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Updated: June 5, 2025
Alas for the tyrant slave-holder when God shall make his award to his poor, oppressed, and despised children, and to those who seek a transient and yet delusive means of present happiness by trampling his fellow and brother in the dust, and appropriating the soul and body of his own crushed victim to the gratification of his depraved appetites and passions.
On the other side were the boys, in physical characteristics the same and suggesting the same social divisions: at the top the farmer now and then a slave-holder and perhaps of gentle blood who had dropped by the way on the westward march of civilization and had cleared some rich river bottom and a neighboring summit of the mountains, where he sent his sheep and cattle to graze; where a creek opened into this valley some free-settler, whose grandfather had fought at King's Mountain usually of Scotch-Irish descent, often English, but sometimes German or sometimes even Huguenot would have his rude home of logs; under him, and in wretched cabins at the head of the creek or on the washed spur of the mountain above, or in some "deadenin" still higher up and swept by mists and low-trailing clouds, the poor white trash worthless descendants of the servile and sometimes criminal class who might have traced their origin back to the slums of London; hand-to-mouth tenants of the valley-aristocrat, hewers of wood for him in the lowlands and upland guardians of his cattle and sheep.
Kansas was in a state of civil war; two days after his inauguration the Supreme Court handed down the famous Dred Scott decision, declaring the right of any slave-holder to take his slaves as property into any territory; while the young Republican party was siding openly with the abolitionists, and, a very firebrand in a powder-house, in 1859, John Brown seized Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and attempted to start a slave insurrection.
And again he was reported to have, with unrelenting temper, represented to his friends in secret council, that, "It was for our safety not to spare one white skin alive." And so it was unmistakably in his purpose to leave not a single egg lying about Charleston, when he was done with it, out of which might possibly be hatched another future slave-holder and oppressor of his people.
Also in 1836 the office at Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river. Birney was a southerner by birth, and had been a slave-holder, but had freed his slaves. Between 1834 and 1840 there was hardly a place of any size in the North where an Abolitionist could speak with certain safety.
One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a rift in the solid South. It was The Impending Crisis, by Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven. His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white.
The slave-holder may mock us; the representatives of property, merchandise, vendible commodities, may threaten us; still our duty is imperative; the spirit of the Constitution should be maintained within the exclusive jurisdiction of the government.
The proprietor assured us that his slaves produced him no more than the bare interest of the money invested in their purchase, and that he was a slave-holder not from choice, but because it was the prevailing practice of the country. He said he had two handsome Mulatto girls hired out at the barracks for six dollars per month each. In St.
Pray for him; instruct him; pour light into the darkness of his mind. Let this be done, and the horrible fears which now haunt the slumbers of the slave-holder will depart. Conscience will take down its racks and gibbets, and his soul will be at peace. His lands will no longer disappoint his hopes. Free labor will renovate them.
I have just been reading your letter once more, and the foolish tears pester me so that I can scarce see out of my eyes. I find, dear madam, that you have known a bitter sorrow which so many parents are carrying with them to the grave. Your words make me think so of little graves elsewhere, that I forget for the time that you are a slave-holder.
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