Lewis Tappan: “If guilty, no necessity required their execution contrary to law.”

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

But what a commentary on slavery and slaveholders is afforded by the gross ignorance prevailing in the old States of South Carolina, Virginia, and North Carolina!

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.

You have lamentable experience, that such is not the case where slaveholders bear rule.