We may congratulate the real friends of emancipation on the progress of public opinion in this affair. Our churches refuse communion with slave-holders. We deny their Christianity. Their deeds show that they are strangers to the love of God. They have not learnt the A B C of the Gospel: they sacrifice everything to gain. Mammon is their god, and to enrich themselves and their families they traffic in human flesh and blood. They do violence to every natural affection which Jehovah has implanted in the human soul, and thus offer one of the greatest insults to the Majesty of Heaven. The great curse of the slave is that God has created him a human being. He suffers severely from the chain, the scourge, and other instruments of cruelty; but the greatest of all torments is his possession of a heart. Slaves, to be happy, ought to be created without any susceptibilities. Love is the cement of society, and the angel which blesses all the relations of life. A world of love would be a second paradise, and the bright reflection of heaven and of the Deity. “God is love.” No tongue can tell, no heart can conceive the unspeakable blessings and joys which spring from the tender affections of parents, children, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, and friends. What would life be without these? God has so constituted us that there can be no real happiness without love; and yet this precious feeling, which comes to us fresh from the heart of the Deity, constitutes the Negro’s hell upon earth. Talk of racks, dungeons, thumb-screws, and other tortures of the Inquisition, slavery embodies them all. To tear relatives from relatives, and friends from friends; to sever the brother from the sister, the husband from the wife, and the child from its mother, inflicts far more suffering on the soul than any outward scourge can lay on the body. Consequently slavery is the monster of monsters, and the slave-holder is the head and chief of all tyrants who have ever cursed the world. He shall therefore no longer stand before us in the garb of Christianity, but shall be exhibited to the world as the lowest, worst, and basest of all criminals, and as such he shall be refused the right hand of fellowship, and expelled from the pale of the Christian Church.
Nothing has ever augured better for the cause of emancipation than the popularity of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The benevolent authoress has thrown so many bewitching charms into her narrative, that she has fascinated every one, and may justly be called the Enchantress of the age. She is read by all ranks and classes. We are amused everywhere by the sight of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” We meet the little British National Schoolboy going home and reading his “Uncle Tom,” as affording him greater amusement than his hoop, his top, or his marbles. And we find the grave divine and scholar, in the first-class railway carriage, with his more costly “Uncle Tom.” We see the lady in her chariot, who has gone out for a ride to enjoy the scenery, and taste the breeze of heaven, beguiled from surrounding objects by the touching pages of Mrs. Stowe. We have witnessed a whole family of children to turn from every other pursuit and amusement to enjoy this mental and moral treat. It has come with them to their meals, and yielded them such a repast that the luxuries of the table were almost unheeded. And then the servants also sought it at every interval, and read it with avidity by stealth. In a word, it is the favourite of the saint and the sinner, the sage and the frivolous, the believer and the unbeliever, the young and the old, the grave and the gay, the learned and the illiterate, the rude and the polished, the sad and the cheerful. And nothing could be more opportune for the cause of humanity. Mrs. Stowe must hereafter take her stand by the side of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and others, as one of the chief instruments raised up by Providence to burst the fetters of the slave, and let the oppressed go free.
We trust, indeed we feel sure, that the slumbering embers of anti-slavery zeal will, by means of this volume, be kindled into active power. We have influence enough among us to move the world on this topic, and all that we require is cooperation and union. The pulpit, the press, and the platform must speak out once more, and by its thunders shake the whole world of slavery. Already the old theme is firing the British heart. Week after week the Morning Advertiser appeals and instructs and arouses. Nor has it laboured in vain. Far and near the friends of the slave look to it as their tower of strength. In America we have a goodly number of abolitionists as our fellow-helpers, and “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” will increase them a thousandfold. The book speaks to the intellect, the reason, and the heart. Women are said to possess an innate power of arriving at truth, without employing the tedious metaphysics of men, and here we have a glorious example. In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” we have logic stripped of its dryness, and clothed with all the charms of romance. We would as soon believe in the power of the planters to reverse the revolutions of the planets as to resist the influence of Mrs. Stowe. The voice of humanity is the voice of God, and is essentially omnipotent. As a punishment for not having listened to this divine oracle, the slave-holders must have the humiliation of being vanquished by a woman. And, after all, what more natural than that the woes of our race should owe their softest, sweetest, and consequently most powerful, utterances to the heart of the sex which was created to bless the world with its tenderest sympathies.
We are thus placed on a vantage ground from which it would be base to retire, especially as we have been raised thus high by the talent and benevolence of a female. Christian chivalry has now open before it a race of glory, compared with which the tilts and tournaments of the olden time are the veriest trifles. The whole country is baptised with anti-slavery zeal, just ready to burst forth in every possible way to emancipate the slave. We must have public meetings everywhere.
The “braying of Exeter Hall,” like the ass of Balaam, has, in ten thousand instances, rebuked the madness of our modern false prophets, who, from love of filthy lucre, have gone forth to curse God’s Israel, because they have left the house of bondage. It is only for the friends of humanity once more to gird themselves for their work, and in a few years there will be another and more extensive triumph over the foes of liberty and the negro.
We can also expostulate. The life of William Allen shows how powerful the voice of an unofficial individual may be, when that voice is the voice of reason, justice, and philanthropy. He brought the tyrants of Europe on their knees before the Majesty of Heaven, and there constrained them to ameliorate the laws which oppressed their subjects. Why should not the diplomacy of England be christianised? If this had been done years ago, we might have converted Napoleon into a man of peace, and saved the nation a thousand millions of taxation. Humanity is the genius of economy. Christian diplomacy would long ago have burst the fetters of the continent, and could now effect wonders in every part of the globe. It is left with the electors to say, whether foreign ambassadors, consuls, &c., shall continue to be the mere minions of mammon, or become the missionaries of justice and philanthropy. But supposing we failed here, there is power beyond that of bureaucratic officials; the denunciations we utter against the rulers of the slave will be carried by the birds of the air to the ears of these tyrants, and make their hearts quiver and knees shake like those of Belshazzar. The words of justice require no patent from courts to render them authoritative. The stamp of Heaven is upon them, and though spoken by a Paul in chains, they pierce the hearts of despots and make them tremble. We mistake if we suppose that conscience is altogether dead in the souls of slave-holders. Heaven has decreed that the wretch who is deaf to the small still voice of duty and mercy, shall be horrified by the thunders of guilt, and feel a hell within. “Haley,” hoping to cheat the devil when he has made his fortune; and “Legree” trembling for fear of ghosts and hobgoblins, are no creatures of fiction, but the truthful delineations of the conscious degradation and forebodings of the trader in human blood.
And further, cannot consistency utter a plea? There is nothing, perhaps, at which men labour more earnestly than to appear consistent. But what fellowship can there be between liberty and slavery? Slavery is a foul blot on the escutcheon of the United States; and every patriotic American feels it to be so. Here, in the land of liberty, Freedom receives her deepest wound in the house of her vaunting friends. The enemies of tyranny over the world are taunted with the despotism of the American democrat. The infidel of our day draws his most potent arguments from the vices and faults of professing Christians; and the advocates of despotism act in the same manner, and procure their artillery from the barbarism of American slave-holders. We must then assail this inconsistency until the guilty parties blush and are ashamed. The continual dropping of water will wear away stones, and the persevering reiterations of truth shall eventually prevail, and make even slave-holders relent and listen to the voice of consistency and humanity.
We have had among us glorious specimens of what the slave can be. To those who talk of his inferior powers and limited rights, we point to such men as Frederick Douglass, Wells Brown, Henson, Garnett, and Dr. Pennington. It was our privilege to enter the hall at Heidelberg, just as the academy conferred on Dr. Pennington his diploma. And is this the man that the slave-holder would sell as he would a horse or bullock? What is the reply of humanity to this question? I need not dwell on the mind, talents, and piety of Brown, Henson, or Garnett. The country has long since borne witness to these. Exeter-hall has often resounded with the loftiest strains of eloquence, but never has it listened to a more intellectual, eloquent, and soul-stirring tongue, than that of Frederick Douglass, and yet this is the man, on whose head the planters have set a price, because he obeyed the voice of nature and of God in running away from the horrors of slavery. But why advance these examples? There is not a field of slaves, a slave-market, or a negro cabin, but proclaims the equality of the African with the rest of the human family. The tears, cries, and broken hearts which every separation by the dealer occasions, proclaim that the sympathies of the slave are equal to those of the rest of mankind. Every argument used by these sons and daughters of bondage, every prayer they offer, every speech they make, and every sermon they preach, prove that all the essentials of soul belong to them in as much native richness as to us. ’Tis true everything has been done to degrade them. The cruelties practised by Simon the cobbler to deprave and demoralise the Dauphin of France, and which awakened the execration of the world, are every day being followed by the planters of America. What if any of us had had the sphere of our knowledge contracted to the smallest span, and our language confined to a few words of the most outlandish patois, is there one man among us that would surpass them in their present condition? Where would Milton, Shakspeare, or Newton have been under such training? Considering the debasing education to which they have been doomed, the slaves are our equals, if not our superiors; every part of their history shows the truth of the words of our poet—
“Fleecy locks and black complexion,
Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim;