Lewis Tappan: “We wish to impress upon you the danger and corruption to which you and your children are exposed from the institution…”

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.

It, is however, worthy of remark, that its cultivation affords a livelihood to only a small proportion of the free inhabitants; and scarcely to any of those we are now addressing.

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.

Slavery is maintained by you whom it impoverishes and degrades, not by those upon whom it confers wealth and influence.