Address to the Non-Slaveholders of the South / on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery

by Lewis Tappan

In breaking the chains which bind the slave, be assured you will be delivering yourselves from a grievous thraldom. Ponder well, we implore you, the following suggestions.

Without your co-operation, the slaveholders, much as they despise you, are powerless. To you they look for agents, and stewards, for overseers, and drivers, and patrols. To you they look for votes to elevate them to office, and to you they too often look for aid to enforce their Lynch laws. Feel then your own power; claim your rights, and exert them for the deliverance of the slave, and consequently for your own happiness and prosperity.

Let then your first demand be for liberty of speech. Your Constitution and laws guarantee to you this right in the most solemn and explicit terms; and yet you have permitted a few slaveholders to rob you of it. Resume it at once. Be not afraid to speak openly of your wrongs, and of the true cause of them. Dread not the Lynch clubs. Their power depends wholly on opinion. The slaveholders are not strong enough to execute their own sentences, if you resist them. They shrank, in Charleston, from prohibiting the sale of Dickens' Notes, because they believed the people were determined to read them. Had the same curiosity been felt in Petersburg, to read the article on Bible Slavery in Breckenridge's Magazine, the slaveholders there would not have dared to purloin them from the post-office and burn them in the street. In the one place they strained at a gnat, in the other they swallowed a camel. Be assured, your bullies are timid bullies; not that they are wanting in individual courage, but because they are aware that their authority rests, not on their physical strength, but on your habits of deference and obedience. Speak then boldly, and without disguise; and be assured that no sooner will your tongues be loosed on the forbidden subject, than you will be surprised to find what a coincidence of thought exists in relation to it. Discussion once commenced, the enemies of slavery will multiply faster with you than they do elsewhere for the obvious reason, that with you there is no dispute about facts. You all know and daily witness the blighting influence of the curse which overspreads your land; and believe us, that just in proportion as your courage rises, will the arrogance of your oppressors sink.

By conversing freely among yourselves, and proclaiming your hostility to slavery in public meetings, you will create an influence that will soon reach the Press. The bands with which the slaveholders have bound this Leviathan will then be snapped asunder. Once establish a free press, and the fate of slavery is sealed. Such a press will advocate your rights, will encourage education and industry, will point out the true cause of the depravation of morals, the prevalence of violence, and the depression of the public welfare.

Having gained the liberty of speech and of the press, you will go on, conquering and to conquer. Political action on your part will lead to new triumphs. The State legislatures and the public offices will no longer be the exclusive patrimony of the holders of slaves. Having once obtained a footing in your legislative halls, you will have secured in a quiet, peaceable, constitutional mode, the downfall of slavery, the recovery of your rights, and the prosperity and happiness of your country.

Think us not extravagantly sanguine. The very horror manifested by the slaveholders of the means we recommend, is evidence of their efficacy. We advise you to exercise freedom of speech. Have they not endeavored to bully you into silence by the threat, that "the question of slavery is not and shall not be open to discussion;" and that the moment any private individual talks about the means of terminating slavery, "that moment his tongue shall be cut out and cast upon a dunghill?"

Promote a free press. Is not the wisdom of the recommendation verified by the proclamation made of "instant death" to the abolition editors in the slave States, if "they avow their opinions?"

Your Constitutions have indeed been rendered by the slaveholders "blurred and obliterated parchments;" be it your care to restore them to their pristine beauty, and to make them fair and legible charters of the rights of man.

But we doubt not, fellow-citizens, that although you give your cordial assent to all we have said respecting the practical influence of slavery, you have, nevertheless, some misgivings about the effect of immediate emancipation. Shut up as you are in darkness on this subject, threatened with death if you talk or write about it; while the utmost pains are taken to prevent books or papers, which might enlighten you, from falling into your hands, it would be wonderful indeed, were you at once prepared to admit the safety and policy of instant and unconditional emancipation. You are assured, and probably believe, that massacre, and conflagration, and universal ruin would ensue on "letting loose the negroes;" but you are kept in ignorance of the fact, that in various parts of the world, negroes have been let loose, and in no one instance have such consequences followed; and you are not permitted to learn, in discussion, the reasons why such consequences never have followed, and never will follow the immediate abolition of slavery. What think you would be the fate of the man who should attempt to deliver a lecture in Charleston or Mobile on the safety of emancipation? Yet such a lecture might be delivered with perfect safety, were the lecturer to be accompanied by one or two hundred of your number, declaring their determination to maintain freedom of speech and to protect the lecturer. From such a lecture you would learn, with astonishment, that the atrocities in St. Domingo, so constantly used by the slaveholders to intimidate the refractory, arose from a civil war, which the planters, by their own folly and wickedness, kindled between themselves and the free blacks, and were wholly independent of the subsequent act of the French Government manumitting the slaves. You would also hear, perhaps for the first time, of the peaceful abolition of slavery in Mexico and South America. You would listen, with a surprise almost bordering on incredulity, to accounts of the glorious, wonderful success, attending the emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the British Colonies, without the loss of a single life. You would learn that in these colonies, among the liberated slaves, ten, twenty, thirty times as numerous as the whites, a degree of tranquility and good order and security is enjoyed, utterly unknown in any Southern or Western slave State. The complaints (grossly exaggerated, if they reach you through the medium of a pro-slavery press) of the want of labor and the diminution of production, arise not from the idleness, but the industry of the enfranchised slaves. Their wives and children, no longer toiling under the lash, are now engaged in the occupations of the family and of the school; while many of the fathers and husbands have become landholders, and raise their own food, and also articles for the market. Substantial and honest prosperity is gradually taking the place of that wealth, which, as in all other slave countries, was concentrated in the hands of a few, and was extorted from the labor of a wretched, degraded and dangerous population.

If you admit the greatest happiness of the greatest number to be the true test of national prosperity, then, beyond all controversy, the British West Indies are now infinitely more prosperous than at any previous period of their history.