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BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

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Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would to-day pour
out a fiery stream of biting ridicule. blasting reproach, withering sarcasm,
and stem rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the
nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the
hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and
man must be proclaimed and denounced.

What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and
cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a
sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness,
swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and
equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and
thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere
bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up
crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on
the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody, than are the people
of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America,
search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by
the side of the every-day practices of this nation, and you will say with me.
that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

THE INTERNAL SLAVE TRADE.

Extract from an Oration, at Rochester Jul 5, 1852

TAKE the American slave trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-senator Benton tells us that the price of men
was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in
no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It
is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy:
and millions are pocketed every year by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states this trade is a chief source of wealth . It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave trade) "the internal slave trade." It is, probably,