The Americans / By an American in London.

  • Calvin Colton
Date:
1833
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The Americans / By an American in London. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    386/412 page 370
    APPENDIX. agencies of the American Colonization Society, slavery in the United States, situated as it is, might have slept in re- pose, till its own violent irruptions had desolated the regions contaminated by the crime. It is little to the purpose to declaim about the inconsistency of slavery with republi- can institutions. All the world knows it is inconsistent. But the crime is not chargeable upon the free States. They have no power over it; and there is no sympathy between them and the Slave States in this particular. For ourselves personally, we acknowledge, that it is a scandal and an insult to humanity for the Slave States to take the Declaration of American Independence into their lips, while they hold a fellow-creature in bondage; and we have no patience with such pretensions. But slavery is there, in such circumstances; and it is very unfair to charge the whole American Union with the crime. It is speaking without knowledge, to impeach the American Colonization Society, as participating in this crime, and perpetuating its guilt, when in fact it is the only possible national expedient of operating against slavery—the only medium, through which the public mind can act for the ultimate extinction of the evil ;—and when, too, all the virtue ot the community is combining and concentrating its energies, through this organization, to wipe away the stain with the sin. The Colony of Liberia, on which so much declamation has been spent, as if it were made a receptacle to relieve the United States of their superfluity of blacks, to make the remainder more valuable as slaves—is a mere acci- dent. It is so in fact. Although it has sometimes been called a drain, it counts nothing as such ; nor is there any present prospect that it ever will. What are two or three thousand, the present population of that colony— or even scores of thousands, if the emigration should ever equal that—compared with the tiro millions and half, that still remain, rapidly increasing ? Liberia is a small
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