[Gutenberg 47050] • The Slavery Question

Pyrrhus Press specializes in bringing books long out of date back to life, allowing today’s readers access to yesterday’s treasures. This is a work written by an abolitionist in the North about the evils of slavery in America before the Civil War. From the preface: “American slavery is a great sin—a complicated iniquity—a gigantic barbarism—and it “is evil, only evil, and that continually.” But the depth of this wickedness is not very frequently sounded, if, indeed it can be sounded. The magnitude of this crime is not often measured, if, indeed it is possible to determine its dimensions. Slavery has narcoticized the consciences of the American people to a most alarming extent. A deep sleep has come over the moral sense, which it would seem cannot be broken by the cries and entreaties of three millions of wretched bondmen. Are we not in imminent danger of being cursed with Pharaoh’s hardness of heart? May we not be visited speedily with judicial blindness such as was inflicted upon the doomed nations and cities of antiquity? The standard of national morality has been degraded to the level of an infamous lower law enacted by scheming political traders. Our national government, in all its departments—Executive, Judicial and Legislative—has been transformed into a pliant tool in the hands of an unscrupulous oligarchy. The powerful American Churches have ceased to be asylums for the oppressed, defenders of the down trodden, uncompromising foes of tyranny, and they have become, on the contrary, the apologists of oppressors, a terror to the oppressed, and the only reliable bulwark of American slavery. The author has aimed to present in the following pages such a discussion of the general subject of slavery.”