It was, perhaps, not unnatural that those interested in slavery should have thought so; but from this great error arose their fatal miscalculation as to the peculiar strength of the anti-slavery cause.
No idea ever agitated the popular mind to whose origin calculating selfishness was more foreign. Even the great uprising which brought about the War of Independence was less free from selfish motives, for it sprang from resistance to a tyrannical abuse of the taxing power. Then the people rose against that oppression which touched their property; the anti-slavery movement originated in an impulse only moral.
It was the irresistible breaking out of a trouble of conscience,—a trouble of conscience which had already disturbed the men who made the American Republic. It found a voice in their anxious admonitions, their gloomy prophecies, their scrupulous care to exclude from the Constitution all forms of expression which might have appeared to sanction the idea of property in man.
It found a voice in the fierce struggles which resulted in the Missouri compromise. It was repressed for a time by material interest, by the greed of gain, when the peculiar product of slave labor became one of the principal staples of the country and a mine of wealth. But the trouble of conscience raised its voice again, shrill and defiant as when your own John Quincy Adams stood in the halls of Congress, and when devoted advocates of the rights of man began and carried on, in the face of ridicule and brutal persecution, an agitation seemingly hopeless. It cried out again and again, until at last its tones and echoes grew louder than all the noises that were to drown it.
The anti-slavery movement found arrayed against itself all the influences, all the agencies, all the arguments which ordinarily control the actions of men.
