OCR Text |
Show 80 cordingly, parties and office-seekers wash their hands of abolitionism as if it were treason, and without committing themselves to slavery, protest their innocence of hostility to it. How far they would bow to the slave power, were the success of a great election to depend on soothing it, cannot be foretold, especially since we have seen the party, most jealous of popular rights, surrendering to this power the right of petition. In this state of things the slave-holding interest has the floor of Congress very much to itself. Now and then a man of moral heroism meets it with erect front, and a tone of conscious superiority. But political life does not abound in men of heroic mould. Military heroes may be found in swarms. Thousands die fearlessly on the field of battle, or the field of "honor." But the moral courage, which can stand cold looks, frowns, and contempt, which asks counsel of higher oracles than people or rulers, and cheerfully gives up preferment to a just cause, is rare enough to be canonized. In such a country the tendency to corruption of moral sentiment in regard to slavery, is strong. Many are tempted to acquiescence in it; and of consequence the good man, the friend of humanity and his country, should meet the danger by strong, uncompromising reprobation of this great wrong. I would close this topic with observing, that there 81 is one portion of the community, to which I would especially commend the cause of the enslaved, and the duty of open testimony against this form of oppression ; and that is, our women. To them above all others, slavery should seem an intolerable evil, because its chief victims are women. In their own country, and not very far from them, there are great multitudes of their sex exposed to dishonor, held as property by man, unprotected by law, driven to the field by the overseer, and happy if not consigned to infinitely baser uses, denied the rights of wife and mother, and liable to be stript of husband and child when another's pleasure or interest may so determine. Such is the lot of hundreds of thousands of their sisters ; and is there nothing here to stir up woman's sympathy, nothing for her to remember when she approaches God's throne or opens her heart to her fellow creatures? Woman should talk of the enslaved to her husband, and do what she can to awaken, amongst his ever thronging worldly cares, some manly indignation, some interest in human freedom. She should breathe into her son a deep sense of the wrongs which man inflicts on man, and send him forth from her arms, a friend of the weak ami injured. She should look on her daughter, and shudder at the doom of so many daughters on her own shores. When she meets with woman, she should talk with her of the ten |