The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare.
Tappan describes slaveholders as a powerful aristocracy that seeks to align their private interests with the public good, critiquing their influence on society.
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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.
Education elevates the inferior classes of society, teaches them their rights, and points out the means of enforcing them.
If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.
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.