Anti-Slavery Paper in Virginia

” The Daily Enterprise is the name of a new paper started in Wheeling, Va. The edtor speaks out as follow in the first number. We hope he will be sustained in the noble stand he has taken, but hardly expect it. He says: 1. We are Anti-Slavery, soul and body, now and forever. We go against enslaving the body, enslaving the mind, the tongue, the press. 2.If the question were to be decided between Perpetual Bondage and Immediate Emancipation, we would choose the latter without hesitancy. 3. We go for the abolition of slavery on the best plan for the slave’s own benefit. The plan we could propose, if necessary. 4. We believe that it is a national evil and an individual curse, and that, in the aggregate, the whites would be greater gainers than the slavos. 5. We suppose that the citizens of Wheeling have but little interest in the question, except as it affects their immediate interests, and are in ths respect prepared to discuss it themselves. Finally, if we are to be proscribed for sentiments like these, the sooner, we get out of this commonwealth, the better. But we have formed no such idea of the people of West Virginia. A few of the selfish and contracted may condemn for opinoin’s sake, but most of them are too liberal to permit their minds to be thus biased.”  (Liberator, February 16, 1849, pg,1)

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