THE DRAGON VOICE | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Feb 5, 1857

THE DRAGON VOICE.

The course of this government, the two-horned beast of prophecy, on the subject of slavery, is thus set forth by Hon. J. R. Giddings in a letter to the Disunion Convention, held in Worcester, Mass., on the 15th inst.:

"I hesitate not to say that this government has been so administered, for the last quarter of a century, as to be destructive of the lives, the liberties and the happiness of a portion of the people; in short, it has become destructive of the very objects for which it was established. Its influence and its powers have been exerted to extend the most barbarous system of human bondage known to mankind. Three distinct and separate wars have been waged to uphold and maintain the system of American Slavery. More than three hundred millions of dollars have been drawn from the pockets of our laboring people, and paid out by government for that purpose, and more than five hundred thousand human victims have been sent to premature graves to uphold and maintain the interests of an institution which the present Administration and its supporters are seeking to extend and eternize. In one of the wars alluded to eighty thousand freemen were sacrificed to this Moloch of Oppression, and in one day recently, three hundred fathers, mothers and children were barbarously butchered by our army for no other crime than attachment to their God-given right to liberty; and the groans of men and women murdered in Kansas by employers of our government, have not yet ceased to ring in our ears.

"We have acquired vast territory and spread the curse of human bondage over it; we have erected nine slave-holding States and received them into our union; we have authorized Slavery in Utah, New Mexico and Western Texas; we have authorized a coastwise commerce in human flesh, which is now carried on under the protection of the American flag; we have established Slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and involved our people of the free States in the disgrace, the crime and the expense of returning fugitives from oppression: under the fostering care of this Federal government the number of slaves has increased more than three millions, and throughout fifteen States and three Territories, bereaved fathers and mothers mourn the loss of children torn from their embrace by brutal slave-dealers; and brothers and sisters, separated from each other, sigh and weep in chains; and millions of hearts are bleeding under the accumulated wrongs of that institution."