William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist by Archibald H. Grimke
page 100 of 356 (28%)
page 100 of 356 (28%)
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Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good.
God's _time is best_!--nor will it long delay; Even now your barren cause begins to bud, And glorious shall the fruit be!--watch and pray, For lo! the kindling dawn that ushers in the day." He considered "Walker's Appeal" "a most injudicious publication, yet warranted by the creed of an independent people." He saw in our Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to go and do likewise. If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their freedom. It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who apotheosized force, to condemn them. What was sauce for the white man's goose was sauce for the black man's gander. The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their masters. The contents of the _Liberator_ were quite as likely to produce a slave insurrection as was "Walker's Appeal," if the paper was allowed to circulate freely among the slave population. It was, in fact, more dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the _Liberator_ in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. |
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