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Show 4. It has been in all men's experience a marked effect of the enterprise in behalf of the African, to generate an overbearing and defying spirit. 'I'hc institution of slavery seems to its opponent to have but one side, and he feels that none but a stupid or a malignant person can hesitate on a view of the facts. Under such an impulse, I was about to say, If any cannot spenl<, or cannot hear the words of freedom, let him go hence, - I had almost said, Creep into your grave, the universe has no need of you! But I have thought better : let him not go. When we consider what remains to be done for this interest, in this country, the dictates of humanity make us tender of suclt as are not yet persuaded. The hardest selfishness is to be borne with. Let us withhold every reproachful, and, if we can, every indignant remark. In this cause, we must renounce our temper, and the risings of pride. If there be any man who thinks the ru in of a race of men a small matter, compared with the last decoration and completions of his own comfort,- who would not so much as part with his icecream, to save them from rapine and manacles, I think, I must not hesitate to satisfy that man, that also his cream and vanilla are safer and chenper, by placing the negro nation on a fair footing, than by robbing them. If the Virginian piques himself on the picturesque luxu ry of his vassalage, on the heavy Ethiopian manners of his houseservants, their silent obedience, theit· hue of brouze,· their turbaned heads, and would not exchange them for thp more intellige1Jt but precarious hired-service of whites, I shoJI not refuse to show him, that when their free-papers are made out, it will still be their interest to remain on his estate, and that the oldest planters of Jamaica are convinced, that it is cheaper to pay wages, than to own the slave. The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict 5 which it records, between the material and the moral nature. From the earliest monuments, it appears, that one race was victim, and served the other races. In the oldest temples of Egypt, negro captives arc painted on tile tombs of kings, in such attitudes as to show that they are on the point of being executed; and Herodotus, our oluest historian, relates that the Troglod ytes hunted the Ethiopians in four-horse-chariots. From the earliest time, the negro has been an article of luxury to the commercial nations. So has it been, down to the day that has just dawned on the world. Language must be ralicd, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous holes that cannot front the day, must ue ransacked , to tell what negro-slavery has been. 'rhesc men, our benefactors, as they arc producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum, and brandy, gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world, - there seated in the fin est climates of the globe, children of the sun,- I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of tlteir brothers. The prizes of society, .the trumpet of fame, the privileges of learning, of culture, of religion, the decencies Ullll joys of marriage, honor, obedience, personal authority, and a perpetual melioration into a finer civility, these were for nil, but not for them. For the negro, was the slaveship to uegin with, in whose filthy hold he sat in irons, unable to lie down; bad food, and insufficiency of that ; disfranchisement; no property in the rags that covered him; no marriage, no right in the poor black woman that cherished him in her bosom,- no right to the children of his body ; no security from the humors, none from the crimes, none from the appetites of his master: toil, famine, insult, and flogging; and, when he sunk in the furrow, no wind of good fame blew over him, no priest of salva- |
