What a wonder, what a shame, what a crime, that in the midst
of the light and progress of the middle of the nineteenth century, such an
abomination and outrage as slavery should be acknowledged to be a legal
institution! Who that reverences law, and would have it bless the world, can
consent that its sanction and support, its honor and holiness be given to such
a compound of robbery and meanness and murder, as is slavery?
Your petitioners pray that your Honorable Bodies request the
representatives and instruct the senators of this State in Congress to treat
the legalization of slavery as an impossibility; and moreover, to insist that
the Federal Constitution shall, like all other laws, be subjected to the strict
rules of legal interpretation, to the end that its anti-slavery character be
thereby seen and established, and all imputations upon that character forever
excluded.
The slave-holder will be strong so long as he can plead law
for his matchless crime. But take from him that plea, and he will be too weak
to continue his grasp upon his victims. It is unreasonable to look for the
peaceful termination of slavery while the North, and especially while
abolitionists of the North, sustain the claim of the South to its
constitutionality. But let the North, and especially the abolitionists of the
North, resist, and expose the absurdity of this claim — and slavery, denied
thereafter all countenance and nourishment from the constitution, will quickly
perish.
Your petitioners will esteem it a great favor if your
Honorable Bodies will consent to hear one or more of them in behalf of the
prayers of their Petition.
January 22, 1850.
SOURCE: Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Gerrit Smith: A
Biography, p. 175-6
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