You see, my friend, that I have replied to your question in the conviction that you desire the abolition of slavery above all other things in this world; as one assured that it is the great work of Christianity in our age and country, as the conflict with idolatry was in other times and climes. Thus you see the salvation of the souls, the maintenance of the rights, the fulfilment of the duties, and the preservation of the free institutions of Americans, to depend upon the extirpation of this accursed and disgraceful disease which is destroying them. If I had reason to think you merely desirous to make sectarian and political capital out of a holy thought and a sacred purpose originated by others—if you were merely contriving defences for what is indefensible, and trying to save the credit of what is disgraceful, trying to throw dust, and change the issue, and pay tithes of cumin to delay justice, in order to spare your own insignificant self in this greatest conflict of light and darkness, good and evil, which the world has now to show—if you had been trying how to seem creditably interested in what ought to be an American’s first business, and calculating how little instead of how much you might sacrifice to the soul-exalting cause of freedom—if you were but trying to get yourself or some friend into office by the judicious use of ideas which, as a republican and a Christian, you ought to give yourself wholly to be used by—if you were the hired agent of some demisemiquaver of a movement which tacked anti-slavery to its other titles, in order to establish a claim on the purses of abolitionists—in any of these cases I would not have stopped to talk with you. Your interest being the thing you had at heart, I should not counsel; I should be called, in the name of all that is holy, to condemn you, in order that blame might awaken conscience. But the case, I trust, is different. I may, then, say to you, with all the confidence, nay, certainty, which is inseparable from experience, knowledge, and utter self-abnegation in the matter, Work with the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lavish your time, your money, your labors, your prayers, in that field, which is the world, and you will reap a thousand fold, now and hereafter. This movement moves. It is alive. Hear how every thing mean and selfish struggles, hisses, and dies under its influence. Never, since the world was, has any effort been so clear, so strong, so uncompromising, so ennobling, so holy, and, let me add, so successful. It is “the bright consummate flower” of the Christianity of the nineteenth century. Look at those who “have not resisted the heavenly vision” it presented them of a nation overcoming its evil propensities, and doing right at all risks; ask them whether it has not saved their souls alive; ask them if it has not made them worshippers of the beauty and sublimity of high character, till they are ready to “know nothing on earth but Jesus Christ and him crucified.” For this they give all—wealth, youth, health, strength, life. Worldly success, obtained by slackening their labors against slavery, (and it is easy to have it on those terms at any moment, so placable a monster is the world,) strikes them like failure and disgrace. They have “scorned delights, and lived laborious days,” till at length they feel it no sacrifice, but the highest joy. All this the American Anti-Slavery Society demands of you. Do it! and be most grateful for the opportunity of fulfilling a work which is its own exceeding great reward. Do it, and find yourself the chosen of God, to keep alive in this nation, degraded and corrupted by slavery, the noble flame of Christian faith, the sentiment of honor and fidelity, the instinct of high-mindedness, the sense of absolute, immutable duty, the charm of chivalrous and poetic feeling, which would make of the poorest Americans the Christian gentlemen of the world.
“Cherish all these high feelings that become
A giver of the gift of liberty.”
You will find yourself under the necessity of doing it in this noble company, or alone. Try it. Strive to be perfect, as God is perfect—to act up to your own highest idea, in connection with church or state in this land corrupted by slavery, and see if you are helped or hindered. Be not dragged along by them protesting. It is graceing as a slave the chariot wheels of a triumph. But flee from them, as one flees out of Babylon. Secure the blessing of union for good, and be delivered from the curse of union in evil, by acting with the American Anti-Slavery Society, its members and friends.
I use this mode of expression advisedly, for I am not speaking of a mere form of association. Many are in harmonious coöperation with it who have neither signed the constitution nor subscribed the annual half dollar. Hence it is neither a formality nor a ceremony, but a united, onward-flowing current of noble lives.
If, then, you feel that devotedness of heart which I verily think your question indicates, I feel free to counsel you to go immediately to the nearest office of the American Anti-Slavery Society,[[1]] by letter, if not in person, subscribe what money you can afford—the first fruits of a life-long liberality, and study the cause like a science, while promoting it like a gospel, under the cheering and helpful sympathy of some of the best company on earth; but not unless; for this company despises what politicians, ecclesiastical and other, call “getting people committed.” They have a horror of this selfish invasion of another’s freedom, as of the encumbrance of selfish help. They warn you not to touch the ark with unhallowed hands.
One consideration more—the thought of what you owe to your forerunners in what you feel to be the truth. It is, to follow meekly after, and be baptized with the baptism that they are baptized with. “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness;” and the more your talents, gifts, and graces may, in your own judgment, be superior to theirs, the more becoming it will be to seek their fellowship; for in the whole land they, and they alone, are right. It is not eulogy, but fact, that theirs is the path of the just, shining more and more unto the perfect day—denied only by the besotted with injustice, the committed to crime. Consider, then, not only what you owe to your slavery-cursed country, your enslaving as well as enslaved countrymen, your fathers’ memory, your remotest posterity, the Christian religion, which forbids the sacrifice of one man’s rights to another man’s interests, and which knows no distinction of caste, color, or condition,—but consider, also, what you owe to those individuals and to that brotherhood who have battled twenty years in the breach for your freedom, involved with that of the meanest slave.
Imagine how the case stood with those who perished by suffocation in the Black Hole at Calcutta. Suppose that some of their number had felt the sublime impulse to place their bodies in the door, and the high devoted hearts to stand the crushing till dawn awoke the tyrant; the rest of that doomed band might have passed out alive. This is what the American Anti-Slavery Society has been unflinchingly doing for you, and for the rest of the nation, amid torture, insult, and curses, through a long night of terror and despair. The life of the land, its precious moral sense, has been thus kept from suffocation. The free agitating air of faithful speech has saved it. The soul of the United States is not dead, thanks, under Providence, to that noble fellowship of resolute souls, to find whom the nation has been winnowed. Do your duty by them, in the name of self-respect. Such companionship is an honor accorded to but few, and of that worthy few I would fain count you one. Strike, then, with them at the existence of slavery, and you will see individual slaves made free, anti-slavery leaven introduced into parties and churches, instruction diffused, the products of free labor multiplied, and fugitives protected, in exact proportion to the energy of the grand onset against the civil system.
Note. The work of the American Anti-Slavery Society is carried on by newspapers, books, tracts, agents, meetings, and conventions. The donor is requested to specify to what department, and in what section of country, he wishes his contribution applied.