The Slavery Question

by John Lawrence

3. In the West India Islands 800,000 slaves were emancipated in one day, and although sixteen years have since elapsed, none of the terrible massacres which were predicted by the opponents of the measure have occurred.

4. This fear of the vengeance of emancipated slaves arises, doubtless, from a guilty conscience—or a feeling that it is richly deserved. A highwayman robs a man, and then says, if I let him go he may have me arrested and punished, therefore I will kill him. Americans say, on the same principle, we have most terribly abused our slaves, and hence, if we let them go they will retaliate, therefore, we must continue the wrong for self preservation!

5. As to amalgamation we have only to say that slavery is an extensive system of forced amalgamation. In the free States this much dreaded evil is of rare occurrence. Immediate emancipation would speedily arrest the very thing here deprecated.

a. The colonization scheme is impracticable. Between three and four millions of people can never be shipped off to Africa. It is impracticable to send even the annual increase of the free colored population. There are in America now about twelve millions of colored people, and there is no power, civil or ecclesiastical, which can carry them away to Africa.[24] A few will go and ought to go as missionaries, but the great and rapidly increasing masses are firmly planted on this continent and here they must remain.

b. Forcible colonization is wrong. Colored people have the same right to live in America that white people have. The Creator made the earth for the habitation of man, and He has never surrendered his ownership of it to any government. The colored man has a right to live in any country on the globe—a right derived from the Creator. Has God said that every race under heaven may have a home in America but the African? Never. It is impertinent as well as wicked for one people to say to another, “you shall not live in this State, nor on this continent.” Such people arrogate to themselves a prerogative which Jehovah only possesses.

c. The present popular scheme of colonization leaves unquestioned the title of the slaveholder, encourages the doctrine that the Bible sanctions the institution, appeals to the basest prejudices of the American people to induce them to countenance the scheme, and encourages the enactment of such laws as now disgrace the statutes of several of the free States, in order, it would seem, to harrass the free colored man until he shall be compelled to flee from the land of his birth to a distant shore for refuge. One who speaks what he knows, says,

“I speak the words of soberness and truth when I say that the most inveterate, the most formidable, the deadliest enemy of the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the colored population of the United States, is that system of African colonization which originated in and is perpetuated by a worldly, Pharaoh-like policy beneath the dignity of a magnanimous and Christian people;—a system which receives much of its vitality from ad captandum appeals to popular prejudices, and to the unholy, groveling passions of the canaille;—a system that interposes every possible obstacle in the way of the improvement and elevation of the colored man in the land of his birth;—that instigates the enactment of laws whose design and tendency are obviously to annoy him, to make him feel, while at home, that he is a stranger and a pilgrim—nay more,—to make him ‘wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked;’—to make him ‘a hissing and a by-word,’ ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ throughout the American Union;—a system that is so irreconcilably opposed to the purpose of God in making ‘of one blood all nations for to dwell on all the face of the earth,’ that when the dying slaveholder, under the lashes of a guilty conscience, would give to his slaves unqualified freedom, it wickedly interposes, and persuades him that ‘to do justly and love mercy’ would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon the community, and that to do his duty to God and his fellow-creatures, under the circumstances, he should bequeath to his surviving slaves the cruel alternative of either expatriation to a far-off, pestilential clime, with the prospect of a premature death, or perpetual slavery, with its untold horrors, in his native land.”—Watkins.

Many objections are offered against immediate emancipation, but they are evidently mere excuses. This may be laid down as a safe rule: Offer no objection to the manumission of slaves which would not satisfy you were you yourselves the slaves to be manumitted. Tried by this reasonable and scriptural rule all apologies, objections and excuses offered for the perpetuation of human bondage, vanish away. There can be no good reason advanced for the continuance of this curse a single year longer. Too long already has it dishonored our churches and our country. Too many souls have been already involved by it in hopeless ruin. Too many generations of slaves have already gone in sorrow and despair down to their graves. Too long has the public conscience been debauched. Justice, humanity and religion with united voice call for immediate emancipation.

If our free institutions are to be preserved they must be released from the folds and the deadly charm of this monster serpent. Freedom cannot flourish in its coils nor survive in its slimy embrace.