Page:The Natick resolution, or, resistance to slaveholders.djvu/25

Rh by repentance and emancipation? Why should you seek to quiet their guilty consciences and awakened terrors?

The masses of the North are in sympathy with Brown and his deeds. In no State is this more true than in that which you represent. In no place in the State is that sympathy more vital than in your own immediate neighborhood; as if your presence there had only tended to kindle the flame and keep it blazing.

Millions in the North rejoice that the slaveholders in Congress bring you and all your associates in politics to this one test,—i.e., Is resistance to slaveholders the right and duty of the slaves and of the North? Will you and your fellow-Republicans help to kill the slaves if they attempt to defend themselves, their wives and children against the rape, rapine, robbery and murder perpetrated on them, daily, by their masters, or will you side with the slaves against the masters? Was John Brown a traitor against God and humanity? Henry Wilson and Charles Sumner will never say he was.

Slaveholders may well turn pale with terror. As Iverson and Mason say, "they sleep on the brink of a volcano." They know they deserve death, on their own showing, at the hands of their slaves. They feel, hourly, their victim's knife at their throats; his dagger at their hearts, and his torch at their dwellings; and their wives and daughters outraged by those whose wives and daughters, mothers and sisters, they themselves have ravished. If they will persist in turning men and women into brutes and chattels, they must abide the results of their inhuman deeds. Their reward is sure and terrible. The bayonets of the North will not much longer defend them. I would that you and your associates in Congress were as true to liberty as the South is to slavery; that you would, in every department of life, as truly embody resistance to slavery, as they do resistance to liberty. Then this "irrepressible conflict" would soon be ended; and the be the only rule of action, in Congress as well as out of it. For the Constitution and the enactments of Congress are but so much blank paper, and will be set at nought as such, when they are opposed to that which enjoins it upon slaves to escape from slavery, and upon the North to incite and help them to escape. If this be trea-