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FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND
STROKES FOR FREEDOM

A Series of
ANTI-SLAVERY TRACTS.

of which
HALF A MILLION.
ARE NOW FIRST ISSUED
by the
FRIENDS OF THE NEGRO

Wilson Armistead
'LAY THE AXE TO THE ROOT OF THE CORRUPT TREE."
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LONDON.
W. & E. Cash, 5 Bishopsgate St.
William Tweedie  337 Strand,
and may be had of all 'booksellers.
1858
 

Leeds Anti-slavery Series, No. 2

SLAVERY DESCRIBED BY A NUMBER OF CONGRESS

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" To what depths of degradation can slavery reduce the immortal mind.  It blots out the intellect, and reduces man, created in the image of his God, to the level of the brutes.  In Alabama no one dare teach his slaves to read the Word of God.  It would subject him to punishment in the penitentiary, were he to do it.  Nor need we go to Alabama to find such laws.  If, Sir, you pass over the river (Potomac) lying before our windows, and on its southern bank attempt to kindle in the dormant intellect of a slave the hope of a future life, by teaching him to read the Scriptures, you will be liable to an incarceration in the penitentiary.  Yes, it s regarded as a crime to teach a slave to read the Bible in this Christian land  - this land of Sabbaths, and ministers, and Bibles, and slaves. . . . . . . . What is slavery, and what are its effects?  A gentleman, once a member in the other end of the Capitol, and a slaveholder, of accurate information, some years since stated, that the average life of slaves, after entering the sugar plantations, was only five years, and upon the cotton plantations only seven years.  That is to say, they are driven so hard at labour as to destroy the lives of the whole of them every five and seven years upon an average.  Now is it not as much murder to destroy the life of our fellow-man, by a torture of five or seven years, as it would be to strike him down at a blow?  Yea, is not this prolonged torture a refinement in cruelty?  I have no time to refer to the licentiousness, or indeed to the almost total obliteration of moral sentiment, to be found not only among slaves, but among all slaveholding communities.
     "It is said, and I believe with perfect truth, to be no unusual thing for slaveholders to sell their own children as slaves.  Brothers traffic in the bodies of their fathers, sons, and daughters.  Such crimes have no names.  Well might Wesley denounce slavery as the sum of all villanies; for it is so in fact."


Leeds Anti-slavery Series. No. 2.
Sold by W. and F. G. CASH, 5, Bishopsgate Street, London; and by JANE JOWETT, Friends' Meeting Yard, Leeds, at 1s. 2. per 100.
 

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