There is not a State or Territory in the Union in which you, fellow-citizens, have not an overwhelming majority over the slaveholders; and the majority is probably the greatest in those in which the slaves are the most numerous, because in such they are chiefly concentrated on large plantations.
It has been the policy of the slaveholders to keep entirely out of sight their own numerical inferiority, and to speak and act as if _their_ interests were those of the whole community. They are the nobility of the south, and they find it expedient to forget that there are any commoners. Hence with them slavery is the INSTITUTION of the SOUTH, while it is in fact the institution of only a portion of the people of the south. It is their craft to magnify and extol the importance and advantages of _their_ institution; and hence we are told by Gov. McDuffie, that slavery "is the CORNER STONE of our republican institutions." To defend this corner stone from the assaults of truth and reason, he audaciously proposed to the legislature, that abolitionists should be punished "with death without benefit of clergy." This gentleman, like most demagogues, while professing great zeal for the PEOPLE, whose interests were for the most part adverse to slavery, was in fact looking to his own aggrandizement. He was, at the very time he uttered these absurd and murderous sentiments, a great planter, and his large "force" was said to have raised in 1836, no less than 122,500 lbs. of cotton.[2] In the same spirit, and with the same design, the Report of a Committee of the South Carolina Legislature, made in 1842, speaks of slavery "as an ancient domestic institution, _cherished in the hearts of the people at the south_, the eradication of which would demolish our whole system of policy, domestic, social, and political."
The slaveholders form a powerful landed aristocracy, banded together for the preservation of their own privileges, and ever endeavoring, for obvious reasons, to identify their private interests with the public welfare. Thus have the landed proprietors of England declaimed loudly on the blessings of dear bread, because the corn laws keep up rents and the price of land. The wealth and influence of your aristocracy, together with your own poverty, have led you to look up to them with a reverence bordering on that which is paid to a feudal nobility by their hereditary dependents. Hence it is, that, unconscious of your own power, you have permitted them to assume, as of right, the whole legislation and government of your respective States. We now propose to call your attention to the practical results of that control over _your_ interests, which, by your sufferance, they have so long exercised. We ask you to join us in the inquiry how far you have been benefitted by the care of your guardians, when compared with the people of the North, who have been left to govern themselves. We will pursue this inquiry in the following order: