But the freedom won by the men of 1776 was
incomplete without the freedom for which the men of 1833 were striving.
The authors of the new declaration would not be inferior to the authors
of the old "in purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of
purpose, intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity
of spirit." Unlike the older actors, the younger had eschewed the sword,
the spilling of human blood in defence of their principles. Theirs was a
moral warfare, the grappling of truth with error, of the power of love
with the inhumanities of the nation. Then it glances at the wrongs which
the fathers suffered, and at the enormities which the slaves were
enduring. The "fathers were never slaves, never bought and sold like
cattle, never shut out from the light of knowledge and religion, never
subjected to the lash of brutal taskmasters," but all these woes and
more, an unimaginable mountain of agony and misery, was the appalling
lot of the slaves in the Southern States. The guilt of this nation,
which partners such a crime against human nature, "is unequaled by any
other on earth," and therefore it is bound to instant repentance, and to
the immediate restitution of justice to the oppressed.
The Declaration of Sentiments denies the right of man to hold property
in a brother man, affirms the identity in principle between the African
slave trade and American slavery, the imprescriptibility of the rights
of the slaves to liberty, the nullity of all laws which run counter to
human rights, and the grand doctrine of civil and political equality in
the Republic, regardless of race and complexional differences.
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