It rests with you to relieve your country of its most dangerous enemy, to render it invulnerable to foreign assaults, and to dissipate that fearful anticipation of wrath and tribulation, which now broods over and oppresses the mind of every white who resides in a slave country.
Tappan urges the South to eliminate its most dangerous enemy, which he identifies as the institution of slavery itself.
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You both know and feel that slavery has rendered labor disgraceful among you; and where this is the case, industry is necessarily discouraged.
We ask your attention to the injuries inflicted upon you and your children, by an institution which lives by your sufferance, and will die at your mandate.
It cannot be, therefore, the interest or the inclination of the sagacious and reflecting among them, to promote the intellectual improvement of the inferior class.
Cotton is the product of slave labor, and its profits at home are confined almost exclusively to the slaveholders.