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Selections: Alvan Stewart's Address

Selections: Alvan Stewart's Address image
Parent Issue
Day
1
Month
July
Year
1844
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

The follovving is the concluding portion of an Address to the Liberty men of the United States,' by Alvan Stewart, Chairman of the National Liberty Committee: It is to be hoped our friends will hold conventions to prevent the admission of Texas. Many of the pro-slavery men already admit the country has been laid under a debt of lasting gratitude to the abolitionists for having sounded, for seven years, the tocsin of alarm against this last Leviathan grasp of slavery, If Texas is kept out, it will be owing to the abolitionists - if it comes in, we must use it as a rack with which to dislócate the bones of slavery, in the States. We willnever give up the Union, Texas inorout. We hold to the Union under all circumstances, and to its entire purification from slavery. This glorious country is not to be computed by dollars, nor any known power cfnumbers. I would bequeath the antislavery battle against slaveholders as an inheritance to my children's children, as one infinitely more glorious and honorable to them, though their hands might be stiffened in earning honest poverty's frugal nieal, than to give them palaces óf marble, built by the unpaid slave, or domains ampie as Esterhazy's cultivated by the unrewarded sinews of soribw's sons. No matter if mountains bestride our path, we will perfórate, where we cannot go over or around. We have eternal justice as our ally, the world for our endorser, and the Almighty God as the captain of our salvation; and long before we have wandered half of forty years in the wilderness of conflict, the emancipated of Georgia, Virginia and Florida shall shout and sing the Freeman's song, in which the disenthralled of Tennessee, Louisiana and Texas shal join in chorus, "We all are free." May the fifty-seven thousand men who stood up in 1843 as the vanguard of the Great Liberty Army, be found faithful in 1844 and unto death, and no one be discovered in the Presidential contest lying a mortal corpse on the field with a Clay or Polk bullet in his back, by which he feil fleeingas a coward from the high positionoflast year to those base redoubts, a United States Bank, a Sub-Treasury, Free Trade or a Tariff. Every Liberty man living, who voted our ticket last year, should be visited, and his name and residence in the city or town entered in a book before the lst of August, and he should agree to distribute 20 tracts a week, until November next, and each man should promise to employ his entire power to make one convert at least, and see that he attends and votes the Libty ticket this fall. A little attention by way of tracts, papers and conversation by one man with another, will effect this most desirable result. For let it be remembered that the present Presidential contest between the great slaveholders, Clay and Polk, and their apologists, will be a contest of official expectants, rather than of the people. The people are not and cannot be moved by this surface-yell of hungry expectants. Neither party want a bank of the United States; neitber party dare disturb this Tariff, as the one in the ascendant will want the revenue it yields. Let no man be content in holding what we have acquired. We cannot do it. We must go forward or recede, gain or lose - it is impossible to remain stationary. No Presidential election can occur with greater advantages placed at our disposal. One of the candidates is a talented ga?nbler, duellist and slaveholder, and how does the other differ? The State Committee should cali a Convention in each State forthwith for organization, not to listen to long speeches to prove s'avery a sin, but to cut the State into sections and send a man with a loaded waggon of tracts into each section. Let him go from county seat to county seat, or such places as may be designated, and deliver such an amount as may be requircd for each county to the delegates assembled, who might raise a sum equal to the expense for their county, and take home the tracts, and thcn that same week look out persons, men and women, who would make it their entire business to visit the and through them, put each family in the town in possession of a tract before Saturday night. For it cannot be denied that the impediment to the tract cause is lack of systematic energy in the distribution. Many think they have done their dutywhen they have bought a few hundred tracts to rot on their shelves. Let nothing be consideréd as done until distribution is complete, and never let three days pass with undistributed tracts in your hoose. Let this tract distribution be repeated each month. A gain: the mosí proñtable meeting i the- - neighborhood meeting, the school house meeting to discuss slavery, and form trat associations. Encourage young men and boys to speak on this question. I would also respectfully suggest that every tract association should provide themselves vrith a variety of Anti-Slavery Hymns and Liberty Songs. Encourage all who can sing, to possess themselres with thi spirit-stirring melody. One Liberty song sung efficiently, will do more to prepare the heart for our Divine principies, than the most splendid oration, or the most compact argument. Oneofthegreatest mistakes y et indulged in, is the supposition, that wo can carry thís cause for the Liberty party, and yet continue to bestow our votes on the pro-slavery parties for the tovvn offices. Never, never, was committed so deplorable a mistake. We never can conquer in the County, State, or Nation, until the Liberty Party controls the town power. Liberty men must fill the tówn offices, or political action be abandoned. Give us the town power and the nation is conquered. The town power is tho power from which all other comes. How absurd for a Liberty man to vote for a proslavery constable who does not make a distinction between a man and a hog, as a matter of property. Do vote if you have to go seven miles in the rain alone to do it. Your vote, righteously given, is never lost - ii ia recorded in Heaven as vell ason earth, and each vote given is a part of the grand mass of means which will strike the last fetter from the last slave. If you refuse to go seven miles in the rain this year, to cast your solitary vote, you, as far as you are concerned, defer the slave's redemption, and suffer him to groan another year in his chains. For we have power to set the slaves free in the States as well as the District and Territories - and the responsibility of the voter is im mense. Do not listen to that man who says rote with me for Clay this year, and I wil vote with you hereafter; for if you fall into this snare, you are probably both undone and will be left in a blind and repróbate state to groupe your way to life's end, anc on a death bed be for the first time made consciousthat in that proslaveryvote, you sent the representative of Christ to the dungeon and made his wife desolate, am his children orphans - yea, you continuec them slaves. From such a death-bec "good Lord deliver us." Attend the polls, distribute votes aa a high religious duty - it ia a part of the mass of means by which the prison doors shall be broken openBe careful not to credit the slanders o the candidates of the Liberty party which will be put afloat by wicked pro-slavery men. Remember our own friends mus best understand the characters of the can didates they nomínate. Do hot refuse to vote the candidates of the Liberty Party unlesa you know them corrupt, incapable and false to human rights. Remember the best are imperfect. May we not for get we beiong to a party which does no malee a choice between sins, or two evils between a horse-thief and a sheep-thief We choose neilher, bat select an hones man, and leave the responsibility on these who choose the least of two villains, mal treating themselves and their country. - For those whö adopt that coürse, will al ways find themselves in the same strait of choosing between two things they profesa to hate, while we vote for what we love, and ihis is our real election and our choice. Slaveholders protrude the old monster's head and horns on every public question, and in relation to each candidate and appointmenf. The North cannot stand it five years longer, in Church or State, to have that offensive picture of deformity held up for their approbation. - Slavery has been digging its own grave for 10 years, and will fall into it sooner than we expect, to the great joy of the civilized world.

Article

Subjects
Signal of Liberty
Old News