An appeal to the people of the North. Page: 4 of 16
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[4]
Platform. That Resolution, the last to be adopted, was made the lead-
ing watch-word in an excited and heated political canvass, and it went
forth as a vital principle in an ad captandum creed, to still further
heat and excite the popular mind, and poison and alienate the popular
feelings of the North against the Constitutional rights and the domes-
tic institutions of the South. That Resolution declares, "that all men
are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain ina-
lienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness." And what rights are these, which this Resolution con-
tends for? The Northern Republicans surely do not mean that they
themselves do not already possess and enjoy the rights of liberty and
the pursuit of happiness? For whom, then, do they demand these
rights? The whole spirit of their platform, outside of the ordinary
questions of political economy, relates solely to the protection of "South-
ern servants" against all control as property; and there is no meaning
and no application in the Resolution, unless the Convention meant to
say that the Southern bondman was created equal to his Southern master,
and "HAD AN INALIENABLE RIGHT TO HIS LIBERTY AND HIS FREEDOM."
THIS, at least, is the construction which the South placed upon the
Resolution, and the North has never denied the correctness of that
interpretation. Thus for month after month, has the South felt, and
grieved in the heart under the painful conviction, that this noble aph-
orism, which inspired our Revolutionary fathers to assert their rights
and to fight for them against the oppressions and tyranny of their
mother country was wrested from the Declaration of Independence,
to be thus used as a taunt and a threat against the South, solely, because
the Southern people had preserved their Government and their Institu-
tions JUST AS THEY HAD BEEN ESTABLISHED by the signers themselves
of that Declaration and the very authors of that aphorism.
This declaration of open and avowed hostility, to their Constitutional
rights, to their guarantees of protection, to their political equality, to
their domestic institutions, to their external security, to their internal
peace, to their social tranquility, to their lives, to their fortunes and to
their very existence as a people and as individuals, caused the people
of the South to stand aghast and think their Northern brethren were
indeed demented.
But patience and good will still ruled the hour!
It was for no idle cause, that this great and glorious Union should
be destroyed; and with strong hopes that this tide of fanaticism, urged
on by artful demagogues, would be rebuked by the masses in the late
political conflict, they anxiously awaited the issue.
Alas! how delusive were their faith and trust in man!
The Anti-Slavery party-a mere sectional party, that had not the
audacity to call itself NATIONAL, triumphed; and that very triumph,
by a domineering majority, thus voting to sustain a sectional hostility
against the rights of the minority, was the overt act of the North, THAT
CRUSHED THE LAST HOPE OF THE SOUTH. Zhe political existence of
the South was ignored, and its Constitutional guarantees and its social
rights henceforth are to be in the keeping of their avowed enemies and
THE STRONG ARM OF THE FEDERAL POWER IS TO BE ALLIED TO
ANTI-SLAVERY FANATICISM.
The Union of the States was a Union for peace, a Union for mutual
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Coleman, William L. An appeal to the people of the North., pamphlet, Date Unknown; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth498127/m1/4/?q=%22%22~1&rotate=270: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Schreiner University.