Record Data
Transcription
COMPENSATED EMANCIPATION.
A Proposal to pay the robber nine times as much as the robbed–A Convention of Fogies–O, the folly of sinners!
Cornville, (Mo.) Sept. 13, 1857.
DEAR FRIEND GARRISON:
With what deep disgust must every true lover of truth and right feel at the blasphemous doings of the above described Convention! What idea of the principles of right has any man, who offers to a slaveholder who has lived all his life-time in idleness, two hundred and fifty dollars, and then insults the slave by offering him the mere pittance of twenty-five dollars? Insult! Mockery! Shame on the men! God grant they may never hold a second Convention!
Compensated emancipation! The people who met in that Convention see no sin in slavery. They do not look upon the slave as good as the one who calls himself by that unchristian word, master. They look upon the slaveholder as a gentleman, whose pocket must be full of money, while the poor slave must not have more than enough to support himself three months. Akin, of South Carolina, with a thousand slaves, must have the snug little sum of $250,000 in his pocket, while one of his crippled and broken-down slaves is to receive the mighty sum of $25! That was, in my opinion, the most outrageous Convention ever held in this country. Pay the robber–for what? Is slaveholding right? This is the first question to be settled. If slaveholding is right, then we will stop talking about it forever. But if it is a sin, a crime of the deepest dye, then it is certainly a sin to offer to pay the robber to relinquish his grasp upon the throat of his victim. Ye advocates of compensated emancipation, is there to be no repentance for this ‘sum of all villainies’? I wish to know what are your ideas of right and wrong. Afflicted brothers and sisters, groaning to be delivered from your terrible oppression, look not to these men as your helpers, for they are not. You have true friends, who are striking for your deliverance–even against this infernal government–and when it goes down, you shall go free.
Yours for the redemption of man,
S. MITCHELL.