The Natick Resolution; or, Resistance to Slaveholders/Letter to WM. Lloyd Garrison
LETTER TO WM. LLOYD GARRISON,
TOUCHING REBELLION AND INSURRECTION AGAINST SLAVEHOLDERS.
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.
Thirty years ago, the entire North, in its domestic, social, religious, political, commercial and military life, was in the same state of abject subserviency to slaveholders. The people seemed not only to have lost the power to resist them, but actually to feel honored that slave-breeders and slave-catchers counted them worthy to do their work of shame and infamy. The very life of their souls to resist seemed to have become extinct. So far as insurrection against them was concerned, the nation was dead and buried in an ignominious grave of servile submission.
You, in 1830, sounded the tocsin of insurrection and revolution against slaveholders, and all that sustains them. In the name of God and Humanity, you proclaimed war against the nation's protected and colossal crime. You said that you would be heard; that you would not yield; that you would never turn back; that you or slavery must die. You struck for immediate, unconditional abolition. What was the first work to be done? To arouse the people of the North, and place them in an attitude of insurrection against slaveholders, in thought, feeling, word, and deed; to incite them to irreconcilable hostility to "the highest kind of theft, i.e., man-stealing," and to the injustice, robbery, rape and rapine inherent in slavery. The reason, conscience, moral and social nature and will of the North were to be quickened and brought into a state of inexorable, undying rebellion against slaveholders, as such. The people of the North, in the family and social circle, in the church, at the ballot-box, in the market, and in all places where they think it their right and duty to live, were to be made to regard and treat slaveholders as they do burglars, thieves, robbers, murderers, midnight assassins, and ravishers of helpless innocence, and to feel that, as such, they have no right to breathe God's air, to see his light, or to live in his universe; that, as slaveholders, they have no rights which any man is bound to respect. This was the first work to be done. By appeals to reason, conscience, pity, and sympathy, made through the press and the living lecturer and speaker, despite the efforts of the Church and State to lull their souls to quietness, life was infused into multitudes in behalf of the slave.
You called on the people of the North to gird on the armor of God against slaveholders. Resistance, rebellion, insurrection against them, and all that sustains them, in sentiment, in principle, in spirit, word and deed, was the watchword of the Anti-Slavery Movement. Insurrection was couched in the very name by which the enterprise was christened, i.e., Anti-Slavery. An Anti-Slavery soul, and an Anti-Slavery life, were to be created in the North; which meant a soul and a life, an interior and exterior life, rebellious and insurrectionary against slaveholders. The souls of the Northern people were to be aroused to cease to side with the oppressors against the oppressed, (as they had ever done,) and to yield up reason and conscience, and all their sympathy, and all their powers of soul and body, to the slaves against their enslavers. Two positions were established: (1) That it is the right and duty of the enslaved and the free to resist all attempts to hold and use human beings as chattels. (2) That it is our right and duty to use all such means to free the slaves as we would use to free ourselves, if we were slaves.
These two positions were, and have been to this day, maintained by you, by Adin Ballou, by Wendell Phillips, and by all Abolitionists. "Incite the slaves to escape from slavery, and defend them against the rape, rapine, and atrocities of those who would enslave them, by the same weapons with which you would defend yourselves, your wives and children. Resist slave-catchers, in behalf of the black slaves, by the same means that you would use in behalf of white slaves." This has been the uniform teaching of Abolitionists from the beginning. Every paper, every letter, every speech, every prayer, every exhortation, has been designed to bring the souls of the people into a state of insurrection against slaveholders, and an argument to induce them to use all such means as they would use, or wish others to use, for their own protection.
As to armed or military resistance to slaveholders, or to any evil-doers, my soul has ever resisted it, and ever must, as inexpedient, unjust and inhuman. Life or liberty can never be protected by killing men. Man-killing is the basis of man-stealing. Human liberty can never be made sacred by the taking of human life. Respect for liberty can never result from contempt for life. Liberty will be safe, only as life is reverenced. The inviolability of life is the only foundation of absolute safety to liberty.
Such has been my cherished conviction for thirty years, as it has been yours. It is because human governments are founded on the right to kill men, in violence and murder, and on that revengeful doctrine of "blood for blood," that I have never taken any part in their administration, by voting, or otherwise. I have no more respect for the authority of the General or State governments, than for that of the wolf or hyena. To me, they are all, as now constituted, but "covenants with Death, and agreements with hell." These governments, in their essential spirit, principles and practices, are a deliberate and formal rejection of those sacred and only truths that are absolutely conservative of "Life, Liberty and Happiness," i.e.,—"Love your enemies," "Forgive as you would be forgiven," "Return to no man evil for evil, but overcome evil with good." They all ignore the spirit and life of the Martyr of Calvary. And the one deep anguish of my heart, as I look on the martyr of Harper's Ferry, is, that his hands, ever so faithful to lib- to liberty, are stained with a brother's blood.
But while this is "the way, the truth and the life" to me, ninety and nine out of every hundred of the enslaved and enslavers, North and South, politicians and priests, in their own defence, insist that armed resistance to slaveholders is obedience to God; and that it is the right and duty of the enslaved to defend themselves, their wives and daughters, against the cruelties, the rape and rapine of their enslavers, by arms and blood; and to kill, slay and destroy all who invade their homes, to drag the objects of their affection to the auction-block, to be sold like brutes. In their own case, they hold that, if they were slaves, it would be the right and duty of John Brown, and of all freemen, to help them to insurrection. I hold them responsible to their own accepted laws of life, to use the same means to defend the Southern slaves, and their wives and children, which they would use, or wish others to use, to defend themselves. I would say to the people of the North: "Go, incite slaves to run away, and guide them on their way to Canada, as John Brown proposed to do; and if slaveholders or their ecclesiastical and political minions attempt to oppose them, and to re-enslave them, defend them, as Brown proposed to do, by the same weapons you would use were you, and your wives and children, the fugitives. Rouse the slaves to rebellion and insurrection, and put into their hands only such weapons as you would use in your own behalf, were you insurgent slaves. If you deem it wrong to use deadly weapons to defend yourselves, do not defend the slaves in that way; but if you would deem the torch and sabre justifiable means of insurrection in your own behalf, were you slaves, use the same in behalf of Southern slaves."
But the people of the North have been in sympathy with, and have plighted their faith and their power to, the enslavers, rather than the enslaved. While, in every possible way, from the pulpit, the platform, the press, they proclaimed armed resistance and armed insurrection against slaveholders as the right and duty of all white people, they have urged a meek, humble, unreasoning, uncomplaining and abject submission on the part of the black slaves. The white slaveholders perpetrate robbery, rape and rapine upon black slaves and their wives and daughters, and if the black slaves strike those white ravishers dead, Edward Everett, and the nation, sustain these Christian and Anglo-Saxon man-stealers in their "midnight and merciless atrocities, and their abominations, not to be named by Christian lips to Christian ears," and hang and shoot the outraged slaves for resisting them. But, if the black slaves return to these white plunderers and ravishers of their homes, according to their deeds, instantly Edward Everett begins to talk of "midnight burnings, wholesale massacres, merciless tortures, and deeds too unutterably atrocious for the English language." Before God and eternal justice and truth, whatever it is right for the white enslavers to do to black slaves and their wives, daughters, mothers and sisters, it is right for black slaves to do to their white enslavers and their wives, daughters, mothers and sisters. Whatever the people of the North would help the white slaveholders to do to their black slaves, they should, and will, one day, help the black slaves to do to the white slaveholders.
Let the North cut loose from their bloody alliance with slaveholders, imitate John Brown, and form a league of offence and defence with the slaves against their enslavers. Let them do in defence of freedom to the slaves whatever they would do in defence of their own freedom. Let the North use all their power to give liberty to the slaves, which they would use to secure freedom to themselves. If they would use the torch and sabre to obtain and secure freedom to themselves, let them use the same weapons to give freedom to the slaves of Virginia.
Now they are politically, not morally, bound to aid slaveholders in their unprovoked, inhuman and murderous assault upon the slaves and their defenceless wives and children, and to shoot down the slaves if they attempt resistance or insurrection. Let them from this hour make an everlasting covenant with the slaves and the slaves' God, to incite and aid them to rebellion against man-stealers; and incite them to insurrection, and defend them against all who would crush them back into slavery, by all such means as they would use to defend themselves. This is what God and Humanity demand of every man and woman in the North, and in the world.
Subjection to an outward, arbitrary authority is the basis of chattel slavery, and of all oppression. The power of the Church and State, the consuming wrath, the lash, the bowie-knife, the revolver, the rifle and bloodhound of slaveholders, and their allies, and the vengeance and terror of an Almighty God, are brought to bear on the ignorant, cowering slaves, to crush out the last vestige of their manhood, and bring them into an unresisting, unreasoning, humble submission to that arbitrary, bloody power that enslaves them. The souls of the slaves fall prostrate, having no will of their own, and deeming every rebellion, insurrectionary thought and feeling, a crime deserving scourging and death, and eternal banishment from God and heaven. The mission of anti-slavery is to inspire them with rebellious thoughts and feelings, and incite them to insurrectionary words and deeds (not deeds of violence and blood) against their inhuman and godless masters.
So that same power of Church and State, the fierce wrath and threatened vengeance of slave-breeders, and the entire power of the government and religion of the nation, and the terrors of death, judgment and eternity, have been brought to bear on the people of the North, to compel them into humble subserviency to the Slave Power. You and your coadjutors have long labored to incite the cowering and crushed souls of the people of the North to a living, practical insurrection against that power; to arouse them to thoughts and feelings, to words and deeds of undying hostility against all constitutions and bibles, all religions and governments, and all men and women, that enslave human beings, or that teach submission on the part of slaves to the power that enslaves them.
The prestige of the words "rebellion" and "insurrection," "rebel" and "insurgent," "treason" and "traitor," for purposes of oppression, as a means to palsy and cower the soul into subserviency to slaveholders, and to constitutions, laws, bibles and religions that sustain them, was fast disappearing before the anti-slavery movement. The gallows and blood of Brown have about dissolved the charm altogether. Rebellion, insurrection and treason against slaveholders, and every authority and influence that sustains them, are fast coming to be expressive of our highest allegiance to God and Humanity. They are coming to be consecrated and holy words, and significant only of justice, honor, fidelity, love, and of whatever is beautiful, grand and heroic in human nature.
The whole power of the Church is wielded to overawe the souls of the people, and bring them submissively and abjectly to yield to the authority of their creed, and without one resisting or rebellious thought or feeling to do its behests, however inhuman they may be, even to turning men and women into chattels, or hanging them on a gallows. The Bible, the only authority in religious faith and practice, and insurrection against it a sin unto eternal death—this is the sentiment and history of the American Church.
The power of the Union and General Government, and of the politics and military of the country, is brought to bear to subject the people to the authority of their Constitution, their political creed; and rebellion, insurrection, treason against that in thought, feeling, word or deed, is counted the sin of sins, and to be expiated only on the gallows; the Constitution the only authority in social, commercial, civil and political life; and resistance and treason against it a sin unto death! For resisting that authority, by attempting to give freedom to those who by it were pronounced slaves, John Brown is hung, and a national gallows awaits all who have enough justice, humanity and piety to imitate him.
Edward Everett dooms slaves to death, who dare to resist the "midnight and merciless atrocities, the wholesale murders, and the abominations not to be spoken by Christian lips to Christian ears," that are perpetrated upon them and their wives and children by Christian hands; that pimp and pander to the lusts of slave-breeders, glorifies them for committing those atrocities, "too unutterable for the English language," upon the slaves and their helpless families, but hangs the slaves and their friends who incite and aid them to resistance and defence!
Abject, humble, uncomplaining submission to external, arbitrary authority, is the law and gospel of Church and State; even when that authority counts manhood and womanhood, female virtue, conjugal fidelity, the purity of marriage, and the sanctity of parentage, crimes punishable with death.
God and Humanity call the slaves of the South and the people of the North to insurrection and treason against a power so Satanic in spirit, and so rapacious, so libidinous, so malignant and murderous in practice. Insurrection of soul against slaveholders, the right and duty of slaves and of the North—this is the first step; then, the means of resistance are to be such, only, as we would use in our own behalf, were we slaves.
The slaveholders have hung John Brown. Let them be assured there are tens of thousands of John Browns now hovering on the confines of slavery, ready to enter in and scatter themselves all over the South, to incite slaves to insurrection against their masters, and to guide them on their way to Canada, bidding defiance to slaveholders, and all slaveholding and slave-catching constitutions and laws; being ready to meet the alternative of a slaveholder's gallows. That instrument of torture has lost its terrors. It is the right and duty of slaves to gain and defend their freedom. It is the right and duty of the people of the North to incite and help them to freedom. This is becoming a paramount duty in the estimation of thousands, and no terrors of the slaveholder's wrath and vengeance will prevent them from doing it.