Page:The Natick resolution, or, resistance to slaveholders.djvu/28

26 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, insur-