The Conflict with Slavery, Part 1, from Volume VII, - The Works of Whittier: the Conflict with Slavery, Politics - and Reform, the Inner Life and Criticism by John Greenleaf Whittier
page 111 of 161 (68%)
page 111 of 161 (68%)
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his explosive pitch and rosin, not to the affectation of humanity, but to
humanity itself. He mocks at pity, scoffs at all who seek to lessen the amount of pain and suffering, sneers at and denies the most sacred rights, and mercilessly consigns an entire class of the children of his Heavenly Father to the doom of compulsory servitude. He vituperates the poor black man with a coarse brutality which would do credit to a Mississippi slave-driver, or a renegade Yankee dealer in human cattle on the banks of the Potomac. His rhetoric has a flavor of the slave-pen and auction-block, vulgar, unmanly, indecent, a scandalous outrage upon good taste and refined feeling, which at once degrades the author and insults his readers. He assumes (for he is one of those sublimated philosophers who reject the Baconian system of induction and depend upon intuition without recourse to facts and figures) that the emancipated class in the West India Islands are universally idle, improvident, and unfit for freedom; that God created them to be the servants and slaves of their "born lords," the white men, and designed them to grow sugar, coffee, and spices for their masters, instead of raising pumpkins and yams for themselves; and that, if they will not do this, "the beneficent whip" should be again employed to compel them. He adopts, in speaking of the black class, the lowest slang of vulgar prejudice. "Black Quashee," sneers the gentlemanly philosopher,--"black Quashee, if he will not help in bringing out the spices, will get himself made a slave again (which state will be a little less ugly than his present one), and with beneficent whip, since other methods avail not, will be compelled to work." It is difficult to treat sentiments so atrocious and couched in such offensive language with anything like respect. Common sense and unperverted conscience revolt instinctively against them. The doctrine |
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