Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845 Page: 31 of 56
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31
tentiary; and also the scarcely less legitimate code of Lynch
laws, and the mobs, riots, and murders, which all have learned
to consider as the characteristic resort and main reliance of
slavery. And to go only one step further with the bare
enumeration of topics, I might ask you if you do not begin
to think and feel how much in another way we are yet
to have to do with slavery, when you are accosted by the
fugitives, - men, women, and children, -who, in such increasing
numbers, are presenting themselves amongst us as
the meritorious objects of our Christian sympathy and aid;
who already in their settlements, with a population of twenty
thousand souls, upon the Canada border, and in their smaller
communities in our midst, doing for themselves in every
way far better than we should expect of them, still look to
us for aid in building their schoolhouses and churches, and
in supplying many unavoidable wants, and must not look in
vain.
But slavery, it is said, with all its political pretensions
and exactions, with all its corrupting social and moral influences,
must necessarily be short-lived; and it is the argument
for our endurance of it that it will soon be defunct.
Experience, indeed, does not confirm the theory; the slave
population rapidly increases, and never, during the existence
of the federal government, has the system exhibited so
much vigor, or made such sudden progress, as within a recent
period. But, we are told, it will soon die out, at least
in the old Slave States, especially in the grain-growing States,
where it can no longer sustain a competition with the free
labor now operating with so many facilities in all the Free
States around them. Upon this point, I admit, that, if Slave.
holding States could be assimilated to manufacturing corporations,
and might be placed under the management of
shrewd Yankee directors, intent only upon pecuniary profits,
and if the proposition were merely to discharge and send
off one set of operatives when another could be obtained
of greater efficiency and on better terms, the abolition of
slavery might be easily effected, and would be a matter of
course. Bnt there is no parallel between the two cases;
Slave-holding States are any thing rather than associations
based upon the application of skill and the employment of
industry; shrewd Yankee directors, or a class of leading
citizens of such a character, can never be found in them;
and the operatives cannot be exchanged, while their employers
remain with them. There is no parallel between
the cases; and they who propose to get rid of slavery by
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Phillips, Stephen C. Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845, book, January 1, 1845; Boston. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth2361/m1/31/: accessed April 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.