Men who can enjoy the sight of negroes writhing in flames, and are permitted by the civil authorities to indulge in such exhibitions, will not be very scrupulous in taking the lives of each other.
Tappan condemns the moral decay of a society that allows public spectacles of violence against enslaved people, suggesting a broader societal issue.
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The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare.
When an infant will bring one hundred, and a man from four hundred to a thousand dollars in the market, slaves are not commodities to be found in the cabins of the poor.
It has been the policy of the slaveholders to keep entirely out of sight their own numerical inferiority, and to speak and act as if their interests were those of the whole community.
Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders.