The Liberator (newspaper)/September 18, 1857/The Reins Tightening

The Reins Tightening.

Extract of a private letter from a highly intelligent gentleman in Missouri:—

‘I think the tyrant reins of slaveholding are being drawn so tight, (or taut, as the sailor says,) that they must soon break. Clay is dead, Benton is dead, politically, and the cause of slavery is in the hands of Southern madmen, and Northern doughfaces, like Cass and Webster, who would be glad to see slavery killed, but who dare not help to kill it. To me, it seems certain that the country will soon be where slavery will have to die, or else we must all be slaves. We must settle the point whether slavery or liberty shall govern the territories, and the determination of that question will determine its continuance in the States. In Missouri, we have fairly turned the prejudice against the negroes into a new channel, where it works against slavery, because the white laborer will not work by the side of the negro slave. Hence he will try to drive the slave out of the State, and the prejudice which has heretofore sustained slavery will now oppose it. There is also a strong Northern emigration coming into the State, and in a few years, I expect to see most of the slaves removed. They will never increase. But slavery, when abolished in this State, will be abolished by prejudice, and not by principle.’

Let freedom be decreed on principle, Missourians!