These facts address themselves to the understanding of all, and prove, beyond cavil, that the slave States have a most unfair and unreasonable representation in Congress, and a very disproportionate share in the election of President.
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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Yet all this gives but an inadequate idea of the political influence exercised by the people of the slave States in the election of President, and consequently over the policy of his administration.
Not a law has been passed, not a treaty ratified, but by their votes.
It is idle, therefore, for them to impute their depressed condition to unjust and partial legislation, since they have from the very first controlled the action of Congress.
Nor has any bill passed the Senate, since the organization of the government, but by the votes of slaveholders.
The Senate has a veto on every law; and as one half of that body are slaveholders, it follows, of course, that no law can be passed without their consent.
We have already shown you that your free population is only 49 per cent. of that of the Northern States; that is, the inhabitants of the free States are more than double the free inhabitants of the slave States.
Is it because the interests of the slaveholders are not represented in the national councils?
Why this continually increasing disparity between you and your Northern brethren?
And now we ask you, why this downward course?
Thus you perceive how unequal is the race in which you are contending.
Hence the moral difference between the two sections of our republic must arise from other than natural causes.