What was sauce for the white man's goose was sauce for the black man's gander.
The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their masters.

The contents of the _Liberator_ were quite as likely to produce a slave insurrection as was "Walker's Appeal," if the paper was allowed to circulate freely among the slave population.

It was, in fact, more dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the _Liberator_ in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation.

Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read.
His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose?
What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible.

Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man?
Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut.