Yours is the business of mercy and compassion, not of oppression. You forcibly rescue from the hands of no man his property, but by your examples and precepts you promote the Abolition of Slavery, and give relief to free Negroes, and others unlawfully held in bondage.
You have shown an anxiety to extend a portion of that freedom to others, which GOD in his Providence hath extended unto you, and a release from that thraldom to which yourselves and your country were so lately tyrannically doomed, and from which you have been but recently delivered. You have evinced to the world your inclination to remove as much as possible the sorrows of those who have lived in undeserved bondage, and that your hearts are expanded with kindness toward men of all colours, conditions and nations; and if you did not interest yourselves in their behalf, how long might their situations remain hard and distressing.
Numbers might passively remain for life in abject slavery from an ignorance of the mode of acquiring their emancipation, notwithstanding they may be justly entitled to their freedom by birth and by the law.
If the hand of prosecution is now raised against you, for relieving your fellow mortals from the distresses of unlawful slavery, and restoring them to liberty, it is to be hoped it will not be of long duration; the principles of your institutions will be daily made more known, and others will begin to think as you do; they will find upon reflection, that they have no just power or authority to hold men in slavery, and seeing that your actions are charitable and disinterested, will cordially inlist under your banners, and aid your benevolent exertions.
Already have you reason to suppose, that your good examples have been influential; you humbly began with a few, and you now see your numbers hourly encreasing.
It may be the effusions of a youthful fancy, solicitous of aggrandizing your merit, but I fear not to say, that the operations of similar institutions will date one of the most splendid æras of American greatness.
Go on then, my friends, pursue the dictates of an unsullied conscience, and cease not until you have finished your work—but let prudence guide you in all your undertakings, and let not an enthusiastic heat predominate over reason. Your cause is a just one, consistent with law and equity, and must finally be advocated by all men of Humanity and Religion.
"For, 'tis Liberty alone which gives the flower
of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
And we are weeds without it."