LETTER FROM MR. WILSON ARMISTEAD TO THE SECRETARY OF THE SOCIETY.
Leeds, 7th Mo. 22, 1852.
My dear Friend,—In responding to thy welcome communication, I may say that I rejoice in the cause of the interruption of our correspondence, so far as it concerns thyself; thy time and talents being so increasingly occupied, in union with other of humanity’s advocates, in assisting to overturn the monster iniquity of our age, that crowning crime of Christendom,—negro slavery!
Go on in this good work! and may God’s blessing abundantly attend, till the eternal overthrow be effected of a system so fraught with every evil, so abhorrent to the rights of nature, and so contrary to the spirit of the Gospel;—till the galling chain be broken off the necks of America’s three million slaves; till its victims be raised from the profoundest depths of ignorance and woe, to which they are now degraded.
’Tis a marvel to me, that a system like that of negro slavery, which admits of such atrocities, can be tolerated for a single hour! Ought not every one who has a spark of humanity, to say nothing of Christianity, in his bosom,—ought not all the sound part of every community in which slavery exists, to rise up en masse, and declare that this abomination shall exist no longer?
Who gave to any man the right to enslave his fellow-man? Can any enactment of human legislators so far sanction robbery, as lawfully to make one man the property of another? Has God poured the tide of life through the African’s breast, and animated it with a portion of his own Divine spirit, and at the same time deprived him of all natural affections, that he alone is to be struck off the list of rational beings, and placed on a level with the brute? Is his flesh marble, and his sinews iron, or his immortal spirit of a class condemned, without hope, to penal suffering, that he is called upon to endure incessant toil, and to be subjected to degradation, bodily and mental, such as no other portion of the family of Adam have ever been destined to endure, without the vengeance of Heaven being signally displayed upon the oppressors? Does the African mother feel less love to her offspring than the white woman? or the African husband regard with less tenderness the wife of his bosom? Is his heart dead to the ties of kindred,—his nature so brutalized, that the sacred associations of home and country awaken no emotions in his breast?
History unanswerably demonstrates that the negro does feel, keenly feel, the wrongs inflicted upon him by his unrighteous enslavers, and that his mind, barren as it has been rendered by hard usage, and desolated with misery, is not unwatered by the pure and gentle streams of natural affection. Yet the lordly oppressors remain unmoved by the sad condition of the negro, contemplate with indifference his bodily and mental sufferings, and still dare to postpone to an indefinite period the termination of his oppression and of their own guilt.
But thanks be to God! there is some counteracting influence to this feeling, and that it is on the advance. The night has been long and dark,—already the horizon brightens; the day of freedom dawns.
Go on, then, my friend; I say, go on! in the good cause thou hast espoused. Labour, and faint not. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.” My kind regards to Frederick Douglass; may he, and all others also, be strengthened and encouraged to labour in the great work of human freedom; that so, by gradual increase, like the mighty surge, they may become strong enough to overpower and drown the oppressor, and be enabled to devise and execute measures of mercy and justice, which may avert the judgments of the Almighty from their guilty land. For surely some signal display of Divine displeasure must await America unless she repent, and undo the heavy burdens of her THREE MILLION SLAVES.
Are not the signs of the times calculated to remind us forcibly of this language of Isaiah, “Behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and no more cover her slain.” Do we not hear already—
“——the wheels of an avenging God,
Groan heavily along the distant road?”
Assuredly, he comes to judge the earth. “Who shall abide the day of his coming; who shall stand when he appeareth?”
Thy Friend, very truly,
IMPROMPTU STANZAS,
SUGGESTED BY THE WORKING OF THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT, AS ILLUSTRATED IN THE CASE OF REV. DOCTOR PENNINGTON.
BY THE WORKSHOP BARD.
Bring out the handcuffs, clank the rusted gyves;
Rain down your curses on the doomed race;
Hang out a terror that shall haunt their lives,
In every place.
Unloose the blood-hounds from oppression’s den;
Arm every brigand in the name of law,
And triple shield of pulpit, press and pen,
Around them draw.
Ho! politicians, orators, divines!
Ho! cotton-mongers of the North and South!
Strike now for slavery, or our Union’s shrines
Are gone forsooth!
Down from their glory into chaos hurled,
Your thirty States in shivered fragments go,
Like the seared leaves by autumn tempests whirled
To depths below.
Closed be each ear, let every tongue be dumb;
Nor one sad pitying tear o’er man be shed,
Though fainting at your threshold he should come,
And ask for bread.
Though woman, fleeing from the cruel grip
Of foul oppression, scarred and stained with blood,
Where from the severed veins the driver’s whip
Hath drank its flood.
Though helpless childhood ask—O pitying Heaven!—
The merest crumb which falls upon the floor,
Tho’ faint and famished, bread must not be given,
Bolt fast the door.
And must it be, thou just and holy God!
That in our midst thy peeled and stricken poor
Shall kneel and plead amid their tears and blood,
For evermore?
Shall those whom thou hast sent baptised from heaven,
To preach the Gospel the wide world around,
To teach the erring they may be forgiven,
Be seized and bound?
Placed on the auction-block, with chattels sold,
Driven like beasts of burden day by day,
The flock be scattered from the shepherd’s fold,
The spoiler’s prey?
How long—thy people cry—O Lord, how long!
Shall not thine arm “shake down the bolted fire!”
Can deeds like these of God-defying wrongs,
Escape His ire?
Must judgments,—such as swept with fearful tread
O’er Egypt when she made thy people slaves,
Where thy hand strewed with their unburied dead
The Red Sea waves?
Must fire and hail from heaven upon us fall,
Our first-born perish ’neath the Avenger’s brand,
And sevenfold darkness, like a funeral pall
O’erspread the land?
We kneel before thy footstool, gracious God,
Spare thou our nation, in thy mercy spare;
We perish quickly ’neath thy lifted rod
And arm made bare.
West Troy, March, 1851.