Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845 Page: 30 of 56

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30

take them for granted, while I add, that, if -we have hearts,
we must feel, and that we ought to feel, how nearly it concerns
us to do what we can, at once and perseveringly, for
the abolition of slavery.
In the discussion of this part of my subject, I am obliged,
from the want of time, to omit many more topics than I can
touch upon. This you will perceive, when I remind you,
that, in speaking of the political influences of slavery by
which we are affected, I might allude to the toleration of
slavery and the slave-trade in the District of Columbia and
the Territories of the United States, in all which all the
States have a common interest, and in the former more
especially, as the seat of the national government, - to the
laws for the security of slavery and the slave-trade, whether
passed by Congress for the District of Columbia, or by the
legislatures of the several States, so far as they directly
infringe the constitutional right of the free colored citizens
of the Free States when temporarily resident in them, or
conflict with our rights of navigation by removing colored
seamen from our vessels in their ports, while they put it out
of our power to resort to any legal means of redress,- to
the reception of our agents despatched to South Carolina
and Louisiana upon a legal errand, in whose persons every
citizen of Massachusetts has been deprived of important
rights, and subjected to the most contumelious and unwarrantable
maltreatment, -to the interference of the general
government, as administered under slave-holding control, in
regard alike to the Post-office Department, in restraining
the distribution of offensive publications through the mail;
the Revenue Department, in employing its officers and vessels
in the detention, arrest, and imprisonment of fugitive
slaves and free citizens connected with them; the War
Department, in making its garrisons alike slave-quarters and
slave-prisons, and converting detachments of the army into
body-guards of.slavery; and the Navy Department, in employing
our vessels of war under such directions, that the
squadron upon the coast of Africa can render no effective
service in arresting the foreign slave-trade, while the home
squadron seems to have little other design or use than overseeing
and protecting the domestic slave-trade. I might
also refer to the penal codes of the Slave States, in which
sympathy with the slave is made to appear among the worst
of crimes, and which have already visited upon citizens of
Free States convicted of it the most odious penalties of the
whipping-post, the pillory, the branding-iron, and the peni

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Phillips, Stephen C. Address on the annexation of Texas, and the aspect of slavery in the United States, in connection therewith: delivered in Boston November 14 and 18, 1845, book, January 1, 1845; Boston. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth2361/m1/30/ocr/: accessed March 29, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.

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