Lewis Tappan: “What are the essential principles of democracy as distinguished from republicanism?”

We surely need not detain you with farther details on this head, to convince you what an enormous sacrifice of happiness and prosperity you are offering on the altar of slavery.

Statesmen may differ about policy, or the means to be employed in the promotion of the public good, but surely they ought to be agreed as to what prosperity means.

There is not a State or Territory in the Union in which you, fellow-citizens, have not an overwhelming majority over the slaveholders; and the majority is probably the greatest in those in which the slaves are the most numerous, because in…

The power of the slaveholders, as we have already showed you, depends on the acquiescence of the major part of the white inhabitants in their domination.