Immediate and unconditional emancipation, is preëminently safe and beneficial to all parties concerned.
No compensation is due to the slave-holder for emancipating his slaves; and emancipation creates no necessity for such compensation because it is of itself a pecuniary benefit, not only to slaves, but to masters.
There should be no compromise in legislation, jurisprudence, or the executive action of the government, any more than in the activities and responsibilities of private life.
No wicked enactments can be morally binding. There are at the present time the highest obligations resting upon the people of the free-states to remove slavery, by moral and political action, as prescribed in the Constitution of the United States.[[1]]
[1]. See William Lloyd Garrison—“The Story of His Life Told by His Children,” vol. 1, p. 408, et. seq., where the full text of the Declaration of Sentiments of the Anti-Slavery Convention of 1833 is given.
Societies were formed on all sides. On the 10th day of January, 1832, the New England Anti-Slavery Society was established in Boston. In 1833, another society was organized in New York City. A call was issued for a national anti-slavery convention, to be held in Philadelphia, December 4th, 5th, and 6th, in 1833, for the purpose of forming a National Anti-Slavery Society. Upward of sixty delegates came to this meeting from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. This was the beginning of the national anti-slavery movement. Arthur Tappan, a well-known merchant of New York City, was chosen president. Among the delegates in attendance were such distinguished men as John G. Whittier, the poet; Beriah Green, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizur Wright, A. L. Cox, and William Goodell. After this time anti-slavery societies were formed in every Northern state, men and women alike being eligible to membership.
The Quaker element in this anti-slavery movement was strong and important. Benjamin Lundy was the pioneer Abolitionist and no single American ever did more for emancipation. In an appeal to the public in 1830, he said: “In a period of ten years prior to 1830, I have sacrificed several thousand dollars of my own hard earnings; have traveled upward of five thousand miles on foot and more than twenty thousand miles in other ways; have visited nineteen states of this Union and held more than two hundred public meetings, and have performed two voyages to the West Indies, by which means the liberation of a considerable number of slaves has been effected.”
The anti-slavery movement was a warfare, but its weapons were those of peace. Appeal to the people by public addresses and through the medium of the press, constituted the only method of fighting. Agitators in behalf of this cause flooded the country with facts, figures, and arguments. They brought the republic back to the principles of liberty and justice upon which it was founded. They urged this issue so persistently that no other question was permitted to equal it in public interest. They set out with the determination that there was to be no peace, no ease of conscience, no further prosperity, no national glory until this question of slavery was settled and settled right. As the subject grew in interest and importance, it attracted to itself some of the brightest minds of the country; men who afterward became distinguished as statesmen, poets, authors, orators. Even men of wealth, whose natural interest would have inclined them to aid in preserving existing conditions, joined the ranks. They gave to the movement a character for respectability and made it a power that must be reckoned with. The new party demanded a new dispensation, and with such persistency, upon grounds which appealed so directly to the fundamental political beliefs of the people, that finally there was not enough inertia in the nation to oppose its demands.
While these revolutionary forces were gathering strength, the great mass of the Negro people in the United States were dumb. In the plantation states, the black man was a chattel; in the Northern states, he was a good deal of an outlaw.
He was not permitted to share in the responsibilities and benefits of citizenship sufficiently to be able to make his abilities known and his purposes respected. “A man without force,” to use Mr. Douglass’s words, “is without the essential dignity of humanity. Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, though it can pity him, and even this it cannot do long, if signs of power do not arise; you can put a man so far beneath the level of his kind that he loses all just ideals of his natural position.”