ABSTINENCE FROM SLAVE-GROWN PRODUCE.
Adin Ballou, of Hopedale, thus handles the Free-Produce question, in the Practical Christian:
In another column will be found a communication from Charles Cadwallader, calling our attention, and that of the Hopedale Community, to the question of duty in respect to the consumption of slave-grown productions. He refers us to our Declaration of acknowledged duties, and invites us to consider whether we are not aiding and abetting slavery and the slave-trade by purchasing for our use the various articles of slave production. It is very surprising to our Pennsylvania friends, and those generally who are scrupulously conscientious against the use of slave-grown produce, that so many of the New England Abolitionists remain comparatively indifferent, to this matter. It seems to them that we are partaking in the sin of slaveholding by purchasing and consuming the articles they iniquitously force their slaves to produce, and that we are strangely blind not to see it. On our part we sincerely respect their scruples of conscience, and above all their fidelity to those scruples, and yet have been unable to perceive, with our degree of intellectual and moral light, the forcible reasons, or to feel the moral convictions they do against using the produce in question. This may be owing to obtuseness of judgment, or obliquity of moral sentiment, and therefore we are admonished to examine the subject, and to search ourselves more thoroughly, that we may be sure of our duty in the matter. Nothing is more common than for men, in the main intelligent and conscientious, to overlook or disregard the nicer applications of their acknowledged moral obligations. It is astonishing how blind and mistaken good men sometimes are with respect to particular duties. Considering these things, we welcome friend Cadwallader's communication, and desire with open convictions to state our views of the subject he presents. We think we may venture to say that the members of the Hopedale Community would generally abandon the use of slave-grown produce, if they should be rationally convinced it was their duty. We are now sufficiently convinced that it would be sinful in us to unite with slaveholders religiously, politically, or socially; i. e. in Church, in State, in community, or in marriage. We are also convinced that it would be sinful in us to sell anything to them, or buy anything of them peculiarly belonging to the system or state of slavery as such; i. e. any article which would not be equally proper and useful in a state of freedom as in a state of slavery. We are furthermore fully convinced that it would be sinful in us to trade or hold any intercourse, however innocent in itself, with slaveholders, the express condition, or legitimate tendency of which, under the circumstances, should be to render us dumb on the subject of slavery, or to indispose us to testify against it. If we could not trade with slaveholders in articles suitable to a state of freedom, or could not preach, or teach school, or practice medicine, or publish books and papers for them without being obliged to be silent concerning the sin of Slavery, or to wink at the wickedness of it, we should be bound to keep utterly aloof from all such dealings and intercourse with them. This duty is founded on a principle of universal application—viz: that we are never to compromise with obvious evil doing. That there is a vast deal of mercantile and other intercourse with slaveholders which is maintained by a sacrifice of principle, for the sake of temporal advantage, is lamentably true. Men and women from the North every year seek their fortune at the South, consenting to be gagged for the time on the subject of Slavery, or insensibly yielding to the expediency of smoothing down their testimony against it. We can see that this is sinful—that it is even basely sinful.
Now if it can be shown that the ordinary use of cotton, rice, molasses, sugar, wheat, flour, Indian corn, &c. by persons who on that account feel under no restraint, or temptation to refrain from a manly testimony against Slavery, is also sinful , we shall feel bound to abstain therefrom at once and forever.—These articles are all good in themselves. Nature originated them for the use of man. She shines upon and moistens, expands and matures them even when their planting and growth are attended by the lash-driven slave. Does the wrong inflicted on the slave, who aids their growth and preparation, so vitiate them that whatever consumes them necessarily becomes implicated in the sin of the slaveholder? We do not see this to be a rational conclusion. The consumers of whom we are now speaking had no participation in stealing the slave from his native land. They have no participation in holding him a slave—none in justifying the master—none in withholding rebuke for the wrong done by him. They use these articles of sustenance and comfort just as they would do, if they had been grown only by freemen —without the least consciousness of any occasion or temptation to favour slaveholding on account of what they thus eat and wear. How then do they sin? Certainly not in their consciousness of wrong, nor in their intentions . Wherein consists their wrong? It is said they are partakers of stolen goods, and are therefore as bad as the thief. Is God a partaker with the man-thief because he gives cotton-seed, earth, sunshine and rain, without which the slave would be of no use to him? And may we not consume what God helps wicked men produce, when the thing produced is in itself good? No, (say our brethren,) if you do you are joined in guilt with the man-stealer, the slave-trader, the slaveholder and the slave-driver. You receive and reward them for stolen goods. But the goods are not stolen goods , in the proper sense of terms. Is a bushel of wheat to be considered stolen goods because a man raised it by the help of a stolen horse? If so every article produced by instruments unjustly acquired or used becomes contaminated. If I purchase a stolen horse, knowing it to have been stolen, I am guilty with the original thief. But suppose the original thief uses that stolen horse to raise a field of corn, of which I buy five bushels for a laudable use in my family, am I then guilty? Or does the sin lie in trading with the thief at all? Or does it lie in affording him means of sustaining himself and family? If so, the principle carried out would forbid us to trade with a known sinner at all, even in a thing in itself innocent. Or is this the point—that knowing a man to be a horse thief, and to be a justifier of horse theft in general, and also to be raising produce with stolen horses only, I should certainly be an a better of his sin, if, in addition to a faithful rebuke, I did not refuse to make use of the articles raised by such means? It is narrowed down then to this,—that I could not buy and consume the productions of such a man without giving a moral sanction to his deliberate and systematic theft. If this be a correct view of the case, it would of course apply to the man-thief with inconceivably greater force. But if we may take this course with the slaveholder, ought we not to take it with all other sinners? Or can we fix such limits to it as to demonstrate that the principle is of just and rational application to easily conceived cases? We invite friend Cadwallader to write again and define the nature and extent of the principle involved in the duty he urges.
