Using texts by Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Angeline Grimke, write a speech to the Senate that responds to Senator Hammond(the passage below). Use direct quotations.
In the U.S. Senate, on 4 March, 1858, James Henry Hammond–a senator from South Carolina–delivered a speech that was proslavery. here is theexcerptt from that speech:
The senator from new york said yersterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. God only can do it when he repeals the fiat,”the poor ye always have with you;” for the man who lives by daily labor, and scarcely lives at that, and who has to put out his labor in the market, and take the best he can get for it; in short, your whole hireline class of manual laborers and “operatives” as you call them, are essentially slaves. the difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not to much employment either. yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street in any of your large towns. why, you meet more beggers in one day, in any single street of the city of new york, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole south. we do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. the status in which we have placed them is an elevation. they are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. none of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the wekness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. yours are white, of your own race; you are their degradation. our slaves do not vote. we give them no political power. your do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. if they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than “an army with banners,” and could combine, where would you be? your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not as they have mistakenly attempted to initiate such proceedings by meeting in parks, with arms in their hands, but by the quiet process of the ballot-box. you have been making war upon us to our very hearthstones. how would you like for us to send lecturers and agitators north, to teach these people this, to aid in combining, and to lead them?