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An Abolitionist Calls Slavery the True Cause of the Texas Revolution
Digital History ID 3665

Author:   Benjamin Lundy
Date:1836

Annotation: Lundy, a New Jersey born Quaker, helped popularize the thesis that the Slave Power, a group consisting the nation’s largest slaveholders, fomented revolution in Texas to seize fresh lands for slavery.


Document: …The prime cause, and the real objects of this war [the Texas Revolution], are not distinctly understood by a large portion of the honest, disinterested, and well-meaning citizens of the United States…. They have been induced to believe that the inhabitants of Texas were engaged in a legitimate contest for the maintenance of the sacred principles of Liberty, and the natural, inalienable Rights of Man: --whereas, the motives of its instigators, and their chief incentives to action, have been, from the commencement, of a directly opposite character and tendency…to wrest the large and valuable territory of Texas from the Mexican Republic, in order to re-establish the SYSTEM OF SLAVERY; to open a vast and profitable SLAVE-MARKET therein; and, ultimately, to annex it to the United States…. The Slaveholding Interest is now paramount in the Executive branch of our national government….

Source: Benjamin Lundy, The War in Texas (Philadelphia, 1836).

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