Dear Douglass:—We have been many of us talking, writing and speechifying for years on the subject of slavery, appealing in every possible manner to the people of this country for its abolition. I fear our views of the subject have been contracted, while we have not failed to point out the miseries connected with the system of compulsory slavery, we have said but little on the subject of OPTIONAL slavery. To illustrate: you were a slave by force, not by choice. Henry B. StantonStanton, Henry Brewster

Born in Griswold, Connecticut, Henry Brewster Stanton (1805–87) is probably best remembered as the husband of woman suffrage advocate Elizabeth Cady Stanton. He became an abolitionist while a student at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati and was among the fifty “Lane Rebels” who withdrew in 1834 when the school prohibited their antislavery efforts. After his resignation from Lane, Stanton joined James G. Birney on a lecture tour in the Northeast. He became active in the American Anti-Slavery Society and, by 1837, served on its executive committee. Between 1837 and 1840, Stanton increasingly challenged the Garrisonian doctrine of “nonresistance,” insisting that abolitionists had a moral duty to use political means to achieve antislavery reforms. Unlike many of his New Organization colleagues, Stanton endorsed women abolitionists’ right to hold office, lecture, and participate fully in the antislavery movement. A prolific writer, Stanton published articles in abolitionist journals, political and religious papers, and Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. After the Civil War, he contributed regularly to the New York Sun. Politically active, Stanton supported at various times the Liberty, Free Soil, Republican, and Democratic parties. Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (Johnstown, N.Y., 1885), 26, 34, 52; Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics (New York, 1967), 68, 120–24; Sorin, New York Abolitionists, 63–67; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 156–59; NCAB, 2:331; DAB, 17:524–25. , John Van BurenVan Buren, John

and that class of men are self made slaves. Now, which is most to be pitied, the slave in the sugar field, rice swamp, &c., reared up in ignorance, shut out from all the chances of mental improvement, of those persons, who have received a liberal education, by nature possessed with good reasoning, faculties, rocked in liberty's cradle, with the blaze of the 19th century to illuminate their path, must we not conclude the latter, for the reason an institution capable of enslaving such characters is most dangerous. Stanton, Van Buren and others I have heard denounced, was that right, should they not rather command our pity, as they are deeper than plummet soundeth below (in the scale of moral being, opportunity considered,) the most abject slave held by force!

Then for Heaven's sake, for humanity's sake, for the sake of all that is worth remembering in the past, and for the glory of the coming future, let us throw off our coats, roll up our shirt sleeves and make a long and strong pull to drag these unfortunate mortals from the depths of degradation into which they have fallen, and when we have got them as high in the scale of being as the slaves held by force, then we will make one more mighty effort for the entire emancipation of the whole.

Yours truly,

John RobertsRoberts, John

Toronto, Sept. 4, 1852.

P.S. Whether liberty men were proper or not to support the Pittsburgh nominees, I do hope all entertaining anti-slavery sentiments, although differing in some respects, will, instead of fighting each other, fight the common foe. At all events others may do as they please, I shall pursue this course.

J. R.