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.
Lewis Tappan: “It rests with you to relieve your country of its most dangerous enemy, to render it invulnerable to foreign assaults…”
Editor's note · Context
Tappan urges the South to eliminate its most dangerous enemy, which he identifies as the institution of slavery itself.
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If we are permitted to apply this rule in testing the moral condition of the South, the result will not be favorable.
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 is also a matter of notoriety, that the price of slaves has been and still is such as to confine their possession almost exclusively to the rich.
The very advertisements in your newspapers show that, for a vast proportion of the comforts and conveniences of life, you are dependent on Northern manufacturers and mechanics.