Antislavery Activism in Lowell
Document 30

... Occasionally a fugitive from oppression seeks shelter among us, and reveals the horrors of his house of bondage. We see that the black man is, after all, our brother. We see that he has the energies, the faculties, the sympathies, the aspirations of a man. When we listen to his choking voice of sorrow, as he tells us of his children torn from him and sold at public outcry, into strange, distant regions; when his eye flashes, as with broken, indignant words he hints at his own degradation and suffering under the whip of the [slave] driver, and lays bare his scarred shoulder, we feel that here our common humanity has suffered; that a grievous wrong has been done to our common nature; that, as a brother MAN, the slave has a claim upon our sympathies. We no longer regard slavery in the abstract; we cease to think of it solely as an "institution," or to consider its victims as "property"--the sight of one of them, standing before us erect and manly, giving evidence of the possession of warm affections, strong passions of love and hate, intellectual vigor, and fine and delicate sensibilities, sweeps away at once all our air-woven apologies for this great American wrong ....