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ADDRESS TO THE ABOLITIONISTS

OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

As reported by a Committee appointed by the first Annual Meeting of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, of which Committee Alvan Stewart, Esq., was Chairman, and which was unanimously adopted, October, 1836.

To rescue the helpless, to resist oppression, to elevate the despised, to combat despotism, to instruct and soften the conscience of the master, to make free, exalt, enlighten and invigorate the faculties of the slave, stand before the world, as the objects of prominent pursuit by the New York State Anti-Slavery Society.

What object so sublime, as that which abates the sufferings of man as a physical being, while it amplifies the undying powers, makes the individual conscious of the greatness of his origin, the superiority of his heaven-descended lineage, and his ultimate destiny beyond the oppressions of time, and the cruelties of a transitory world?

What is worthy the pursuit of a tenant of immortality, except that which may place his own body, and that of his neighbor, in the best attitude to have the soul illuminated with the knowledge of itself, of its Author, its obligations to itself, to man, and to God?

But the question is asked every day, who is my neighbor? Every human being, on whom the sun rises or sets, who feels the cold of winter, or the heat of summer, whether he is seated on the throne of power or languishes in the damps of the dungeon; whether he is fed from the table of abundance, or eats his moldy crust under the shadow of a wall; whether he be the owner of the rice, cotton and sugar fields of the

sultry South, or the naked, scar-marked, chain-loaded, whipbeaten, under-fed, and unpaid slave who cultivates them.

No matter where he received his birth; whether idolatry has forged its wretched chains for his mind, whether he be educated to lift his hand on the solitudes of Africa, to strip others of what they have; no matter how great the debasement of mind, even if lost in the mazes of Confucius' infidelity; no matter how that mind has been defiled by the rust of superstition, in a succession of ages; no matter with what fearful orgies of the midnight blaze and flowing blood, the sons of Christendom have robbed the black man of himself; no matter how solemn the form by which the planter of the South, by bargain and sale, by written instruments drawn in conformity to the highwayman's code, may make out his title (yes, let him show his bond for human flesh); no matter how bloody legislation may attempt to create title deeds, by which man may be sold to man; no matter how solemn the form of the last will of the dotard, trembling on the confines of the grave, who endeavors to bind to another the slave who has served him through life's brief course; no matter how often he may begin his will, "In the name of God, amen "-(Solemn mockery! God-insulting adjuration! Yes, let southern lawyers bring their 40,000 recorded wills, let us behold these scoffers now, in their noiseless graves, binding 500,000 human beings, to eternal slavery, calling on God with an "amen "- -"so might it be," to ratify what might raise a blush on a ruined archangel's cheek;) no matter for all this casuistry, this network of fraud, this inversion of truth; no matter for all these things, the slave is still a man, our brother, and an inheritor of Eternity-he is still the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves; and this Society is the Samaritan, who will take him up, bind his wounds, and restore him to himself. Yes, if anything makes one nearer, and dearer, and more of

a neighbor than another, it is because his helplessness and misery demand it, and we must obey the heavenly mandate. To enlarge the compass of action beyond the efforts of individual benevolence, in behalf of the poor American slave, and form this Society, one year ago, brought together 600 of the choice spirits of this State, the sons of humanity, from the borders of Lake Erie, the hills of Montauk, the mountains of Delaware, the waters of Champlain, the banks of the Hudson, and the shores of Ontario.

American Slavery is a pyramid of crime-a death shade thrown over this guilty land. Though we were driven from this temple of the Most High, dedicated to Him "who is no respecter of persons," by a mob of native Americans-whose principles on that occasion, were the same as those taught in the school of Dante, Marat, and Robespierre, yet we have reason to thank the Source of all good, that while these enemies of God and man intended it for our harm, it resulted in our good, in adding many thousands to our numbers. Under the sanction of the principles, embodied in the constitution of our Society, we are assembled in the same house, a second time, to publish to our countrymen, the secrets and movements of our Society, with our future intentions. These principles and intentions are inscribed on the hearts of the benevolent, and make their home in the temple of eternal Justice. They are principles which are not depending upon the ebullitions of a floating, unthinking mob, who will shout hosannas to-day, and crucifixion to-morrow; whose minds are unfixed as the whirlwind, one day insulting Heaven and dishonoring earth with fiendish shouts over prostrate humanity, while the next, they build temples to canonize the ashes of the victims they have immolated, and then place in the highest niche of human remembrance, that man as philanthropist, when dead, who, when living, was loaded with obloquy, and covered with. reproach. These principles bind

in holy harmony a band of philanthropists, who deride the scorn of the haughty, who love the lowest being invested with a never-dying mind, who move forward and upward against the descending stream of popular violence, carrying consolation and deliverance to the prisoner-unawed by the bold front of defiance, but upheld and cheered by the rewards of the final judgment; when the master and slave, the scorner and the scorned, the oppressor and the oppressed, shall stand up for a final analysis of character, before the Judge, at whose presence the heavens and earth will flee away.

To lend energy to truth, to give confidence to virtue, to be numbered with the feeble, to take seats with the humble, to divide our substance with the hungry, never to forsake the dumb, never to cease displaying the slave's wrongs to this guilty age, always to continue haunting the imagination of this slave-grinding nation, with the crimes of the past, the wickedness of the present, and the accountability in the future; while at the same time we implore the Parent of the Universe to hear the cries of the millions of his helpless children, which are ascending day and night from the slavecursed fields of southern despotism; are objects lying near our hearts.

VIEW OF SLAVERY.

Let us take a view of slavery, as it appears in masses, either for the purpose of seeing the amount of robbery committed on slaves of this land, as a question of money; or the amount of brutal chastisement inflicted to obtain the labor performed; and then let us examine briefly the constitutional power of Congress, to abolish the internal American slave trade, now prosecuted with most of the horrors which accompanied the old African slave trade.

There are at least 500,000 slaves in the slave States, each of whom, at the present prices of produce, earns, over and

above his wretched subsistence, $200 per annum, or one hundred millions of dollars. The other 2,000,000 of slaves we put down as earning no more than their miserable subsistence, which is, beyond a doubt, greatly undervaluing their labors. This calculation leaves the slaveholders in the receipt of a net income of one hundred millions of dollars, not one dollar of which belongs to the slaveholder, but every dollar ought to be the slaves'. To obtain this one hundred millions of dollars from the poor slave, there are inflicted at least, on an average, twenty lashes or blows on the person of each slave, which would not be inflicted were they not slaves, amounting to fifty millions of lashes on the two and a half millions of slaves, or, in other words, a blow is struck for every two dollars earned by the slaves. The fifty millions of lashes is the return the slaveholder makes as a compensation for the $100,000,000 earned for the masters by the poor slaves.

The united robberies, piracies, forgeries, counterfeit-moneypassing, and thefts of the whole world for one year, will not equal the sum of which the American slaves are robbed annually. The American slave has been robbed every day for 200 years gone by, by a people whose chivalry consists in the generosity of that act. The fifty millions of lashes struck on the American slaves (which would not be if they were free) exceed all the acts of cruelty of the civilized and barbarian world beside. Yes, the twelve slave States of America are the head-quarters of cruelty for the world; the residence of duelling, the native land of Lynch law, where its professors reside and its scholars practise. These States are the asylum of piracy, made respectable by the sanctions of law, where immortal minds are ruined, in the wholesale, by constitutional edicts; where the marriage contract is ex changed for wandering adultery. This is the land dedicated to amalgamation, where 500,000 mulattoes testify the affec

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