And now comes the period of our proposed bloodless revolution, which will try men’s souls. Let us do as our fathers did, and refuse to pay taxes to the general government. “Millions for defence, but not one cent for tribute,” cried our ancestors, in order to save their descendants from the oppressive spirit of England’s grasping avarice. They at first were ridiculed, and it is stated that when John Warren, one of the aristocracy of Boston, made an inflammatory speech, at a rebel meeting, that he was denounced by the leading citizens of this place, and a copy of a letter is still preserved, written by some of them in reference to the transaction, in which they state, that “one Dr. Warren, had indeed made a rebellious speech, but he was applauded only by a few rowdies.” Shall not we be as willing to sacrifice our property and lives, as were our ancestors? Did not John Hancock hand the keys of his stores and dwelling to the authorities of the city, saying to them, “this is all of my property, but if the good of Boston requires its destruction, I freely yield it to you?” To pay taxes is to support the government, under which we live, for without this support it could not exist. These taxes are not paid of course directly, but still we eat, drink, and wear those things, on which a duty is paid, which gives the general government all its power. For instance. The Mexican War has left a large debt resting on our shoulders. The only way in which it will be paid probably is, by an increased tariff on particular articles of consumption. Now if an entire cessation of such consumption should take place, would not the government be left destitute of the means to pay this debt? Who pays the salaries of the officers of this government, but the consumer of the articles taxed by it? If the consumption of all such articles can be prevented, would not our government be obliged to cease operations, for want of oil to grease its machinery with? It moves only as money is furnished it. Our navy and army, the protectors of the South, can only be supported by large sums of money, derived from the revenue of the nation, which revenue we help to create by our consumption of these things. If sugar pays a large duty, or tea and coffee, or silks and satins, broadcloths and cassimeres, by refusing to use those articles, and inducing others to do the same, would not the revenue of the nation be affected? and when the actual tax-gatherer in the shape of the merchant, holds out his seductive wares for our purchase, could we not exhibit to him our pledge to “totally abstain” from the use of such articles; as the temperance man shows his ticket, as a reason why he should not partake of the intoxicating cup?

Another step could also be taken. A president could be chosen by us, and other necessary officers, and we could go on with our government, just as if no other existed, “beating for recruits” all the while, and offering no physical resistance to those who molest us. Have we not a right so to do?

have you become bond slaves to a power fully as oppressive of you, as that of Britain’s tyrannical king, against whom your ancestors lifted their stout arms in rebellion, and unfurled their banner of revolt, on which was gloriously inscribed, “victory or death?” Have you forever lost all that portion of your ancestral fire, which armed three millions of poor and feeble men to engage in deadly combat with the richest and most powerful nation in Christendom? Ah, has God forsaken you so entirely, that no pulse of gladness beats in your frame, as you listen to the stirring notes of the wild, clarion sound of freedom, coming over these hills, and echoing from the far-distant prairies of the wide West? Oh is there not, friends, any deep fountain of sorrow gushing up from the inmost depths of your secret souls, for the sufferings and woes of the three millions of your Southern brethren? Ah, is there not any remnant of the spark of divinity which our Father in heaven has placed in every human heart, left to warm up your frigid souls? Say, breathes there not a particle of indignant life in your moral nature, as you listen to the mad agonies of shrieking mothers, the victims of remorseless tyrants who now stand defacing God’s image and stamping in the dust the lineaments of their Creator? Oh, is there none of manhood left in you, that the shrieks of trampled upon and bleeding innocence, should not move you to contend with Slavery’s cruel power? But is not your own safety a reason why you should cease to doff your beavers to the South, and should refuse to pay homage to her any longer? Listen a moment while I exhibit to you some more personal and selfish arguments. At the last election, the Southern States were allowed one electoral vote for every 7,500 voters, while at the North, it took 12,000 voters to entitle us to one elector. The number of electors, of which we were thus deprived, was about 100, which was the same as excluding from the privilege of the elective franchise, 750,000 voters, about the number in all New England and Pennsylvania! Now are not these persons taxed equally with those who have the privilege of voting? Do not all the citizens of the North pay taxes? Yes, and much more than their true proportion, for by far the greater portion of duty-paying goods, are consumed at the North. Then, is not the principle which our fathers died to oppose, fully carried out by our government, taxation without representation? and yet we tamely submit to this plucking our substance from us, by the fierce beak of our country’s eagle; while our fathers would not so much as listen to the slight growling of the English lion, as he shook his shaggy mane in their faces, and touched them with but the extremities of his bloody paw! Robbery, if committed by a bird of prey, the American eagle, is to be patiently submitted to, and indeed we call it but the tickling of an affectionate friend or child; but let the valiant lion of Old England take the value of a pin’s point, or a few old pine trees and worthless rocks from us, and how the welkin rings with the sound of our abhorrence of such depredations. We are like the slaveholder, spoken of in our friend’s narrative, who told the slaves it was a crime to steal from him, but none to rob his neighbors, because he reaped the benefits of the theft. So with us. We are rewarded for our submission to this robbery, by the paltry trade of the South, and as long as a few of us can make more money than we lose otherwise by our connection with the South, we care not for our principles, although every fourth of July we laud our fathers for fighting in behalf of them; or for the losses of the mass of the people. Taxation without representation! This practice deluged the fields of our country, with our ancestor’s and Briton’s son’s blood; and caused our prosperity, as a nation, to be stricken to the ground, and we magnify our fathers for their boldness, in reference to it; yet we cherish the same principle, and press it to our bosoms as a part of our religion!

Great Britain tried our fathers, accused of crime, away from their homes, across the waters of the ocean, and we call it a great oppression; but let one of our sons be guilty of an act in violation of Southern law, or be even suspected of it, and there is no law by which he can be tried. All law is trampled under foot, and he is doomed to waste away his life, in a gloomy prison, or to be whipped almost to death. Which is the worst, being tried across the sea, by an impartial court, or being strung up by Lynch law between the heavens and the earth, and left dangling on the limb of a tree, or else doomed to wear out a miserable existence in some foul dungeon?

But to make the case still more parallel. Great Britain, our fathers complained, quartered soldiers upon them in times of peace, who eat out their substance and corrupted the people. For what other earthly purpose is the army of the United States continued in existence, but to watch the bidding of the monster Slavery, and be ready to fly at a moment’s warning to her assistance, in case the least attempt should be made by their victims to regain their freedom? That this is a true statement, may be seen from the fact, that all our wars for the last thirty-five years, have been waged in behalf of Slavery, and even our last war with Great Britain, is attributed by many persons to the demands of the slave power. It is certain, that no war will ever be allowed by the South, except in behalf of Slavery, for it would be detrimental to their interests; and it is well known that she rules over the destinies of this country, and guides its affairs of state, as effectually as Alexander or Napoleon ruled the countries they had conquered. Slavery rules this nation, did we say? It can hardly be called ruling, for we are so submissive to the faintest manifestation of her will, that she has but to glance her glowing eye towards our craven souls, and we will prostrate our abject forms lowly on the ground, with our faces hid in the dust, which we are truly unworthy to touch; as submissively and reverentially, as the devout Mussulman kisses the ground when the hour of prayer arrives, crying, “God is great.” Our God is emphatically Slavery. To him we address our early matins, and in his ear are uttered our evening orisons. More devoutly do we render homage to our god, Slavery, than the most pious of us adore the God of heaven, which proves that we are a very religious people, worshipping, not crocodiles, leeks and onions, snakes, and images of wood and stone, but a god, whose service is infinitely more disgusting than that of any heathen idol, but one who pays us well, for our obeisance, as we imagine.

In this matter of a standing army, we go beyond our fathers in suffering oppression. They were not obliged to fight for England, when the object of the war was to enslave themselves; but it is well known that the great object the South has in view, in all her wars, is the aggrandizement of herself and the subjection of the North to her complete dictation; and we are called upon to engage in these wars, and after they are fought, we are compelled to foot the heavy bills.

But when our fathers were oppressed, they could plead in their own behalf. If they placed their feet on England’s shores, no harm could befal them, as long as they were guilty of no crime. They could defend their own cause; and the thunders of a Burke’s eloquence, shook the walls of Parliament to their foundation, and made the tyrants of England tremble and quake with fear, as he poured forth the fervor of his vehement eloquence in strong condemnation of the oppression of the colonies. A William Pitt too, could frighten the British minister from his unhallowed security, amid the multitude of fawning sycophants surrounding him, in the height of his political power, by the thunders of his voice, uttered in faithful rebuke of the war measures of the government. This noble Earl, was allowed to plead in behalf of American freedom, until his earnest spirit was claimed by the grim messenger death, as he arose in his place in the House of Lords, to speak in our behalf. But suffer what we may, is there any redress for us at the hands of our government? Our property may be injured by spoliations on our commerce, such as imprisoning our seamen, as well as by the crime of seizing our free citizens and depriving them of their liberty; and can we obtain the least redress? O the ignominy of our puerile connection with the South!

It is well known that under the system of Slavery, the three great blessings of republicanism are denied to a large portion of our citizens. These are, freedom of the press, of speech and of locomotion. And will we allow ourselves to be deprived of what even Europe’s despotic kings have been bestowing upon their subjects? Are we more base and abject in our submission to the South, than are the oppressed millions of the old world, in their subjection to their kingly oppressors? O what falsifiers of our own professions, and truants to our own dearly prized principles, we are! Can an abolitionist travel unexposed at the South? I have had some little experience in the matter, and know that such is not the case. Men have pursued me with relentless hate, and implements of death have been brought into requisition against me, for no crime, only for exposing Slavery, in its own dominions. Can we send to any part of the South those newspapers we may wish to send there? While at the South, I was advised by a friend to conceal a paper I had received, because of its being opposed to Slavery; and it is in only particular portions of that ill-fated country, that anti-slavery publications, can be introduced. It is not many years, since a man was publicly whipped, for having an anti-slavery newspaper wrapped around a bible, which he was offering for sale. As to liberty of speech, not half the freedom is allowed the opponents of Slavery on the floors of Congress, that the British Parliament allowed the opposers of the American War. In Boston, on the day which ushered the famous stamp act into existence, the bells were tolled, and a funeral procession passed through the streets, bearing a coffin, on which the word Liberty was inscribed. “During the movement of the procession, minute guns were fired, and an oration was pronounced in favor of the deceased. Similar expressions of grief and indignation occurred in many parts of the land;” but, friends, no funeral procession passed through our streets when Liberty died the second time—no muffled bells sounded their melancholy peals in the ears of a mourning people; no liberty-loving orator was found to pronounce a requiem for the departed goddess; and yet she was slain—and slain too, not by foreign hands, nor by the natural allies of human oppressors, but, shall I tell the sad and dismal tale? by those, who twenty-five years before, had shrouded their faces in mantles of mourning, and rent the air with their expressions of grief, at the destruction of one of liberty’s little fingers, by the passage of the stamp act; but when Liberty lay a full length corpse, on the floors of that Congress, which sold her to the South, as Judas betrayed the Son of God, and for almost as small a boon, viz.: “the carrying trade” of the South; not only were there no lamentations made over her complete departure, but she was taken by night and buried hastily; while

as her corse was deposited without a “winding sheet,” or even “a soldier’s cloak” to wrap around her bleeding form. Clandestinely was she hurried out of the sight of the men who murdered her; and instead of songs of sorrow, being heard throughout the land, pæans of praise ascended from its every corner, and honors were heaped on the heads of her murderers. But Liberty as truly died then, as if loud lamentations had been made in her behalf, and the descendants of those very men, who in 1765 followed the coffin of liberty to its place of deposit, because no business was deemed lawful unless the records of it were made on stamped paper; the descendants of these very mourners of liberty, now, do what is infinitely worse than to use the stamped paper of a British king; they swear to support that sacrifice of Liberty upon the altar of Southern slavery, whenever they are admitted to any offices of trust and renown. Is not this oppressive, when we may not administer justice to our fellow men, or exercise the most common authority, without renewing the thrust at the departed spirit of liberty, as our fathers actually slew her fair form?

On the 5th of March, 1775, the Boston massacre occurred—the fearful tragedy of State Street! All Boston was aroused, murders dreadful had been committed by the British troops, and it was a difficult task to allay the excitement occasioned thereby. What was the amount of this terrible massacre? Why, three Boston citizens had been shot in the heat of an affray with the British soldiery! What horror seemed to seize upon the hearts of the people! Why, “our brothers are being shot down in the face of open day, and our turn may come next.” Terrible was the indignation of our fathers! And yet we, their descendants, calmly allow the South to slay our citizens at their leisure. The blood of a murdered Lovejoy, still cries out from the ground for vengeance! A Baltimore prison, still contains the impress of a departed spirit’s feet, which left an impression on its gloomy pavement, as he fled from an earthly prison-house to the mansions of the blest. A C. C. Torrey still calls for redress for his wrongs at the hands of Southern tyrants. The jail of our own capital if it could speak, would tell of him who pined away within its noisome walls, as he lay in that republican enclosure, a victim to Southern tyranny. Yes, Dr. Crandall’s blood has not yet been atoned for, by the wicked South. Here are, at least three victims who have been slain, at the cruel dictation of Slavery’s dreadful power. But time would fail me, to tell of a Van Zandt, of a Fairbanks, and of numerous others, whose lives have been forfeited to the South. And yet we submit to her dictation. Our own citizens slain, imprisoned, and cruelly beaten, but yet we have no heart to break away from this degrading alliance with our Southern man-stealing brethren.

But, I must bring this expostulation to a close, and proceed to show the consequences of this event, the formation of a new government. Of these it may be said; they could not be more disastrous to the North than Slavery has been; for like the “horse-leech’s two daughters,” she continually cries “give, give,” and never seems to have enough. Hardly through with the digestion of the tremendous morsel just administered to her gormandizing appetite, she commences to lick her lips, and daintily ask for a dessert, with which to finish the full meal which she has already made of California and New Mexico, and as her mother deems it her duty, never to deny any of her darling daughter’s reasonable requests, probably the Island of Cuba, will soon be placed at her side, for her to nibble upon at leisure.

Many persons deprecate our plan, for fear of a civil war; and terrific ideas of rivers of blood rolling across our fields, and piles of bones heaped on our shores, startle them in their slumbers, as the rustling of a leaf fills the slaveholder’s heart with fear. In the first place, how very absurd is this idea of a civil war being the result of disunion. Can any one seriously urge it, as an objection to this movement? Look at the vast extent of territory open to the incursions of an enemy, if the North should withdraw from the South. There are the Islands of the West Indies, filled with emancipated slaves, ready, some of them to join in an effort to redeem the Southern slaves from bondage. Then there is the long line of sea-board, entirely unprotected, which even in the last war was devastated in part by the British army, and the capital of our country reduced to ashes. On the Northern frontier, runs that talismanic line, over which a slave has but to place his foot, and glorious liberty becomes his possession. Here stand, twelve millions of freemen, ready to fight in behalf of the panting fugitive, while nearly 20,000 sturdy hearts beat quick to the sound of the trumpet of freedom, and are ready to leave their homes in Canada, to assist their brethren. Then, there is ill-treated and insulted Mexico, burning under a sense of the wrongs inflicted upon her, and watching an opportunity to redress those wrongs. Last of all, are the numerous Indian tribes, smarting under a deep sense of the wrongs they have received at our hands. Now will any sensible person assert that five millions of Southerners, allowing all her white population to be in favor of Slavery, with an intestine foe, ready to spring upon her, as soon as the last chance of freedom presents itself, will be in danger of fighting twelve millions of free Northerners, who can call to their aid all these, and numerous other allies? Why, the idea is preposterous, and none but an insane man, can seriously entertain it. Who would fight the North, if war should be declared? At the first sound of the trumpet of war, every slave would be instantly free; for never could the Southerners leave their homes exposed to the fury of an insurgent population, as they would be obliged to, if an army should be organized to fight the North.

But who are those persons who cry out “civil war, and bloodshed?” Are they not mostly those who believe the revolutionary war to have been right? If Slavery is wrong, to be consistent, they ought to hail any movement which will hasten an insurrection among the Slaves. What is a civil war of a few years’ continuance, in comparison to the seven years’ war we waged with Great Britain? Then our resources were limited, our treasury light, and we were only three millions strong. But now, we abound in resources, have become plethoric on account of our riches, and are twelve millions strong, while our enemy is less than half that number. We coped with twenty millions of British subjects, when we numbered but three millions, can we not now with twelve millions cope with five? Then has our glory departed indeed, and we are the veriest slaves in existence. But would our trade be endangered? Ah, that is the question. Said a person to me not long since, “I acknowledge there would be benefits in a dissolution of the Union, but there are also disadvantages.” And what are they? we inquired. “Why, our trade would be injured.” Let it perish then! Every mother’s son of us, had better pack up and on board our numerous vessels go on a begging expedition to England or France, or we had better “tie millstones about our necks, and drown ourselves in the depths of the sea;” or, we had better lay down in the streets and perish with hunger, than to allow Slavery to continue its existence.

The moment it is granted that a dissolution of the Union would abolish Slavery quicker than any other course, then I think our point is gained, and there is no necessity of proving that we shall not lose the sale of a few hats and boots, or slave whips. It seems almost an insult to the character of the Northern people to answer such an argument as this, and yet I fear that it is the “strong reason” why this question meets with so much opposition.

If slavery is abolished, no one can deny that our trade, so important to Northern men, and for which they are ready to barter the welfare of three millions of human beings, would be materially increased; but for one I care not, whether this will be the case or not. I cannot, I will not argue this question. It is a sin against the Holy Ghost, to dream of balancing the matter in this way. Northern men, you are too much actuated by this spirit of Avarice! You must be converted from this accursed love for gold; for it will sink you into the lowest degradation of a life afar from Deity. You cannot be the friends of God, while it reigns in your hearts! You must arise, and cast it from you! You must be converted from your selfishness, and then you will have no objections to offer against a dissolution of the Union! If your eyes can only be anointed with the eye-salve of humanity, and be washed in the waters of benevolence, you will see the folly of all your objections, and will be ready to sink all your ships with their rich cargoes, into the depths of the sea, and to burn your well-filled stores, rather than to cause Slavery to continue another day! O, men of the North, can ye not be aroused to action in the slave’s behalf? Shall the purple streams of the slave’s blood, flow ceaselessly and rapidly o’er our land, gushing forth from every hill-side of the South, and coloring all the fair fields of Southern industry, on account of your sustaining power? O that I could utter some word in your ear, which would quicken your dormant sensibilities and arouse you to action in the slave’s cause! Shall I tell you of God, of heaven, and of hell? There is a God, and as he descends from his abode among the stars, and essays to find an entrance into your soul, by which he may make you “a joint heir with Christ to an inheritance, incorruptible and undefiled and which fadeth not away,” depend upon it, that he will be frustrated in his benevolent purpose, if the demon of pro-slavery, lies coiled up in your heart. Whatever may be said of religion, it is true that God can never approve of any person, in league with slaveholders; for a just God is forever opposed to all forms of robbery and oppression. If God’s favor then is of any value, flee, I beseech thee, to the arms of liberty, and be encircled by her protecting power; so that all approach to Slavery may be dreaded by thee, as an angel dreads the polluting touch of sin.

REPRESENTATION OF THE BOX,

In which a fellow mortal travelled a long journey, in quest of those rights which the piety and republicanism of this country denied to him, the right to possess.

[Image of the box unavailable.]

Philadelphia
Pa.
Right side up with care

3 feet 1 inch long, 2 feet wide, 2 feet 6 inches high.

As long as the temples of humanity contain a single worshipper, whose heart beats in unison with that of the God of the universe; must a religion and a government which could inflict such misery upon a human being, be execrated and fled from, as a bright angel, abhors and flees from the touch of hideous sin.