Many persons, who appear to be sensible of the evils of slavery, seem utterly at a loss for some feasible method of abolishing it. “It is here in our midst,” say they, “and how are we to get rid of it?”

To this question we have a plain scriptural answer. “Loose the bands of wickedness,”—“undo the heavy burdens,”—“Let the oppressed go free,”—“break every yoke,”—“proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

Immediate, unconditional, universal emancipation is the only just, the only reasonable and the only possible method of adjusting the slavery question. To this measure the people of the United States must come. A general Jubilee is inevitable. Slavery is an unmitigated wrong. Every element of it is at variance with the happiness of man and the law of God. It is without a single redeeming principle, and hence its destruction—its total annihilation is necessary.

Since the gigantic wrongs of slavery have been so generally made known as somewhat to arouse the public conscience from its long sleep, some writers, anxious to preserve the system, have proposed to reform it. They say, “Slavery, of itself, is a very innocent relation, but its evils are horrible. Let us correct the evils and preserve the system.”

But slavery cannot be reformed, so as to make it a tolerable institution because its essential feature—viz, property in a human being, is, wherever imposed, an outrageous, an insufferable wrong. Who would think of reforming robbery—of making laws to regulate robbers in their trade—and to prevent brutal men from engaging in it? What if it should be enacted by grave senators that none but gentlemen should rob, and that they must do it genteelly—using no unnecessary cruelty or coercion? All the world would laugh such senators to scorn. But slavery is from beginning to end a system of robbery, which it is as impossible to reform, so as to take away its “evils,” as it is to so reform piracy as to destroy its evils, and make it a humane, just and christian trade.

But the American slaves, it is maintained, are not prepared for freedom. This objection is without foundation. God creates men free, and sends them forth into the world with such endowments as are needed in a state of freedom, and as are suited to no other state. To say that a race, which God has created free, is unprepared for freedom is to reproach the Maker. Freedom is the native element of man. And

“Not prepared for freedom?” This has been the watchword of oppressors in all ages. The “people,” the uninformed “masses,” have, in the estimation of tyrants, always been prepared for slavery and injustice of every kind, but never for freedom. And it has ever been their policy to render them less fit for any station or any responsibility in life. They never put forth an effort to prepare their victims for any higher business than obsequious submission to usurped authority. True to this spirit, those who are most noisy about the unfitness of slaves for freedom, are most zealous for the maintenance of those odious laws and usages which shut them out from all chance of mental and moral culture.

And if the slaves are unprepared for freedom, what is to prepare them for it? Their present degradation is owing to slavery, and it is not likely that the continuance of the cause of their degradation will elevate them. Remove the cause, and the effect will cease. Emancipate the colored man, open to him our schools and colleges, place before him motives for action such as animate freemen, and swell the hearts of Christians, give him an opportunity and he will prove himself every whit a MAN. How mean and hypocritical the objection, that slaves are not prepared for freedom, when we employ the whole weight of our laws and prejudices to crush out their manhood, and as far as possible unfit them for any condition except that of working animals.

But thousands of slaves have fled from their oppressors, and, in the midst of the greatest difficulties and embarrassments, have not only proved themselves prepared for freedom, but also to take a position amongst the most cultivated and honored freemen.

The half-free colored people of the United States prove themselves worthy of all the rights of American citizens.

There are now in Canada about 35,000 fugitive slaves; and no people have ever entered upon the possession of freedom under more embarrassing circumstances. They were born in chains. The iron yoke had galled their necks. Their backs had felt the keen lash. In their flight they were pursued by hungry blood-hounds and more hungry marshals.—Naked, broken in spirit, impoverished and uneducated, they reached a cold, ungenial clime. But they were free! And those 35,000 escaped slaves are rapidly improving in wealth, intelligence, and in every social virtue. In the town of Buxton 130 families reside who own a body of 9,000 acres of land. The fugitive slaves of Canada West now own 25,000 acres of land. Were they not prepared for freedom?

Immediate emancipation worked admirably in the British West Indies. The masters were not murdered by the emancipated slaves, as was predicted, but good order reigned everywhere. The liberated people have been rapidly improving in intelligence and wealth.—The terrible wrongs and miseries of slavery are no more. Rev. Mr. Richardson, a missionary in Jamaica, speaking of the moral condition of those islands, says:

“Marriage is much more common than formerly, and the blessings of the family and social relations are much more extensively enjoyed. The Sabbath is also more generally observed. The means of education and religious instruction are better enjoyed, although but little appreciated and improved by the great mass of the people. It is also true, that the moral sense of the people is becoming somewhat enlightened. But while this is true, yet their moral condition is very far from being what it ought to be.

“Our brightest hopes and fondest anticipations must and will centre around the YOUTH of this island. I see the hand of Providence steadily urging onward, with resistless might, the car of Progress. Gaunt Prejudice and grim Superstition gradually give way; Darkness and Error recede before the sunlight of Truth; and even the demon of Lust and the giant Intemperance (twin brothers in Satan’s family) are bereft of their power, and chained for a season. I see intelligence, purity, and piety supplanting ignorance, licentiousness, and irreligion, and this moral waste becoming transformed until it blooms and flourishes as the garden of God.”

“Immediate emancipation?” exclaims a fearful friend, “that will never do! Murder, amalgamation, and many other evils will be inevitable consequences of such a measure. Let us colonize the slaves. Send them back to their own country.” To these objections it may be answered,

1. Colored men are not more inclined to murder than are white men. Africans have the same natural dispositions which distinguish other races.

2. Many masters have emancipated their slaves, and thereby secured their undying affection. Liberated slaves have never turned with bloody hands upon their liberators.

3. In the West India Islands 800,000 slaves were emancipated in one day, and although sixteen years have since elapsed, none of the terrible massacres which were predicted by the opponents of the measure have occurred.

4. This fear of the vengeance of emancipated slaves arises, doubtless, from a guilty conscience—or a feeling that it is richly deserved. A highwayman robs a man, and then says, if I let him go he may have me arrested and punished, therefore I will kill him. Americans say, on the same principle, we have most terribly abused our slaves, and hence, if we let them go they will retaliate, therefore, we must continue the wrong for self preservation!

5. As to amalgamation we have only to say that slavery is an extensive system of forced amalgamation. In the free States this much dreaded evil is of rare occurrence. Immediate emancipation would speedily arrest the very thing here deprecated.

a. The colonization scheme is impracticable. Between three and four millions of people can never be shipped off to Africa. It is impracticable to send even the annual increase of the free colored population. There are in America now about twelve millions of colored people, and there is no power, civil or ecclesiastical, which can carry them away to Africa.[24] A few will go and ought to go as missionaries, but the great and rapidly increasing masses are firmly planted on this continent and here they must remain.

b. Forcible colonization is wrong. Colored people have the same right to live in America that white people have. The Creator made the earth for the habitation of man, and He has never surrendered his ownership of it to any government. The colored man has a right to live in any country on the globe—a right derived from the Creator. Has God said that every race under heaven may have a home in America but the African? Never. It is impertinent as well as wicked for one people to say to another, “you shall not live in this State, nor on this continent.” Such people arrogate to themselves a prerogative which Jehovah only possesses.

c. The present popular scheme of colonization leaves unquestioned the title of the slaveholder, encourages the doctrine that the Bible sanctions the institution, appeals to the basest prejudices of the American people to induce them to countenance the scheme, and encourages the enactment of such laws as now disgrace the statutes of several of the free States, in order, it would seem, to harrass the free colored man until he shall be compelled to flee from the land of his birth to a distant shore for refuge. One who speaks what he knows, says,

“I speak the words of soberness and truth when I say that the most inveterate, the most formidable, the deadliest enemy of the peace, prosperity, and happiness of the colored population of the United States, is that system of African colonization which originated in and is perpetuated by a worldly, Pharaoh-like policy beneath the dignity of a magnanimous and Christian people;—a system which receives much of its vitality from ad captandum appeals to popular prejudices, and to the unholy, groveling passions of the canaille;—a system that interposes every possible obstacle in the way of the improvement and elevation of the colored man in the land of his birth;—that instigates the enactment of laws whose design and tendency are obviously to annoy him, to make him feel, while at home, that he is a stranger and a pilgrim—nay more,—to make him ‘wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked;’—to make him ‘a hissing and a by-word,’ ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ throughout the American Union;—a system that is so irreconcilably opposed to the purpose of God in making ‘of one blood all nations for to dwell on all the face of the earth,’ that when the dying slaveholder, under the lashes of a guilty conscience, would give to his slaves unqualified freedom, it wickedly interposes, and persuades him that ‘to do justly and love mercy’ would be to inflict an irreparable injury upon the community, and that to do his duty to God and his fellow-creatures, under the circumstances, he should bequeath to his surviving slaves the cruel alternative of either expatriation to a far-off, pestilential clime, with the prospect of a premature death, or perpetual slavery, with its untold horrors, in his native land.”—Watkins.

Many objections are offered against immediate emancipation, but they are evidently mere excuses. This may be laid down as a safe rule: Offer no objection to the manumission of slaves which would not satisfy you were you yourselves the slaves to be manumitted. Tried by this reasonable and scriptural rule all apologies, objections and excuses offered for the perpetuation of human bondage, vanish away. There can be no good reason advanced for the continuance of this curse a single year longer. Too long already has it dishonored our churches and our country. Too many souls have been already involved by it in hopeless ruin. Too many generations of slaves have already gone in sorrow and despair down to their graves. Too long has the public conscience been debauched. Justice, humanity and religion with united voice call for immediate emancipation.

If our free institutions are to be preserved they must be released from the folds and the deadly charm of this monster serpent. Freedom cannot flourish in its coils nor survive in its slimy embrace.

Individual and national repentance and reformation only can avert the terrible judgments of an offended God. The cries of the oppressed have gone up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and he will be avenged speedily.

There are not more than one hundred and twenty thousand slaveholders in the United States, and it would be easy for them to settle this whole question in one year or even in a day. Let them simply be honest, be just, obey the Bible, overcome their pride, avarice, prejudices and lusts, and the work will be done. The example of Freeborn Garretson is commended to the special attention of all slaveholders, and especially of those who profess religion. This good man says:

“As I stood with a book in my hand, in the act of giving out a hymn, this thought powerfully struck my mind: ‘It is not right for you to keep your fellow-creatures in bondage; you must let the oppressed go free.’ I knew it to be that same blessed voice which had spoken to me before. Till then I had not suspected that the practice of slave-keeping was wrong; I had not read a book on the subject, nor been told so by any. I paused a minute, and then replied, ‘Lord, the oppressed shall go free.’ And I was as clear of them in my mind, as if I had never owned one. I told them they did not belong to me, and that I did not desire their services without making them a compensation. I was now at liberty to proceed in worship. After singing, I kneeled to pray. Had I the tongue of an angel, I could not fully describe what I felt: all my dejection, and that melancholy gloom which preyed upon me, vanished in a moment, and a divine sweetness ran through my whole frame.

“It was God, not man, that taught me the impropriety of holding slaves: and I shall never be able to praise him enough for it. My very heart has bled, since that, for slaveholders, especially those who made a profession of religion; for I believe it to be a crying sin.”