by any portion of the community not directly interested in slave property.
Visions of emancipation, of agrarianism, and of popular resistance to their authority, are ever floating in their distempered and excited imaginations.
They know their own weakness, and are afraid you should know it also.
Hence their constant comparison of the laborers of the North, with their own slaves; and hence, in no small degree, the absence among you of those institutions which confer upon the poor that knowledge which is power.
The former will own the latter, either collectively through the government, or individually in a state of domestic servitude, as exists in the Southern States of this confederacy.
If LABORERS ever obtain the political power of a country, it is in fact in a state of REVOLUTION.
The capitalists north of Mason and Dixon's line, have precisely the same interest in the labor of the country, that the capitalists of England have in their labor.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.