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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ. BOSTON, APRIL 22, 1845. My Dear Friend: You remember the old fable of "The Man and the Lion," where the lion complained that he should not be so misrepresented "when the lions wrote his- tory." I am glad the time has come when the "lions write history." We have been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest sufficiently satisfied with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the results of such a relation, with- out seeking farther to find whether they have fol- lowed in every instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week, and love to count the lashes on the slave's back, are seldom the "stuff" out of which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I remember that, in 1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India experiment, before they could come into our ranks. Those "results" have come long ago; but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as converts. A man must be dis- posed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,--and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,--before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life. I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of God's children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice done them. Ex- perience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered your A B C, or knew where the "white sails" of the Chesapeake were bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and blighting death which gathers over his soul. |
