The North Star (Rochester)/1847/12/03/The Fourteenth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar
THE FOURTEENTH
NATIONAL ANTI-SLAVERY BAZAAR,
To be held in Boston during Christmas and New Year's Week, 1847–8.
The undersigned, the Committee of the Fourteenth National Anti-Slavery Bazaar, appeal to all that is good and true in this nation for which they labor, to aid their undertaking.
Our object is the abolition of slavery, through the renovation of public opinion; and we ask help of all who feel compassion for a suffering people, or the instinct of self-preservation in view of the encroachments of tyranny and the dangers of sin; or the divine and awful sense of justice, moving them to uphold the right; or the high sense of honor and religious obligation, impelling them to choose their lot in this life with the slaves, and not with their oppressors; or shame beneath the scorn of Christendom, justly due to a nation of slaveholders; or disgust at the discrepancy between American principle and American practice; or responsibility for keeping pure the sources of public morals; or desire to lay deep in the national conscience the foundations of future generations.
After a deep and careful examination of ways and means for the peaceable abolition of slavery, it has been found hopeless, except through the consent of the majority of the whole people. This obtained, the work is done; for the willing can readily find a way. Sound judgment on the choice of means, and the best economy in their expenditure, alike forbid us, therefore, to enter into the partisan or sectarian schemes, by which the purposes of any one of the various political and theological persuasions will be subserved at the expense of the cause of Freedom, while all others are alienated from it in the same proportions. When the preliminary question is put, which every one ought to ask,—"How do you mean to expand the money, which you require our help to raise?"—our answer is, It shall be spent wholly and directly in awakening, informing and influencing the public mind on this primarily important question. It shall not be put into the hands of any of the political organizations, to promote the election of any candidate, but be made to awaken the love of freedom and the hatred of slavery in all: not in aiding a few fugitives to escape, but to save them that painful and hazardous experiment, by abolishing the system which enslaves them; not in sending them to Africa, but in enabling them to become the free and happy elements of national strength and prosperity at home; not in making the proposition, in degrading to the morals of our nation, that the government should become the tributary of this wrong, but in efforts for such an elevation of national character as shall brand it—crime.
This money will in short, be spent neither in compensation, colonization, nor political partisanship; while a clear-sighted economy will also forbid its being used in the equally benevolent, though less effectual channel of a vigilance committee. It will he spent in propagandism; for we strike openly, boldly, strongly, and successfully too, as our fourteen years of labor prove, as the root of the system we mean to abolish.
Finally, we appeal to our friends and countrymen to take part in this holy cause, as to frail and suffering and short-lived fellow-creatures. It shall strengthen them in weakness, comfort in affliction, and steel against calamity. It shall save them from the sin of living on the side of the oppressor, and the ignominy of dying in the silent support of wrong. It shall secure their children from such an inheritance of grief and shame, as the remembrance that their parents were drawn by disgraceful sympathy into the ranks of the enslavers, when the moral battle was fought out in the United States for the freedom of the race. Its consolations are proportionate to its renunciations; and in its prosecution, as in the great cause of Christianity, of which its principles form a fundamental part, we are able to assure such as embrace it, that no man shall lose friends, or houses, or lands, for its sake, but he shall receive an hundred-fold of nobler recompense in this world. and a sense of spiritual life besides, to which the indifferent frivolities of spiritual existence sink into insignificance.
By the united efforts of all who ought to co-operate on this occasion, it is proposed to place TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS at the ultimate disposal of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN,
ANN T. GREENE PHILLIPS,
HELEN E. GARRISON,
MARY MAY,
ELIZA LEE FOLLEN,
HENRIETTA SARGENT,
SARAH SHAW RUSSELL,
SARAH BLAKE SHAW,
MARY GRAY CHAPMAN,
LOUISA LORING,
CATHERINE SARGENT,
CAROLINE WESTON,
HANNAH TUFTS,
MARY YOUNG,
ELIZA K. MERIAM,
MARY WILLEY,
CAROLINE F. WILLIAMS,
SUSAN C. CABOT,
ANNE WARREN WESTON,
EVELINA S. A. SMITH,
ABBY SOUTHWICK,
MARIA LOWELL,
SARAH H. SOUTHWICK,
FRANCES MARY ROBBINS,
ANN R. BRAMHALL,
LYDIA PARKER,
HARRIET T. WHITE,
HARRIET B. HALL,
ABBY FRANCIS,
HARRIET M. JACKSON,
ANNA R. PIHLBRICK.