The Liberator

From the Herald of Freedom.

The Union.

I marvel not that abolitionists have come to the startling conclusion that this reverend, ancient, extolled at home and abroad, yet ungodly, mischievous and tyrannical compact should be forthwith dissolved. Of what abominations and oppressions has it not been guilty? With what crimes, follies and enormities is it not chargeable? Its cruelties would make the tyrants and pirates of by-gone centuries blush, if half the light of truth now blazing on the world, had shown before their eye. The blackest of their guilt is the hypocrisy of this nation. All this wickedness is marked by some most glorious principles, and by the loudest professions of republicanism, democracy, justice and equality. While their sympathies are hypocritically extended to the Polander, they crush, cheat, starve, expatriate and kill the Indian and the Negro, the rightful owners of the soil, and the native subjects of the Government. Under pretences most fair, to suppress the damning traffic in humanity, the nation provides for a perpetual din of auctioneering men, women and children in sight of its legislative halls, and in hearing of scoundrel representatives and senators. Can it be supposed that a true abolitionist would uphold its Constitution or take part in its administration? Never. The moment his eyes rest on the horrid spectacles constantly exhibited in the slave mart, and he learns the anomalous fact that this is the work of the NATION as united by this compact; of whatever character the instrument may be, his language must be, let this 'covenant with death and agreement with hell' be dissolved! Nullification is his doctrine thenceforward, not that he hates the instrument in itself, or, as the Carolinians did, would frighten his opponents into submission to his dictum, but that the purposes the instrument is made to serve are inhuman, cruel, base, diabolical. He may even love and revere the instrument and those who framed it, and fervently pray that sacred to liberty as it has been deemed, admired by the nations of the earth, and worshipped by this people, as it has been, could become the bond of a holier alliance than that between liberty in profession and slavery in practice, as it really is at present. But since that may not be, in the present relations and circumstances of the northern and southern sections of this people, he cannot but pray as fervently that this perdition-dealing 'union' may cease to be.