'Let me ask, who can wish under existing circumstances that the constitution should be altered, when it must bring with it a violation of property—and when that violation of private property must engender such hostility of feelings, and elicit such bitter vituperation? The whole Union would feel a concussion, and no one can count the costs of the contest.' * * * 'By means of our colony, they may remove their slaves and restore them to freedom—and at the same time no way jeopardize the safety of themselves or their property.'—[Proceedings of the First Annual Meeting of the New-Jersey Colonization Society.]
'The establishment of our colony will afford facilities to proprietors for completing in Africa the exercise of the right which can only be partially exercised in this country, of disposing of our property, in our own way, without injury to the community.'—[Fourteenth Annual Report.]
What audacity do those advocates of the Society exhibit, who use, in reference to beings made a little lower than the angels, language like this—'disposing of our property in our own way'—'we hold their slaves, as we hold their other property, SACRED'!![L] If they really mean and believe what they say, it is something more heinous than impertinence to urge the planters to dispossess themselves of their property by colonization; and if the slaves belong of right to them,—are on a par with goods and chattels,—how idle, how supremely ridiculous it is to mourn over their wretched condition, to sigh for their emancipation, to declaim against the evil and wickedness of slavery, or even to denounce the slave trade! But the unfortunate blacks are not now, and never can be, the property of the planters; consequently the claims of their pretended owners are no better than those of the pirate or highway robber.
FOOTNOTES:
[K] The owners of slaves are licensed robbers, and not the just proprietors of what they claim: freeing them is not depriving them of property, but restoring it to the right owner; it is suffering the unlawful captive to escape. It is not wronging the master, but doing justice to the slave, restoring him to himself. Emancipation would only take away property that is its own property, and not ours; property that has the same right to possess us, as we have to possess it; property that has the same right to convert our children into dogs and calves and colts, as we have to convert theirs into these beasts; property that may transfer our children to strangers, by the same right that we transfer theirs.—Rice.
[L] 'Is there no difference between a vested interest in a house or a tenement, and a vested interest in a human being? No difference between a right to bricks and mortar, and a right to the flesh of man—a right to torture his body and to degrade his mind at your good will and pleasure? There is this difference,—the right to the house originates in law, and is reconcilable to justice; the claim (for I will not call it a right) to the man, originated in robbery, and is an outrage upon every principle of justice, and every tenet of religion.'—Speech of Fowell Buxton in the British Parliament.