Ο ADDRESS, DELIVERED ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1836, AT PINE STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, IN THE MORNING, AND AT SALEM, IN THE AFTERNOON. [BY REQUEST OF THE FRIENDS TO THE IMMEDIATE ABOLITION OF SLAVERY.] BY CHARLES FITCH, BOSTON: 46, WASHINGTON STREET. ADDRESS. "WE HOLD IT TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT GOD HAS CREATED ALL MEN EQUAL, AND ENDOWED THEM WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS, AND THAT AMONG THESE RIGHTS, ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.' That is my text-and if ever one sentence was written in the English language, which expresses more than any other, the true spirit of those who would abolish slavery throughout the world, it seems to me to be this. It comprises just everything for which abolitionists contend. It covers the whole ground, and reaches the farthest possible extent of all their avowed principles, and of all the measures which they contemplate, or which they desire to see used, for the deliverance of their fellow-men who are held in chains. Nothing ever was said, nothing ever was written, which aimed more directly to the entire and eternal destruction of the institution of slavery than this. You might gather up all the anti-slavery papers and books, under which our Post Masters and Southern mail carriers have groaned so piteously; and at which Southern slaveholders have uttered such cries of distress; and add to them all the speeches of George Thompson on both sides of the Atlantic; and all the fire and fury of William Lloyd Garrison; with every published number of the Liberator, and Emancipator, and New York Evangelist; and every sentence that has ever been uttered by the whole company of fugitives from the Lane Seminary; and every thing that ever has been or ever will be said by J. G. Birney, in his Philanthropist ; and all the speeches of Gerrit Smith, since his conversion; in short, every thing that has ever been said, or written, or thought, by any man or woman that has dared open a mouth, or peep, on the subject of immediate emancipation, and steep them all together, and if you please, pass them all through deacon Giles' distillery, by his very best set of hands; and you will not be able to extract from them, by any process or system of torture, any more direct, thorough-going, unshrinking abolitionism than is here brought to view. Just let the principles contained in this one sentence, prevail throughout the world, and slavery is dead, and buried, and consumed, and its dust scattered to the winds. Just listen to it, We hold it to be self-evident, that God has created all men equal, and endowed them with certain unalienable rights, and that among these rights, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Excellent-just the thing for which the abolitionist pleads, and is just every thing he asks. Let the light of that single sentence go over the land, and shine on every mind, and warm every heart, and slavery with its lengthened train of concomitant evils, would take fire and be consumed. But who dared utter such a sentence? Did it fall from the lips of some hair-brained young man; some beardless advocate of the incendiary doctrine, that men ought to do right, and risk the consequences? Not at all. It was deliberately discussed, and at length declared, by solemn vote of a company of cool grey-heads, met in council, to assert their own rights and the rights of their country, in the ears of the world. It is a part, in short, of the Declaration of American Independence -that glorious instrument, which has been read by a thousand voices, in the ears of listening multitudes, every Fourth of July, for the last fifty years. The glorious Declaration of American Independence, of which every citizen of these United States has been so proud, contains this very sentence. It even stands at the head of it, as the starting point, the grand reason of all the toils and sufferings of our fathers, to throw off what they regarded as the yoke of oppression. This bold and fearless declaration of the equal rights of men, stands imprinted upon the escutcheon of our country, in letters which the world may read. Yet while we present it to the eyes of all mankind, and make it our glory to urge it upon their attention, as the grand principle, the standing rule by which we are determined to live, and in defence of which we mean to die, we bind two and a half millions of our fellow-men in chains. We declare that they have been created with rights equal to ours, that our Maker endowed them with the same rich inheritance which he has given us; and then we strip them of all their rights, and make them, so far as we can do it, beasts, instead of men. We declare, that liberty and the pursuit of happiness belong to them inalienably, as the gift of God, and then we put a yoke on their neck, a fetter on their heel, and apply the scourge to their back, and wrench from them the fruit of all their toil. Such is America, in the eye of the world. Were I to draw a picture of the exact attitude in which our country stands before the nations of the earth; I would show you a man standing erect, his head uplifted as if conscious of much dignity and self-importance, wearing a crown of large dimensions, on which should be emblazoned, in letters of gold, |