With these gentlemen, life and liberty seem to be accounted as the small dust of the balance, when weighed against slavery and plantations; hence, to preserve the latter they are ever ready to sacrifice the former, in utter defiance of laws and constitutions.
Tappan highlights the willingness of slaveholders to sacrifice life and liberty for the sake of maintaining slavery, criticizing their moral priorities.
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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.
Has it ever happened that the mass of any people were rich enough to keep, for their own convenience, such expensive laborers--as southern slaves?
Slavery is maintained by you whom it impoverishes and degrades, not by those upon whom it confers wealth and influence.
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.