Alas! their language has been re-echoed again and again by public meetings in the slave States; and we proceed to lay before you overwhelming proof that in the expression of their murderous feelings towards the abolitionists, they have…
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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We have already seen that one of the blessings which the slaveholders attribute to their favorite institution, is exemption from popular tumults, and from encroachments by the democracy upon the rights of property.
Their argument is, that political power in the hands of the poor and laboring classes is always attended with danger, and that this danger is averted when these classes are kept in bondage.
With these gentlemen, life and liberty seem to be accounted as the small dust of the balance, when weighed against slavery and plantations; hence, to preserve the latter they are ever ready to sacrifice the former, in utter defiance of…
We hazard little in the assertion, that in no civilized Christian community on earth is human life less protected by law, or more frequently taken with impunity, than in the slave States of the Federal Union.
We wish to impress upon you the danger and corruption to which you and your children are exposed from the institution, which, as we have shown you, exists by your sufferance.
A species of common law has grown up in Kentucky, which, were it written down, would, in all civilized countries, cause her to be re-christened, in derision, THE LAND OF BLOOD.
Why do we hear of stabbings and shootings almost daily in some part or other of our State?
DEATH BY VIOLENCE.--The moral atmosphere in our State appears to be in a deleterious and sanguinary condition.
Almost every exchange paper which reaches us, contains some inhuman and revolting case of murder, or death by violence.
As a Louisiana parent, I reflect with terror, that our beloved children, reared to become one day honorable and useful citizens, may be the victims of these votaries of vice and licentiousness.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.