insurrections of the South? One horrible tragedy, gentlemen, must still
be fresh in your recollection,--Southampton, with its fired dwellings and
ghastly dead! Southampton, with its dreadful associations, of the death
struggle with the insurgents, the groans of the tortured negroes, the
lamentations of the surviving whites over woman in her innocence and
beauty, and childhood, and hoary age!

"The hour of emancipation," said Thomas Jefferson, "is advancing in the
march of time. It will come. If not brought on by the generous energy
of our own minds, it will come by the bloody process of St. Domingo!"

To the just and prophetic language of your own great statesman I have but
a few words to add. They shall be those of truth and soberness.

We regard the slave system in your section of the country as a great
evil, moral and political,--an evil which, if left to itself for even a
few years longer, will give the entire South into the hands of the
blacks.

The terms of the national compact compel us to consider more than two
millions of our fellow-beings as your property; not, indeed, morally,
really, de facto, but still legally your property! We acknowledge that
you have a power derived from the United States Constitution to hold this
"property," but we deny that you have any moral right to take advantage
of that power. For truth will not allow us to admit that any human law
or compact can make void or put aside the ordinance of the living God and
the eternal laws of Nature.

We therefore hold it to be the duty of the people of the slave-holding
states to begin the work of emancipation now; that any delay must be