Page:The Natick resolution, or, resistance to slaveholders.djvu/31

Rh 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 3*