All of these institutions arose naturally out of the
circumstances, the character, and wants of men, at the time, and have
been of essential service in their day. But the great antagonist which
free principles encountered on American soil; which was planted
alongside of the tree of liberty; which grew with its growth, and
strengthened with its strength; which, like a noxious parasitic vine,
wound its insidious coils around the trunk that supported it--binding
its expanding branches, rooted in its tissues, and living on its vital
fluids;--this insidious enemy was slavery--a thoroughly undisguised
manifestation of human selfishness and greed; without a single redeeming
trait--simply an unmitigated evil: a two-edged weapon, cutting and
maiming both ways, up and down--the master perhaps even more than the
slave; a huge evil committed, reacting in evil, in the exact degree of
its hugeness and momentum. Yes! this great antagonist was slavery--an
institution long thrown out of European life; a relic of the lowest
barbarism and savagism, the very antipodes of freedom, and flourishing
best only in the rudest forms of society; but now rearing its hideous
visage in the midst of principles, forms, and institutions the most free
and advanced of any that the world has ever witnessed.
In the presence of this great fact, one is led to exclaim: 'How
strange!' How monstrous an anomaly! What singular fatality has brought
two such irreconcilable opposites together? It is as if two individuals,
deadly foes, should by a mysterious chance, encounter each other
unexpectedly on some wide, dreary waste of the Arctic solitudes.
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