The rehabilitation of the African slave-trade is seriously proposed
and will be furiously urged, and nothing can hinder its accomplishment
but its interference with the domestic manufactures of the breeding
Slave States. The pirate Walker is already mustering his forces for
another incursion into Nicaragua, and rumors are rife that General
Houston designs wresting yet another Texas from Mexico. Mighty events
are at hand, even at the door; and the mission of them all will be to
fix Slavery firmly and forever on the throne of this nation.
Is the success of this conspiracy to be final and eternal? Are the
States which name themselves, in simplicity or in irony, the Free
States, to be always the satrapies of a central power like this? Are
we forever to submit to be cheated out of our national rights by an
oligarchy as despicable as it is detestable, because it clothes itself
in the forms of democracy, and allows us the ceremonies of choice, the
name of power, and the permission to register the edicts of the
sovereign? We, who broke the sceptre of King George, and set our feet
on the supremacy of the British Parliament, surrender ourselves, bound
hand and foot in bonds of our own weaving, into the hands of the
slaveholding Philistines! We, who scorned the rule of the aristocracy
of English acres, submit without a murmur, or with an ineffectual
resistance, to the aristocracy of American flesh and blood! Is our
spirit effectually broken? is the brand of meanness and compromise
burnt in uneffaceably upon our souls? and are we never to be roused,
by any indignities, to fervent resentment and effectual resistance?
The answer to these grave questions lies with ourselves alone.
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