In breaking the chains which bind the slave, be assured you will be delivering yourselves from a grievous thraldom. Ponder well, we implore you, the following suggestions.
Without your co-operation, the slaveholders, much as they despise you, are powerless. To you they look for agents, and stewards, for overseers, and drivers, and patrols. To you they look for votes to elevate them to office, and to you they too often look for aid to enforce their Lynch laws. Feel then your own power; claim your rights, and exert them for the deliverance of the slave, and consequently for your own happiness and prosperity.
Let then your first demand be for LIBERTY OF SPEECH. Your Constitution and laws guarantee to you this right in the most solemn and explicit terms; and yet you have permitted a few slaveholders to rob you of it. Resume it at once. Be not afraid to speak openly of your wrongs, and of the true cause of them. Dread not the Lynch clubs. Their power depends wholly on opinion. The slaveholders are not strong enough to execute their own sentences, if _you_ resist them. They shrank, in Charleston, from prohibiting the sale of Dickens' Notes, because they believed the people were determined to read them. Had the same curiosity been felt in Petersburg, to read the article on Bible Slavery in Breckenridge's Magazine, the slaveholders there would not have dared to purloin them from the post-office and burn them in the street. In the one place they strained at a gnat, in the other they swallowed a camel. Be assured, your bullies are timid bullies; not that they are wanting in individual courage, but because they are aware that their authority rests, not on their physical strength, but on _your_ habits of deference and obedience. Speak then boldly, and without disguise; and be assured that no sooner will your tongues be loosed on the forbidden subject, than you will be surprised to find what a coincidence of thought exists in relation to it. Discussion once commenced, the enemies of slavery will multiply faster with you than they do elsewhere for the obvious reason, that with you there is no dispute about _facts_. You all know and daily witness the blighting influence of the curse which overspreads your land; and believe us, that just in proportion as your courage rises, will the arrogance of your oppressors sink.