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 THE HANI) OF GOD 
 
 WITH THE BLACK RACE. 
 
 ^l DISCOURSE, 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE TUE 
 
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 Hi- <<> o ■<> 1 
 
 REV. ALEXANDER T. McGILL, D. D., 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, AT PRINCETON, R. J. 
 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 WILLIAM F. GEDDES, PRINTER, 320 CHESTNUT STREET. 
 
 18G2. 
 
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THE HAND OF GOD 
 
 WITH THE BLACK RACE. 
 
 A. DISCOURSE 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 Ijciutsgtoia Colouration: Stocietg, 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. ALEXANDER T. McGILL, D. D., 
 
 PROFESSOR IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, AT PRINCETON, N. J. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY REQUEST. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 WILLIAM F. GEDDKS, PRINTER, 320 CHESTNUT STREET. 
 
 1862. 
 
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THE HAND OF GOD WITH THE BLACK MCE. 
 
 " And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of 
 the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of 
 their habitation." — Acts xvii. 26. 
 
 Institutes of natural religion are condensed with admirable skill, in this 
 text and its connections. And as propounded here, they are alike adap- 
 ted to lead the heathen forward, and the Christian backward, with profitable 
 lessons. The cogeney with which they shut up the refined idolaters of 
 Athens to "Jesus and the resurrection," is reciprocated now, by the force 
 with which the Gospel sends us back to these dictates, as required in its 
 own progress and triumph. Events of history add new interest to this 
 reciprocal tie of nature and inspiration every day. The light of reason, 
 the voice of revelation, and the finger of Providence, combine as they never 
 combined before, to call our attention to these four things which the 
 analysis of this portion fairly presents to us. 
 
 1st. Tlie unity of our whole race as it sprung from, the hand of its 
 Maker: 2nd. The special Providence which governs the times or 
 events of any people: 3rd. TJie special Providence which fixes their 
 place in the world : Uh. The manifest aim, alike of creation and 
 Providence, in dealing with all races, to bring men at last to the 
 knowledge of Himself 
 
 I. In the very same year — the year 1620 — there came to this continent 
 two portions of the human race, the most opposite, in all respects, that could be 
 found on the face of the earth. The one was white, and the other was black ; 
 the one was free, the other captive ; the one was enlightened, the other igno- 
 rant ; the one was elevated with the best intelligence that ever dawned 
 upon the world, the other debased with the darkest delusions that ever 
 invaded our guilty nature. The one were so much the masters of their 
 own destiny, that the raging elements of the sea, the frowning terrors of 
 
the wilderness, a barren coast, a savage hostility before them, and a 
 haughty despotism behind them, could not hinder them, with scanty means 
 and scanty numbers, from achieving, in less than two hundred years, results, 
 which no other ten centuries ever attained, for the most favored people 
 under heaven. The other were so much the mere products of time and 
 chance, that they seemed to have no destiny whatever. Though sprung 
 upon the richest soil beneath the sun, and carried to the fairest clime and 
 culture of a new world, there was no mastery of anything laid to their 
 hands with all the exuberance of material advantage ; but prone, passive, 
 and helpless, they could hardly compete with the beasts of the field, in the 
 dignity of a chattel indenture ; which constituted their only bill of rights 
 among the children of men. These two opposite portions were the pilgrims 
 who came to Plymouth in the Mayflower; and the first cargo of African 
 slaves that came to Jamestown, Virginia, in a Dutch man-of-war. 
 
 The Puritans who came here were the best of that name ; and the Afri- 
 cans who came were the worst, probably, of that name, being the negroes 
 of the coast, always found to be the most depraved and abused in Africa. 
 It is singular that these arrivals occurred in the same year; and singular, 
 that the best specimens of humanity, and the worst, should be placed 
 simultaneously in this land, on which men of all lands have been made to 
 look ever since, with surpassing interest. As if "the Maker of us all" 
 would summon the whole earth to witness on this magnificent theatre, not 
 the boast of Americans themselves, the experiment of self-government, the 
 movements of regulated liberty, the progress of a model and mighty Re- 
 public ; but to witness the truth of the first proposition of my text, that, 
 "He hath made of one blood all nations of men." 
 
 This collocation, side by side, in the same twelvemonth, of the most 
 exalted and the most debased, of what we call the human species, has 
 surely not resulted, in what would have been the result of a start together, 
 of two diverse and repellant progenies, in the original of their being. 
 Remember, what was then considered the superior race, in view of both 
 the hemispheres ; the proudest coevals which the Puritans had upon the 
 face of the globe — the Spaniards. How have we distanced them, in arts, 
 and arms, and riches, and power ; until a stranger to history might almost 
 as well question, whether the Spaniard, any more than the African, has 
 
descended from the same Adam, with the Anglo-Saxon. We have not 
 been able, with all the neglect and wrong of the relation, so to distance 
 the black man. Bound to the chariot wheels of our own progress, by an 
 original hap, which made him a clog, that we would gladly have pushed 
 off nl every stadium of our career, he has notwithstanding ascended steadily 
 the car itself; and in spite of the reluctance of every party professing to 
 be friend or foe, thai darkened, trampled, outcast portion of humanity 
 has become, in one sense, of fearful import, master of our destiny as a 
 nation ; although even in point of numbers, not one sixth part of the 
 whole, and in point of rank, not one ninth of this sixth part be yet free 
 from the bondage to which they were imported originally. Great as we 
 are and proud as we have been, the question of our existence in the eyes 
 of the whole world depends on the solution of the problem, what to do 
 with the black race. And we perish among the nations, if that solution 
 be made on any other terms, than a full recognition of the simple truth 
 which is here affirmed, that they are of one blood with ourselves. 
 
 Since the tumult began of that civil war which now afflicts us, I have 
 not heard at all from that ethnological school, which, for some twelve or 
 thirteen years, had been steadily diffusing in the Southern mind a contra- 
 diction of eternal truth, in this particular. With the exception of a few 
 infidels at the North, and these imported for the most part from Europe, 
 the tractarians of this school belong entirely to the South; and even there 
 they have been met by certain able Christian teachers, such as Bachman, 
 and Smyth of Charleston, with unanswerable power. 
 
 It is far beyond our limits here, and might appear distrustful to the lone 
 sufficiency of God's word, to dwell on the suffrages of science ; as if the 
 signature of the Holy Ghost depended, for its authentication, upon any 
 lucubrations of man. Physiology, at the lowest degree of the scale, among 
 creatures, will show how the animal man must be the same, in view of his 
 structure, constitution and habits ; birth, life and death ; every thing that 
 touches a visible existence on the earth. Philology, at a higher grade, 
 tells us how identical he must be, in the common possession of a faculty, 
 which no other visible creature possesses, that of imparting his thoughts, 
 by the articulate and connected utterances of language. Moral Philos- 
 ophy, rising higher yet, evinces how perfectly the same he is, in the sense 
 
6 
 
 of right and wrong, true and false ; on which the responsibilities of time, 
 and the retributions of eternity are made alike to hinge. And then, at 
 a higher elevation still, the history of men will prove, that families, tribes, 
 and nations, in all times, and all places of the earth, have been developed 
 by the same causes ; and made to rise or fall by the same influences, for 
 good or evil. In short, the simple and sublime averment of the text, on 
 which alone our faith reposes, even if it were but the word of man, would 
 subsidize all that man discovers, in the confirmation of its truth. 
 
 II. The Apostle claims for the Maker of all men the right to govern 
 them, in the control of their vicissitudes ; "hath determined the times before 
 appointed;" that is, the dates, or events of history — turning points in the 
 progress of nations. Probably the form of expression here was shaped by 
 a reference, inevitable with the educated Jew, to that precise determination 
 of time, with which the special providence of God had ruled the destiny 
 of Israel. "Know of a surety," said the Most High to Abram, when 
 "an horror of great darkness fell upon him," — "that thy seed shall be a 
 stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall 
 afflict them four hundred years ; and also that nation, whom they shall 
 serve, I will judge : and afterwards shall they come out with great substance," 
 (Gen. xv. 13, 14.) It is only because they were a visibly covenanted 
 people that their "times" are thus explicitly mentioned ; all other nations 
 and races of men are led, and overruled, and destined, with equal precision 
 of times, by the councils of Him, who hath made them all of one blood. 
 The illustrious progeny of Shem and the obscure descendants of Ham, are 
 as perfectly alike, in the parental forecast of their common Maker, as they 
 are alike in the weakness of their birth, the necessities of their life, and 
 the dust to which they moulder. 
 
 Indeed, these "last times" of ours would summon us to see, in the 
 chronicles of the most abject posterity that ever sprung from the unco- 
 ven anted sires of mankind, a similarity of lot to the great covenanted 
 race of old, which no other nation or race ever exhibited in its annals. 
 The Africans in our country are strangers and servants "in a land that is 
 not theirs." They are here for a special purpose, just as surely as my 
 text is true, that a special providence controls the times which measure 
 events for any people. That special purpose resembles the end for which 
 
the visible seed of Abraham were consigned to bondage inEgypt — culture, 
 preparation, a temporary bondage, to be terminated, and gloriously 
 terminated ; not, I hope and pray, with judgments on this nation, as the 
 plagues, and the spoils, and the overthrow, avenged the quarrel of His 
 covenant on the tyrant and taskmasters of Egypt ; but in the way of re- 
 leasing and sending back to their own land a people, who came to us utterly 
 destitute of every thing that mortal and immortal man requires ; and go 
 from us ladened with every benefit and blessing which can exalt a people 
 in the life that now is, and save them in the life that is to come. 
 
 If ever " the times before appointed," in the lot of any people, unfolded 
 themselves, their continuance and their limitation, alike in significant events, 
 the condition of the black man here shows that neither a perpetual bondage, 
 nor an immediate abolition, is the will of God concerning him. It is the 
 schooling of slaves in this Republic which Heaven decreed for slavery, 
 when Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, all implored the British 
 Crown in vain to spare these colonies the curse of its infliction ; and the 
 tutelage is to last until the enslaved are able and willing to carry back 
 to their own land the spoils of a Christian civilization. 
 
 Slavery itself is no school. It only degrades and destroys the children 
 of men. Even the chosen race of Israel, who went down to Egypt, with 
 a cultivation which the second man in the kingdom was not ashamed to 
 own and introduce to the court of Pharaoh, could not endure the servi- 
 tude of three generations after Joseph, without sinking so low as to hug 
 their chains and reproach their deliverer, and carry with them, in their 
 exodus, a spirit so besotted as to require nearly half a century of time in 
 the wilderness, to fit them for Canaan. Look at slavery by itself in Africa. 
 No where else on the globe has it had the same time and chance to work 
 out its own legitimate results. There, pre-eminently, it is the patriarchal 
 institution ; and proves what it can do, to complete the family, and give 
 the structure of society a solid basis, and a beautiful gradation. There it 
 is, that the king of Dahomey first rung the changes, which have been so 
 eloquently repeated at Charleston and New Orleans, that the social fabric 
 is not perfect, without a substratum of involuntary bondage, a pedestal of 
 living souls, to be bought and sold forevei*, like the beasts of burden. 
 Fetish idolatry, cannibal cruelty, the horrid barracoon, the stifling middle 
 
8 
 
 passage, the anguish of outraged humanity, without one pang of pity in 
 the human breast, are but a portion of the fruits which slavery of itself 
 confers upon the civilization of men. 
 
 Give it, if you please, a better opportunity than its own heathen parent- 
 age at home; transfer it to a Christian community, without imparting to 
 it Christian culture ; and see if centuries of experiment will not leave the 
 slave as degraded as ever, and the master himself a monster of selfish, 
 cruel, and impure desires. The history of Jamaica will give us proof. 
 In the course of the first three hundred years of its history, about half of 
 which there was Spanish rule, and the other half English, the masters, 
 whether Spanish or English, conceived it to be incompatible with the re- 
 lation of slavery to give the blacks any religious instruction. At the end 
 of this period, eight hundred thousand slaves had been imported into that 
 island from Africa, and not one half this number could then be counted ; 
 more than half the number from time to time had sunk beneath the lash of 
 cruelty. The rigors of bondage were too hard, even for the prolific in- 
 crease of a serving race. When slavery is "under tutors and governors 
 till the time appointed," as in Egypt of old, it multiplies its people with 
 prodigious increase. And wherever it is bonded for perpetuity, as in 
 Jamaica of the last century, and Cuba of this, it perishes with its victims ; 
 as if the God that made us could not bear the sight of it beneath his 
 heavens. Thirty insurrections in Jamaica occurred in the lapse of one 
 hundred and forty years ; scarcely a vestige of Christianity existed even 
 among the whites, and the blacks themselves were worse than most of the 
 Africans at home. " I speak from my own knowledge," said Mr. Edwards 
 (historian of the West Indies) from his place in the House of Commons, 
 "when I say they are cannibals, and that instead of listening to a mission- 
 ary, they would certainly eat him." When the British mind was at length 
 awakened earnestly, (to the calls of humanity and decency, in dealing with 
 this dependency, and did send the Christian missionary, the rancor of those 
 English masters became furious, tore down the chapels with violence, and 
 persecuted the man of God, as if he had come with the torch of the incen- 
 diary, instead of the redeeming light of the Gospel. Such was slavery, even 
 in the bosom of Christendom, when left to work out its own "times" and 
 events. 
 
9 
 
 But now on the other hand, look at the trial of immediate emancipation, 
 without preparing the slave for freedom, by the education for which the 
 purpose of God brought him here, a savage in chains. Would you pre- 
 fer to see him attaining "liberty and equality," by himseif, without mix- 
 ture of blood, on the soil which he had tilled for generations, by the sweat of 
 his brow and the lash of his overseer ? Look at Jlavti; where the fetters 
 of slavery were broken off at once, by the Constituent Assembly of France. 
 In less than half a century her industry and commerce were annihilated ; 
 the Sabbath, the family, and the school, were abolished; the missionaries 
 of the cross — Baptist, Methodist and Episcopalian — were expelled with 
 bitter persecution ; thousands of free blacks from the United States, 
 almost as many as have gone to Liberia since its origin, in less than twenty 
 years had sunk to the same besotted level ; and at length a despot was 
 enthroned, with barbaric pomp, and remorseless tyranny, and the worship 
 of devils for his creed ; until the whole community seemed to touch the 
 bottom of a degradation, as foul and hideous as ever had been revealed in 
 the land of their African fathers. We hail with gladness a revolution for 
 the better which has lately occurred ; but the annals of Hayti have already 
 given the indelible lesson, that a republic of black men erected at once, 
 by an unschooled and Unprepared emancipation, is but a pilloried equality, 
 set up for a gazing stock and a scorn among the nations of the earth. 
 
 But would you prefer to see him attain liberty and equality in the home 
 of his master ; to see the dominant and the subjugated races remain upon 
 the same soil, with die same immunities of social, civil and political rights, 
 and of course, amalgamation, like that of the Norman and the Saxon 
 races ; which has invariably followed this blending of people, however 
 opposite the original stocks ? Look at Mexico; where the proud Castil- 
 iau, the subjugated Indian, and the barbarous African slave, were all made 
 free and equal just about one generation, or thirty-t(vvo years ago; by a 
 single decree, to meet what was considered "a military necessity. '' More 
 than half of the whole population is already mixed blooded ; and just as 
 amalgamation advances, degradation deepens; anarchy prevails; laws, 
 constitutions, and the ballot box are a mockery ; wave after wave of mili- 
 tary despotism has left that Republic, of more than eight million souls, on 
 the fairest region under heaven, for the acquisition of wealth and glory, 
 
10 
 
 without money, without credit, without commerce, without union, without 
 religion, until at length the ambition of Spain, herself, seeks to remand 
 the abject people to their old repudiated thraldom. 
 
 These are some providential indications beside us, that neither slavery 
 perpetuated, for its own sake, nor slavery abolished, before its subjects are 
 educated for freedom, will comport with the determination of God our 
 Maker, in "the times before appointed," for the African people in these 
 United States. It is slavery at school, which he intends, in allowing slavery 
 at all in such a nation as this — at school, for a limited time to be measured 
 by the bondmen's own susceptibilities — at school, in the bosom of that- 
 Christian civilization which speaks the English language and its idioms of 
 regulated liberty — at school, with an obligation on the masters to be their 
 teachers, and to hasten the tuition — at school, for all the world besides, to 
 follow this tutelage ; not with a similar oppression as in these Noi'thern 
 States, which makes the freedman despised among freemen, as long as he 
 differs in color ; nor yet with an alloy of the dominant race, which his con- 
 stitution repels, and his prejudice abhors ; but with that inevitable exodus 
 from the house of bondage, to a land that is their own, which colonization 
 proposes to guide and furnish, and succor and defend. 
 
 III. This leads me to the third point in the teaching of the text — that 
 special providence which fixes the place of each people on the face of the 
 earth, "the bounds of their habitation." The most obvious proof of this, 
 in regard to the people of which we speak at present, and one which forces 
 itself upon the candor of all unprejudiced men, is the stamp of features, 
 and structure of skin, which God has made to dwell within the tropics of 
 our globe. The longest line of descent from the slave, as originally im- 
 ported, has not altered these claims of our equator upon her sable sons 
 and daughtei\s ; nor failed to remind us, that their dispersion over North 
 America is really a forced migration, even in the sunny South; and much 
 more in the Boreal frosts of Canada. Stupor, and squalor, rheumatism, 
 and consumption, prey upon these exiles, just in proportion as they ascend 
 our latitudes ; even with all the animation that freedom, whether allowed 
 or snatched, can impart to their nature. No one, it seems to me, who 
 watches the negro, anywhere upon our temperate zone, in the dead of 
 
11 
 
 winter, can help a surmise, that the God of nature has another destination 
 in store for the development of his constitutional energies. 
 
 But Africa needs him, still more than he need- Africa. She stretches 
 forth her hands, not for the races, that can but touch her shore, and could 
 but subjugate her people; but for the return of her own children, to the 
 latest generations. She says, in her own peculiar sense, to the North give 
 up, to the South keep not back, bring my sons from far and ray daughters 
 from the ends of the earth. That poor mother of slaves came out of the 
 original chaos, a solitary continent ; which of all other divisions of the 
 globe, is the least susceptible of benefit from strangers. If you look at 
 her shape on the map of the world, you see it rounded and concentrated 
 upon itself; without peninsulas, and inland seas, entering from the ocean, 
 with the reach of commerce and its civilizing influence to her inmost 
 recesses, showing that nothing can redeem and exalt her, but forces from 
 within, the attainment of art and science, and religion, by her own returned 
 and indigenous populations. She has but one mile of coast for every six 
 hundred and twenty-three miles of surface; while Europe has one mile of 
 coast for every hundred and fifty-six miles of surface — evincing that the 
 advantage of Europe, in emerging from barbarism to the glory of Christian 
 civilization, is four times as great, by the very lines of the earth, which 
 become "the bounds of her habitation." 
 
 And it is not. surely, because the vast interior of Africa is a sterile 
 waste, that her mighty contour fences off, in this way, the keels and canvas 
 of the nations. Discoveries every year, by Living-tone, Barth, Burton, 
 Andersson, and other truthful adventurers, prove that her soil is rich beyond 
 comparison, that her rivers are deep enough and long enough to bear the 
 freight of empires on their bosom; and in short, that she needs only the 
 elevation of man by the interaction of men, who can stand her suns and 
 breathe her vapours, to become the garden of this globe, and bless all the 
 ends of the earth with her inexhaustible abundance. 
 
 It is the land of promise at this moment of sublunary time. Discoveries 
 have exhaused the new world. This hemisphere is booked within and 
 without by an indefatigable topography, which henceforth may rest, till 
 the planet itself is changed. But Africa now fixes on herself that curious 
 and restless and excited gaze, which America has held, for three centuries 
 
12 
 
 and a half, and which has never failed in history to draw after it the tides 
 of immigration, and the utmost energies of human enterprize. Shall the 
 instincts of humanity be powerless, because it is an old world that is now 
 thrown open to enlightened men ? Shall the migratory impulse of manly 
 souls be repressed, because a mother, instead of a daughter, pleads, and 
 the plea reaches from ten thousand cemeteries of ancestral pride, for one 
 race alone to return, and take the last El Dorado, which the measuring 
 line of man's adventure can reach upon the face of the earth ? 
 
 Conceive it possible that when Columbus, Raleigh, and Hudson, had 
 reported this continent of ours to the people of Europe, some intimation 
 had been given, that only one particular race of that continent could live 
 and thrive in this one — some intimation but half as palpable as that which 
 designates the black man for Africa; think you, that particular people 
 would have hesitated to venture on the magnificent inheritance which God 
 had given to them alone ? Would they not have risen up in a day and 
 rushed upon their destination here until not a soul was left to linger, where 
 any other race competed for the bounds of a habitation ? And can it be, 
 that even if the black man were equal to the white man here in social, 
 civil, and political advantages, he would stay an hour to compete for 
 places and positions, when empires of wealth and happiness and glory on 
 the earth, are thrown open to him yonder without a rival ? 
 
 Let it not be said that he returns to a land of reprobation. There is 
 no curse on Africa, to preclude the utmost grandeur aud felicity, in the 
 future of her races. Egypt may have a doom still resting upon her, and 
 Lybia, Numidia, and Mauritania, all the Northern shore, from the Nile to 
 the Straits of Hercules; wherever the Gospel was spread, and then 
 extinguished by man. But no curse ever yet resulted on that glowing- 
 tropical belt where we urge the black man to go with the light of Christian 
 civilization. No history is there, to bode some viol of unexpiated wrath, 
 which buried empires had been too frail to suffer and exhaust. All is fresh 
 in the hope, which returns with these captives. The race now lifts up its 
 head, for the time appointed when its turn shall come to wield the rod of 
 empire. 
 
 " Muse! take the harp of prophecy : Behold ! 
 The glories of a brighter age unfold : 
 Friends of the outcast ! view the accomplished plan, 
 The Negro towering to the height of man." 
 
13 
 
 The last hope of humanity is not fighting here for existence, as we are 
 often told. Freedom lias another home. She has never yel spread her 
 tents along the equator. Let her eagles gaze upon the sun. where the sun 
 is at home, with his perennial fruits and flowers. Who knows, but that 
 a mighty tropical Republic is just what this reeling planet needs, to make 
 it steady and peaceful; to fix the balance of power at the centre of the 
 earth, and thence govern to the poles with a reign of order and righteous- 
 ness. 
 
 The experiment is made. Finley, Caldwell, and Key, were true pro- 
 phets. And so was their first agent, the sainted and heroic Mills, who 
 just forty-four years ago this month, said, as he was embarking in this 
 city on the ship Electra, "we go, to lay the foundation of a free and in- 
 dependent Empire, on the coast of poor degraded Africa." The Republic 
 of Liberia is at this moment the most promising and prosperous govern- 
 ment in the world. It has copied all that is wise and good in our institu- 
 tions and history. It has avoided the pernicious evil. Instead of touching 
 the aborigines of the land, only to defraud, debase, and exterminate them, 
 it has embraced them, with a quick and redeeming civilization, which was 
 never equalled in the chronicles of human progress. Instead of starting 
 on its high career, with the seeds of dissolution in its own bosom, pestilent 
 theories, to destroy it in the vigor of youth, or necessitate the pangs of 
 another birth, before its manhood is reached, it has waited in its weakness, 
 for the solution of every problem, for the sifting of every objection, for the 
 detection of every bane, until at length it moves, without one fear of fail- 
 ure ; and every great power on the globe stands by to give it speed and 
 safety. Never did any colony make a beginning so hopeful and auspi- 
 cious. It has had better health, than either Plymouth or .lamest own had, 
 at the beginning ; better agriculture, than either Carolina or Louisiana 
 had upon their virgin soils in the bush ; better trade and commerce, than 
 either New York or Philadelphia had. in the first forty years of mercantile 
 adventure; better education than Massachusetts or Connecticut had, in 
 the first half century of their institutions ; better Christianity, in its free- 
 dom, simplicity, and power combined, than any people ever had in the 
 cradle since the days of the Apostles ; these are hut some of the first 
 things in the destiny of this young black Republic 
 
14 
 
 Nor is it a mere handful of freed men, aping the usages of their quondam 
 masters, and existing by the sufferance of the nations, as an act of mag- 
 nanimity towards an insignificant people. Already it is conceded that 
 the state papers of the Liberian President compare well with any similar 
 documents of President or Premier, in the most cultivated cabinets of 
 Christendom. Already it is felt, that this infant government is as much 
 a necessity in the family of nations, as any other independence on the face 
 of the globe. It is needed, to unlock the gates of a commerce, the most 
 rich and varied, that ever yet ladened the ships of the merchant. It is 
 needed, to stifle the most atrocious robbery and wrong, that ever cor- 
 rupted the welfare of nations — that accursed slave trade, which it has cost 
 the nations ten times more, on every other six hundred miles of African 
 coast, to repress by their squadrons, than all that has ever yet been ex- 
 pended for Liberia ; and even then the work has not been done half so 
 well. Look at the most recent facts of this nature. Cargoes of recaptured 
 slaves, Congoes and others, amounting in all to some forty-five hundred 
 souls, one third of the whole citizenship of Liberia, have been cast upon 
 its lap, in less than a twelvemonth ; and already, "they go to their schools, 
 crowd their churches, and adopt their dress, speak their English," marry 
 their daughters, and stand redeemed in all the dignity of Christian families. 
 And instead of depressing themselves they only gather fresh energies from 
 this rapid assimilation; and President Benson declares, they could receive 
 twenty thousand in this manner without detriment to their own civilization. 
 Verily, here it is, that a nation is born in a day ; and here it is, that all 
 nations must guaranty enduring nationality, if they would keep the pulse 
 of humanity beating at the rate of sound health and long life to all living 
 flesh. 
 
 And it must be added, that the only great power on earth which has 
 hitherto refused to acknowledge the independence of Liberia, is really the 
 most dependent of all, upon the success and aggrandizement of that young- 
 Republic. Never did a mother so soon begin to lean upon a daughter for 
 aid and comfort, as the United States are compelled to lean upon Liberia, 
 for ultimate help and relief — cure in her sickness — a staff in her tottering — 
 a refuge in her tempest and consternation. 
 
 Such are some of the attractions, with which colonization would per- 
 
15 
 
 suade the free colored people, to return to the land of their fathers; and 
 of their own choice, concur with the manifest determination of heaven, to 
 fix there the bounds of their habitation. But even without such attractions, 
 there is a necessity that they return — a compulsion of circumstances, which 
 nothing relieves, but the prospect and plans of this benevolent agency. 
 The black man cannot stay here. The South will not allow him to re- 
 main, with his shackles broken off. All her statesmen, from that day of 
 Washington and Jefferson, when slavery was considered a canker in the 
 body politic, to this day of Davis and Stephens, when it is claimed to be 
 the very basis of the best reconstruction — all are of one mind, in regard to 
 the manumitted negro ; that he must go from them; for the sake of their 
 own safety, at well as his beneficial enlargement. The House of Delegates 
 in Virginia signalized the last day of the last century, with a resolution to 
 this effect. And all the wise, and the great, and the good men, who have 
 ever appeared in the South as the negroes' friends — Thornton, Jefferson, 
 Madison, Monroe, Pendleton, Wythe, Lee, Marshall, Clay, Crawford, — 
 all, without exception, have insisted that the free blacks must be removed, 
 and colonized by themselves. Some thought of St. Domingo ; some of 
 Louisiana, beyond the Mississippi ; some of Sierra Leone, upon the Af- 
 rican shore ; where Great Britain had made the first experiment of settling 
 the colored "contrabands," who had fled to her ranks in the war of our 
 independence. And at length the very same great anti-slavery mind that 
 had incorporated in the first draught of the Declaration of Independence, 
 the entail of slavery upon us, by the British crown, as one of the worst 
 enormities in the whole catalogue of colonial wrongs — Mr. Jefferson, 
 eleven years before Liberia was purchased, and five years before a Society 
 was formed, gave to his country the thought, of a separate American 
 settlement in Africa. Would, that the next great thought, of the next 
 greatest Virginian, had been equally oracular ; that of Chief Justice 
 Marshall, who wished and advised, that all the lands which Virginia had 
 given the United States, worth $200,000,000, should be given, to the 
 whole extent of their proceeds, for the purposes of colonization ! Had 
 this been done, the legions of the great North Western territory would 
 not this day be marshalled in deadly feud against that mother of States, 
 and the hosts of rebellion gathered on her bosom. 
 
16 
 
 But the North is intolerant as the South, to the negro freeman. The 
 last twenty years of legislation and conventions at the North have piled 
 up more enactments against the equal rights of the Africans, than any 
 century of intolerant legislation, in the dark ages of Europe, ever accumu- 
 lated against the persecuted Jew. And even where he is allowed to 
 live at all, how galling the disfranchisement, and how menial the thrift, 
 we compel him to abide by ! Inexorable caste precludes him from every 
 thing, that kindles the aspirations of freemen — from all rank and honor 
 and power, and even eminent usefulness — from everything but the ac- 
 quisition of pelf, by the meanest handicrafts of life. 
 
 Nothing but colonization in Africa, will open a great and effectual 
 door to voluntary manumission at the South. Nothing but colonization 
 in Africa, will open a great and effectual door to voluntary justice, at the 
 North. The master will not emancipate his chattel, to be spurned where- 
 ever he may roam. The abolitionist will not receive the freedman, if he 
 be a black beneficiary, to equal rights, anywhere on this side of the At- 
 lantic. And thus it is that He, who has determined these "times before 
 appointed," has also determined, by the manifest movements of necessity 
 on every hand, "the bounds of their habitation" to be in the home of their 
 fathers. 
 
 IY. And who, that loves the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, will 
 not acquiesce in all necessities, which go to spread " the glorious Gospel 
 of the blessed God ?" This is the aim, this the consummation of all that 
 special Providence, which brings good out of evil, in working for every 
 " afflicted and poor people." If in the times of ignorance, at which God 
 winked, the constant indication of unity in creating and a special Provi- 
 dence in ordering the destiny of every people, was enough to excite the 
 benighted heathen to seek after God, when there was but a chance, "if 
 haply," they might find him, how much more should such a demonstra- 
 tion now, of a common blood, and a special care of the Most High for 
 such a trodden race as this, awake the world to seek after him, when 
 there is a perfect certainty of finding him ? Along with the Gospel, as it 
 goes with redeeming light to Africa, will be the story of another exodus, 
 a New Testament exodus, for the world to hear, and for the ransomed of 
 that continent to teach their children and children's children, to all gene- 
 
17 
 
 rations. How vast a theme of adoring gratitude, and love, and obliga- 
 tion, and instruction too, did the deliverance of Israel from bondage in 
 Egypl add to the precious light of revealed religion which they carried 
 back to Palestine! The preface to the ten commandments, God's eter- 
 nal law, was itself couched, at Eoreb, in the fact of this their special 
 deliverance. Migrations are the best of missions. Even if the while 
 man could live as a missionary on the African coast, which is impossible, 
 beyond the average of four years; even if the returning sons of Africa 
 should prove incompetent forever, to make the grammars and translate 
 the Scriptures into vernacular tongues, which is incredible, if not absurd; 
 stiil would it be a larger and better and dearer Christianity, which eman- 
 cipated hands of Africans take home, than any the white man could 
 give; being illustrated with this grand development of divin 
 and faithfulness to the tribes of Ethiopia. 
 
 Its missionary aspects alone are enough to enlist the ardor and liberality 
 of every Christian man, for this cause of colonization in Africa. Its 
 patriotism, its philanthropy, its worldly wisdom, its whole asscntl >l: 
 merits and values, the rarest and best that ever combined in any so 
 of man's organization, have been so palpable and imposing, upon the 
 minds of its friends, and the passions of its enemies, that its grandest 
 claim of all, for which alone it should lie cherished and promoted, if 
 thing besides in its history had been foolishness, to this hour, has 
 been strangely unappreciated. In its day of small things, for the spread 
 of his kingdom and tic knowledge of himself, behold "what. God hath 
 wrought!" Devil worship and brutal violence have already (led fr< a 
 hundred miles of the benighted coast ; and churches, and schools, ami a 
 college now dot the whole conquest ; and invite, with wonderful success, 
 two hundred and fifty thousand heathen, under its jurisdiction, lo accepl 
 the light and liberty of the Gospel. And far beyond the selvage of that 
 evangelized and evangelizing shore, the preachers of Jesus Christ have 
 penetrated the interior, and have already been hailed with welcome, by the 
 barbarous idolaters; who swarm upon its fertile hills and valleys. 
 
 Let it be remembered, that the majority of American Africans in 
 Liberia, are emancipated slaves from the Southern States. The prouder 
 2 
 
18 
 
 intelligence of Northern freemen among the blacks, infatuated with the 
 dream of attaining equal rights on this continent, has hitherto disdained, 
 for the most part, the benefit of colonization. It is the poor slave that has 
 done this great thing for Africa, " whereof we are glad. " And if so, is not 
 his education for which alone, as we have seen, the Almighty Maker allows 
 him to he in bondage here, far advanced ? The proportion of Protestant 
 Christianity, as indicated by the number of its professors in the United 
 States, is just about as large at this moment among the blacks, as among 
 the whites — about one for every eight souls. This, at the present fearful 
 crisis, demands attention, as a marvellous indication of the Most High. 
 Take up the whole African population of these embattled States, both free 
 and slave, the four millions and an half, and put them down, just as they 
 now are, upon the continent of Africa, and that desert would " rejoice and 
 blossom as the rose.'' Larger than the whole population of the American 
 colonies when we achieved our independence — larger than the whole popu- 
 lation of church members, when our Christianity undertook to pervade this 
 continent, is now this leaven, so disturbing to us, and destructive to our 
 peace ; but large enough and pure enough to be cast now with trans- 
 forming power upon that mighty lump — the whole continent of Africa. 
 Colonization, under God, in this dark hour, is the only hope of America. 
 If the Federal Constitution is to be vindicated and re-established, and a 
 cordon stronger than ever is to be drawn around the existing area of 
 slavery, this cause alone, so clear to patriotic men of the South in the past 
 generation, will penetrate that circle and again call from the bosom of 
 oppression nearly two to one, that she can find at the North, for the home 
 she has provided in Liberia; and again obtain from the dyiug slave-holder 
 the munificent bequest of the whole plantation — the slaves to go, and the 
 lands to bear the cost, of preparing, and conveying, and settling them. 
 But if it be otherwise, in the purpose of Him, who "hath determined the 
 times before appointed "__ ifthe "Contrabands of War ''shall be numerous 
 even as the whole population of slaves in the revolted States; if millions 
 were to be released to-morrow, and come trooping to the side of Federal 
 power ami victory — Colonization is the only scheme within the whole 
 compass of man's imagination which would not be confounded with such 
 
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 •«i result. It has room for them all. It has work for them all. It has 
 all things ready — foundations laid — methods matured — instrumentalities 
 organized — experiments perfectly assured — aims as elevated as the ever- 
 lasting Gospel itself; and it only asks for half the money which this 
 dreadful war will cost, to relieve the country of its fatal causes forever. 
 
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