Wednesday, 26 December 2012

"If the grand experiment fails"


In 1846, James Macbeth argued that slavery was poisoning the United States, the land of self-professed liberty, and it's such a powerful statement I had to replicate it here. 

“...if the grand experiment of the American republic fails – and through the fierce passions which slavery engenders, it is provoking danger every hour from within and from without – then woe to the cause of liberty over the earth. To save that republic, its slavery must be abolished, and if it be not extricated by the energetic action of its churches – at present so shamefully lethargic – it will not be extricated peacefully and the last lingering tints of the bow of hope on that western sky may soon disappear in a revolutionary storm – in a shower of blood…”

That "shower of blood" would become the Civil War.

(|Macbeth, James, “No Fellowship with slaveholders: a calm review of the debate on slavery in the Free Assembly of 1846, addressed respectfully to the Assembly of 1847, and to the members and kirk sessions of the Free Church”, Glasgow, 1846, pp.3-37.)

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