Heretofore the invaders of our soil were themselves interested in slave property: now they would be zealous emancipationists, and they would be accompanied by the most terrific vision which could meet the eye of a slaveholder, regiments of…
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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God knows their perils are real, and not imaginary: and who can question, that with a hostile British army in the heart of Virginia or Alabama, the whole slave region would presently become one vast scene of horror and desolation?
And think you that men, thus in awe of their own dependents, shuddering at a musket in the hands of a black, and with a population of two millions and a half of these dreaded slaves, will expose themselves to the tremendous consequences of…
In the Southern portion of the Union, the great object was to keep arms and a knowledge of arms out of the hands of the blacks.
The very idea of an armed negro startles their fearful imaginations.
The action of the Federal Government is, we know, controlled by the slave interest; and what testimony does that action bear to the military weakness of the South?
And now we ask you, fellow-citizens, if all these declarations and confessions be true--and who can doubt it--what must be your inevitable condition, should your soil be invaded by a foreign foe, bearing the standard of EMANCIPATION?
But a consciousness, with all their stupidity, that a ten-fold force, superior in discipline, if not in barbarity, would gather from the four corners of the United States, and slaughter them, keeps them in subjection.
We, of the South, are emphatically surrounded by a dangerous class of beings--degraded and stupid savages, who, if they could but once entertain the idea, that immediate and unconditional death would not be their portion, would re-act the…
Such are the terrific visions which are constantly presenting themselves to the affrighted imaginations of the slaveholders; such the character which, among themselves, they attribute to their own domestics.
And thus the yoke would be transferred from the black to the white man, and the master fall a bleeding victim to his own slave.
No man would even dare for an hour to leave his own habitation; if he did, he would expect on his return to find his wife and children massacred.