4333. LABORERS, Slave vs. English.—
Nor in the class of laborers do I mean to
withhold from the comparison that portion
whose color has condemned them, in certain
parts of our Union, to a subjection to the will
of others. Even these are better fed in these
States, warmer clothed, and labor less than
the journeymen or day-laborers of England.
They have the comfort, too, of numerous
families, in the midst of whom they live without
want, or fear of it; a solace which few
of the laborers of England possess. They are
subject, it is true, to bodily coercion; but are
not the hundreds of thousands of British
soldiers and seamen subject to the same, without
seeing, at the end of their career, when
age and accident shall have rendered them
unequal to labor, the certainty, which the
other has, that he will never want? And
has not the British seaman, as much as the
African, been reduced to this bondage by
force, in flagrant violation of his own consent,
and of his natural right in his own per
son? And with the laborers of England generally,
does not the moral coercion of want
subject their will as despotically to that of
their employer, as the physical constraint does
the soldier, the seaman or the slave? But
do not mistake me. I am not advocating
slavery. I am not justifying the wrongs we
have committed on a foreign people, by the
example of another nation committing equal
wrongs on their own subjects. On the contrary,
there is nothing I would not sacrifice
to a practicable plan of abolishing every vestige
of this moral and political depravity. But
I am, at present, comparing the condition and
degree of suffering to which oppression has
reduced the man of one color, with the condition
and degree of suffering to which oppression
has reduced the man of another
color; equally condemning both.—
To Thomas Cooper. Washington ed. vi, 378.
(M.
1814)
