Slavery: letters and speeches

by Horace Mann

For this reason, I am glad to see so many ladies in this audience. It becomes them to be here. If any mortal should cultivate an abhorrence of slavery, the female sex should do it. Whatever any one may hold to be the social relation between free women and slave women, yet before God and Christ, and all the holy angels, they belong to the same sisterhood of the human race. They are your sisters. And what is the condition of these your sisters, in regard to everything that a virtuous and noble woman holds most sacred and dear?

Ladies, there are now in this land of pretended freedom and pretended gospel a million and a half of women who have no practical knowledge of what a woman’s higher life should be, or what a woman’s most precious rights are. Since the Declaration of Independence, the number of slaves in this country has increased from less than five hundred thousand to more than three millions; and before the close of this century, their descendants will increase to more than thrice three millions. And yet, neither as to the living nor as to the dead, has there ever been a lawful marriage among them all. There has never been a man slave who could say, “This is my wife, heart of my heart, and life of my life, and no mortal power shall pluck her from my side.” There has never been a woman slave who could say, “This is my lawful, wedded husband, whom I promise to love and cherish, and to whom I vow inviolable constancy.” “For this cause,” says Christ, “shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.” But the “twain” of slaves are never one. And even when any sham ceremony is observed, to distinguish this holy relation of husband and wife from the cohabitations of beasts, and he who officiates comes to those other words of Christ, “What, therefore, God has joined together, let not man put asunder,” he stops; for he knows, and they all know, that a few dollars, at any time, will bring bereavement upon both,—a double bereavement, he a widower and she a widow, both still surviving. Their life, at best, is but a life of concubinage;—not even that concubinage, which, though not founded upon a lawful contract, has still something like conjugal fidelity in it, and therefore a semblance of virtue; but a various and vagrant concubinage, traversing the circle of overseer, master, master’s guests, and master’s sons. The fate of the children born to the slave mother you all know. Those objects upon which all maternal affections meet and glow as in a focus, are torn from her bosom, like lambs from the flock when the shambles are empty.

And as to those females who are young, sprightly, and handsome:—

Charge me not with indelicacy in touching upon this theme. Honi soit qui mal y pense. I speak not to fastidious ears, but to the pure in heart, to whom all things are pure. I speak of eternal verities, before whose massive force the heart trembles and bows itself, as reeds before the tempest. It is the grossest and most shameless of all indelicacies to patronize and multiply vice, through pusillanimity in exposing it,—

As to those females, I say, who are young, sprightly, and handsome, whom God has damned with beauty of form and beauty of face, because they only attract the gloating eye of passion, who can describe the loathsomeness of their life? They are ripened for the New Orleans, or for some other market, whence southern harems are supplied; as, under the Mahometan religion, white Caucasian beauties are sent to the slave marts of the darker-skinned Turk.

In that company of seventy-six persons who attempted, in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthy girls who had those peculiar attractions of form, of feature, and of complexion, which southern connoisseurs in sensualism so highly prize. Elizabeth Russell was one of them. She fell immediately into the slave-traders’ fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market. The hearts of those who saw her and foresaw her fate were touched with pity. They offered eighteen hundred dollars to redeem her, and some there were who offered to give, who would not have had much left after the gift. But the fiend of a slave trader was inexorable. He knew how he could transmute her charms into gold through the fires of sin. He demanded twenty-one hundred dollars, (though for menial services she would not have been worth more than four or five,) and would take nothing less. She was despatched to New Orleans, but when about half way there, God had mercy upon her and smote her with death. Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide. There were two girls named Edmundson in the same company. When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims. He bantered her, telling her what fine dresses and fine furniture they would have. “Yes,” said she, “that may do well in this life, but what will become of them in the next?” They, too, were sent to New Orleans, but they were afterwards redeemed at an enormous ransom, and brought back. There was one girl, who, after her recapture in the Pearl, was sold six times in seven weeks, in Maryland and Virginia, for her beauty’s sake. But she proved heroically and sublimely intractable. Like Rebecca, the Jewess, she would have flung herself from the loftiest battlement, rather than yield her person to a villain. Notwithstanding her masters’ pretence that they had bought her with their money, and owned her soul, yet she had wealth, which, though all the earth were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” it could not buy. It was not difficult, therefore, to purchase her, and she was redeemed and came to New York; and I have been informed in the most authentic manner from the lady of the very respectable family of which she became an inmate, that, on an examination of her person, after the healing-time of the journey had passed, her body was found scarred and waled with whip marks, which the villains inflicted upon her because she would not come to their bed.

Now, suppose a sister or daughter of yours, of this heroic soul and spotless purity, should find herself on the way to New Orleans;—suppose, by almost superhuman power and adroitness, she should escape, and should thread her solitary and darksome path, for hundreds of miles, towards the north star; should lie down in caverns, with poisonous reptiles by day, and pursue her lonely journey by night, finding the beasts of the forests to be less terrible than man; should swim rivers, and keep off famine by roots and insects, until at last, thanks be to God, she sets her mangled and bleeding feet upon the soil of freedom. Perhaps some echo of the fame of the Pilgrim mothers has reached her ears. She has heard of Boston and its noble women of old, and she hies hither as to a city of refuge,—as to a sanctuary where virtue has an altar, and where she can lay down her hunted and weary body, and be at rest. Fallacious hope! The lecher pursues his prey, and he is here. He goes to some Glossin lawyer who sues out a warrant; and to some Jack Ketch who serves it. The victim is seized at midnight, under some lying charge, and she is carried before a commissioner, whose conduct, were he a quasi judge, as he pretends to be, would be enough to make every hair of the judicial ermine forever detestable. Here a process is gone through which she does not understand, and some papers are read of which she never heard, and then a judgment is pronounced that her “labor” is “due” to her pursuer, (and such labor!) that she “owes service” to him, (and such service!) and then the commissioner delivers her into his arms, and pockets a fee which common pimps would be ashamed to work for.

And, my friends, the keenest pang in the grief of all this is, that there is no fiction or romance about it. A commissioner who could bring himself down to send a man to a Georgia cotton-field under this law, the first time trying, could send a virtuous and spotless woman into enforced harlotry the second time; and the prince of darkness only knows what he could not set him to do afterwards. The clergymen who could defend the enslavers of Sims because he “owed” the “service” of one sex, could defend the enslavers of a woman because she “owed” the “service” of the other sex;—the clergymen of the rich parishes I mean;—for it happens, with the constancy of a law of nature, that it is only the clergymen of the rich parishes who do this. Do they not know how to serve and reverence their Lord and Master,—that is, their Landlord and Paymaster!

But, fellow-citizens, as our feelings are stimulated to the keenest sensibility, in looking at the infinite of wrong which slavery commits; as we see the millions and millions of human beings dimly emerging into view, and crowding down the vista of futurity to blast our eyes with the vision of their woe, a potent voice rings in our ears, exclaiming, “Conquer your prejudices,” “Conquer your prejudices.” And this execrable counsel is uttered in reference to the infinite crime and disgrace of sending into slavery, without a trial, those who are free under our laws,—the men to stripes and death, and the women to the body’s shame and the soul’s perdition. Fouler, baser, more ungodly counsel was never uttered, since it was said to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “On the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die.”

And what is it that this long-honored eulogist of liberty, but now its great apostate, blasphemes with the name of “prejudice”? If there be one sentiment more deeply rooted in the public heart of Massachusetts than any other, more intertwined and grown together with all the fibres of its being, it is the sentiment of liberty. We have drunk it in with our mothers’ milk; we have imbibed it from all the lessons of the school-room and the teachings of the sanctuary; we have inspired it with the atmosphere we breathe, and our organs have been attuned to it from our birth, by the anthems of the mountain’s wind and the ocean’s roar. It was from the love of liberty that our earlier fathers plucked themselves up by the roots from that natal soil into which they had been fastening for centuries. For this they wandered abroad upon the ocean, deeming its ingulfing surges to be more tolerable than a tyrant’s power. For this they transplanted themselves to this land, at that time more distant and more formidable to them than any part of the habitable globe could now be to us. For this they performed the double task of enduring all privations and dangers, and at the same time of laying the foundations of all our free and glorious institutions; and as the sires were stricken down by toil and death, the sons took up the work and bore it on, generation after generation.