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Whisky Slavery

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Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 9, 1882

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 8, No. 42.

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Whisky Slavery.

By Editor

We take the following from an address by Mrs. Chapin of Charleston, S. C., before the national W. C. T. U.:—
A minister of the gospel told me that he heard, only a few days ago, a corner shop rumseller say to a western distiller, that the barrel of whisky he had bought from him, doctored, had turned out twelve barrels of whisky for the colored people that he had bought it for. Now, what kind of liquor do you suppose that was? And that is the kind of liquor that is being sold to these newly enfranchised people, and they are drinking it. Do you call them free? Ah, they are in far more abject slavery than we ever held them in. You have done only half of your duty. You have got to have prohibition, prohibition. Instead of worshiping their God, they worship their party. I tell you it is time for honest people to come out from parties; they have had their way. Slavery is dead, forever dead. It is not among the current issues of the day any longer, and although I cannot truthfully say I think it was exactly fair for us who had nothing to do with bringing it here, to have to bear all the expense of getting it away, we would not have these people put into slavery again, not upon any consideration. To Christian owners they were a responsibility greater than children. Who is responsible for them now? They have been alienated from us. Who is responsible? They are the wards of the nation. What is the nation doing for them? Licensing bad men to sell them burning, fiery poison; that is what it is doing, and they cannot brag of enfranchising them while they do it. They ought to take care of them as they do of the Indian and the soldier. Before the war it was an offense punished by law, to sell liquor to a slave; then you never saw a slave drunk; now the best of them get drunk, and the religious among them deplore it deeply. It is the duty of the nation to give us prohibition; that is it. We could work together in a prohibition movement.