LETTER TO WM. LLOYD GARRISON,
TOUCHING REBELLION AND INSURRECTION AGAINST SLAVEHOLDERS.
Boston, Dec. 11th, 1859.
Dear Garrison:
I use the words resistance, rebellion, and insurrection, because these alone can truly express those mental, social and moral conditions which God and Humanity enjoin in regard to slaveholders.
Thirty years ago, the soul of this nation was in a condition of cowering subserviency to that power which turns every sixth man, woman and child into "a chattel personal." Reason, conscience, sympathy and will had succumbed, and apparently had lost the capacity to rise in rebellion against it. Insurrection against slave-breeders seemed not only an impossibility, but an immorality; a kind of blasphemy against what was considered a God-ordained and time-honored practice. Slavery was inter-blended with all domestic, social, ecclesiastical, political and commercial relations, and defended by the religious, governmental and military power. Wherever men and women lived, there they embodied a living submission to slaveholders. Resistance, or insurrection against them, in any relation, in thought, feeling, word or deed, was counted a felony against the peace of society, against the Union, and its sovereign power.
Four millions of slaves, this day, are, by reason of the influence that is brought to bear upon them, made to believe and feel that the greatest sin they can commit, the sin most sure to make them liable to the vengeance and lash of their oppressors, and to all "the miseries of this life, to the wrath of God and the pains of hell forever," is that of insurrection and resistance against slaveholders, in thought, word or deed. Their will-power to resist is gone. They have no will of their own! To have a will, a conscience, or an aversion to their enslavement, and to express it in word or deed, instantly subjects them to the lash or the gallows. The will of the tyrant is their only legalized and baptized rule of life.
