"To feel
The weight of human misery less, and glide
Ungroaning to the tomb,"

I shall not have written in vain; my conscience will be satisfied.

Far be it from me to cast new bitterness into the gall and wormwood
waters of sectional prejudice. No; I desire peace, the peace of
universal love, of catholic sympathy, the peace of a common interest, a
common feeling, a common humanity. But so long as slavery is tolerated,
no such peace can exist. Liberty and slavery cannot dwell in harmony
together. There will be a perpetual "war in the members" of the
political Mezentius between the living and the dead. God and man have
placed between them an everlasting barrier, an eternal separation. No
matter under what name or law or compact their union is attempted, the
ordination of Providence has forbidden it, and it cannot stand. Peace!
there can be no peace between justice and oppression, between robbery and
righteousness, truth and falsehood, freedom and slavery.

The slave-holding states are not free. The name of liberty is there, but
the spirit is wanting. They do not partake of its invaluable blessings.
Wherever slavery exists to any considerable extent, with the exception of
some recently settled portions of the country, and which have not yet
felt in a great degree the baneful and deteriorating influences of slave
labor, we hear at this moment the cry of suffering. We are told of
grass-grown streets, of crumbling mansions, of beggared planters and
barren plantations, of fear from without, of terror within. The once
fertile fields are wasted and tenantless, for the curse of slavery, the
improvidence of that labor whose hire has been kept back by fraud, has
been there, poisoning the very earth beyond the reviving influence of the