Lewis Tappan: “Here then we have an appalling proof of the paralyzing influence of slavery on the industry of the whites.”

You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged.

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.

The influence of slavery on population is strikingly illustrated by a comparison between Kentucky and Ohio.

You are told, much of the wealth is invested in negroes--yet it obviously is a wealth that impoverishes; and no stronger evidence of the truth of this assertion is needed, than the comparative price of land in the free and slave States.