CURSORY REVIEW 
 
 OP 
 
 "AMERICAN APOLOGY FOR AMERICAN 
 ACCESSION TO NEGRO SLAVERY." 
 
 BY JAMES GRAHAME, ESQ. 
 
GIFT OF 
 EVGENE MEYEt,JR. 
 
WHO IS TO BLAME? 
 
 OR, 
 
 CURSORY REVIEW 
 
 OP 
 
 AMERICAN APOLOGY FOR AMERICAN ACCESSION 
 TO NEGRO SLAVERY." 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES GRAHAME, ESQ. 
 
 LL.D. OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, MEMBER OF THE ROYAL ACADEMIC SOCIETY OF NANTF.8, 
 
 CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 
 
 HONORARY MEMBER OF THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF GEORGIA, 
 
 AND AUTHOR OF THE HISTORY OF "THE UNITED STATES 
 
 OF NORTH AMERICA." 
 
 No crime so bold, but would be understood 
 A real, or at least a seeming good : 
 Who fears not to do ill, yjt fears the narre; 
 And, free from sonscience, is a slave to fame." 
 
 SIR JOHN DENHAM. 
 
 LONDON: 
 SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 
 
 1842. 
 
London : 
 
 Printed by STEWART and MURRAY, 
 Old Bailey 
 
TO 
 
 THOMAS CLARKSON, 
 
 THE FRIEND AND BENEFACTOR OF THE WHOLE HUMAN RACE, 
 
 RESTORER OF THE VIOLATED RIGHTS OF AFRICA 
 
 AND THE TARNISHED HONOUR OF EUROPE, 
 
 WHO 
 HAS ACHIEVED THE GLORY NOT OF SLAYING THOUSANDS, BUT OF 
 
 FREEING AND BLESSING 
 TENS OF THOUSANDS OF HIS FELLOW MEN, 
 
 THESE SHEETS ARE DEDICATED, 
 
 AS 
 
 A SLIGHT EXPRESSION OF 
 THE HIGHEST VENERATION AND ESTEEM, 
 
 BY 
 
 THE SON OF HIS 
 OLDEST SURVIVING FRIEND AND COADJUTOR. 
 
 Nantes, June 1842. 
 
 349613 
 
CURSORY REVIEW. 
 
 " IF there be," said that generous friend of America 
 and of human nature, Thomas Day, (chiefly known 
 as the author of Sandford and Merton,) " if there 
 be an object truly ridiculous in the universe, it is an 
 American patriot signing resolutions in favour of 
 liberty with the one hand, and with the other, brand 
 ishing a whip over his affrighted slaves." These 
 words express the sentiment of all civilized men 
 except the Americans themselves who, in refer 
 ence to the system of negro slavery which they con 
 tinue to uphold, so far from admitting the reproach 
 of peculiar iniquity, boldly challenge a right to 
 peculiar indulgence. In their Defence to the world, 
 they allege discriminating circumstances from which 
 they deduce in their own favour a plea of entire 
 
moral exculpation appealing to a dire necessity 
 that makes them the blameless doers of devilish 
 deeds. 
 
 In no age or country have tyrannical invaders 
 and usurpers of other men's rights been without 
 apologies and apologists. Tears have been shed 
 to palliate the rapacity of Xerxes, and disguise the 
 ambition of Cromwell. But time-born Truth has 
 always unmasked the hypocrite and his hypocrisy, and 
 disclosed the falsehood of the allegations on which 
 the oppressor sought to rear his unsound and ini 
 quitous plea. Perhaps the well known fable of the 
 wolf and lamb would be rendered truer to nature, 
 at least to the new disclosures of nature that the 
 new world has produced, if the wolf were made to 
 say to his victim, " I am sorry to destroy you ; but 
 can neither restrain nor condemn the appetite which 
 I indulge. That appetite was awakened in me by 
 the power and artifice of a stronger brute that once 
 domineered over myself : and though I have exerted 
 sufficient vigour to reject his tyranny over me, yet 
 I feel quite unable to forego the evil appetite 
 against yourself which he taught me, or to over 
 come the prejudice against you which his lessons 
 impressed on my innocent, reluctant, but tenacious 
 mind." 
 
The Americans, with continual application of 
 flattering unction to their own souls, and osten 
 tatious challenge of the world's admiration, plume 
 themselves on being, of all the nations who have 
 flourished in ancient or in modern times, the 
 people by whom civil and political liberty has been 
 most justly and nobly appreciated, most gallantly 
 achieved, and most faithfully and successfully cultr 
 vated, preserved, and extended. To the plain un- 
 corrupted understandings of honest men in every 
 other country, this American claim appears seriously 
 impeached in truth and value by the actual subsist 
 ence of negro slavery in America ; and the Ame 
 ricans are everywhere taxed with the disgrace of 
 peculiar treachery to those generous principles of 
 which they profess themselves the most ardent and 
 praiseworthy votaries. 
 
 Manifold and various are the defensive pleas by 
 which Americans attempt to repel, elude, or exte 
 nuate the heavy charge. The citizens of those 
 States, members of the Federal Union, within whose 
 territory negro slavery has been actually abolished, 
 protest that their conduct is not only irreproachable, 
 but deserves the praise of generous sacrifice of their 
 private interests on the altar of universal justice and 
 liberty: a protestation of which I shall presently do 
 
8 
 
 my endeavour to ascertain the value. They further 
 protest against any responsibility for the actual 
 retention of negro slavery within the Southern con 
 federated States, on the plea that by the con 
 stitutional compact of their National Union, the 
 federal government is debarred from all interference 
 with the social economy and domestic concerns 
 of the particular provinces, to whose local govern 
 ments respectively is reserved the paramount and 
 exclusive power of regulating such matters within 
 the limits of their own separate and independent 
 jurisdiction. They claim at once the praise of piety 
 for disallowing within their private limits a practice 
 repugnant to the will of God and the rights of man ; 
 and the praise of justice for their faithful adherence 
 ta a voluntary compact that blends their national 
 name, character, and power with the support and 
 perpetuation of that practice. On the other hand, 
 the citizens of those States in which negro slavery 
 still subsists, repel the charge against themselves in 
 a tone as confident as that of their slaveless col 
 leagues, but with greater variety of pleading. At 
 once seeking their own vindication, and retorting 
 the implied censure conveyed in the language of 
 their national though not provincial colleagues, they 
 contend that negro labour is essential to the pecu- 
 
9 
 
 liar culture of the soil whieh they possess ; and that 
 negro slave-labour, after having been employed in 
 every one of the older American States (even in 
 those whose soils demanded preferably the labour of 
 free and white men) has never been abandoned 
 in any one where the whites could retain it without 
 manifest disadvantage to themselves. Some of 
 them protest that, deploring the existence of 
 slavery as a hated outrage on human nature, they 
 acquiesce in it as a rooted and irremovable evil, of 
 which the blame (if there be any) mainly lies with 
 the Almighty, in creating its necessity by creating 
 such climes and other circumstances of such potent 
 invitation as to render the temptation to the practice 
 irresistible by any exertion of the virtuous force 
 which he has imparted to man. I have heard many 
 of these persons profess, with every appearance of 
 vehement sincerity, their desire to discover some 
 practicable plan of abolishing negro slavery ; but 
 have almost invariably found that they required the 
 impracticability of redressing long and enormous 
 injustice without any atoning sacrifice or reparatory 
 expence, of restoring and elevating, as if by magic, 
 and without any surrender of interest or convenience, 
 the rights and the dignity of a numerous race of 
 men whom they and their fathers have ruined and 
 
10 
 
 degraded. Others of them, and these by no means 
 the least respected, enlightened, and zealous of 
 their party, acquitting both their Creator and them 
 selves from blame, courageously defend the system 
 of negro slavery, and challenge not the indulgence 
 but the applause of the world for their retention of 
 it. They represent it as enhancing the sense and 
 the value of liberty in the white masters, and foster 
 ing the dull and undeveloped intelligence of the 
 black slaves ; * as establishing between different 
 classes of men patriarchal relationships, liable in 
 deed to abuse, but of which the proper and reason 
 able use opens new fields of virtue and happiness to 
 mankind ; and as enlarging the physical as well as the 
 moral welfare of the human race, by cheaply supplying 
 
 * I am far from classing the American writer Bancroft (though a 
 systematic flatterer and soother of every reigning prejudice of his 
 countrymen) with this tribe of reasoners. Yet we find him employ 
 ing such language as this : " To the Southern colonies Providence 
 has entrusted the guardianship and the education of the coloured 
 race. In the midst of the horrors of slavery and the slave trade, the 
 masters have in part at least performed the office of advancing and 
 civilizing the negro." Bancroft's United States, chap. 24. This 
 writer refers to the general prevalence of slavery in the world, as if 
 there were safety (for America at least) in following a multitude to 
 do evil, and to its prevalence in patriarchal times; as the Jews 
 defended to our Saviour their practice of unrestricted] divorce, by 
 the concession which " the hardness of their hearts" (as He told 
 them) extorted from the statutes of Moses. 
 
H 
 
 those tropical luxuries and commodities which only 
 negro labour is competent to produce. Negro sla 
 very, they contend, is, of all existing human institu 
 tions, the one which, rightly used, has the strongest 
 tendency to promote the glory of God and the 
 dignity and felicity of men. They have certainly 
 found a new field for the exercise and expatiation 
 of the human faculties, by a brave bound over the 
 ordinary limits of impudence, absurdity, and im 
 piety. 
 
 But to come to the topic which mainly engages 
 my thoughts at present there is one defensive plea, 
 in which all classes of reasoners in America are 
 united : that negro slavery, whether regarded as a 
 good, an evil, or a mixed institution, is a circum 
 stance in the lot of the Americans not created by 
 themselves or their American forefathers, but thrust 
 upon them against their wills by the abused parental 
 power of Great Britain during their national pupil 
 age, and fostered to its present mature and vigorous 
 growth among them by the same authority exerted 
 in contempt of their earnest and oft-repeated com 
 plaints and deprecations. It is strange that no 
 British statesman has ever thought it worth his while 
 to ascertain how far the blame thus imputed to his 
 country is well founded. 
 
12 
 
 Before we inquire into the truth of the plea, let 
 us attempt to ascertain its precise meaning. 
 
 The Americans do not pretend that Great Britain 
 either employed or threatened to employ physical 
 force in order to engage their fathers to appropriate 
 negro slaves. No degree of ignorance and credu 
 lity within the calculation of mortal effrontery could 
 credit such an allegation. What the Americans 
 assert is, that Britain authorized and encouraged 
 her merchants to tempt them with offered cargoes of 
 negroes a temptation whose first approach they 
 would fain have forbidden ; whose continued assault 
 they dreaded and detested ; but whose seductivein- 
 fluence proved invariably too strong for their virtu 
 ous forbearance. The plea, then, stripped of the 
 vague rhetoric in which it is customarily clothed, im 
 ports not that Britain forced her colonial offspring 
 to become slaveholders, but that she facilitated (as 
 undeniably she did) their acquisition or at least their 
 extension of this tyrannical power. Whatever effect 
 this apologetic plea may produce in America, I be 
 lieve that even the most credulous ear on which it 
 can fall in European and impartial audience, is of 
 fended by the perception that it is pushed by its 
 professors a great deal too far ; and that it can no 
 more justify the Americans than a straw can support 
 
13 
 
 a drowning man, or the guilt of a thief can excuse 
 the receiver of the stolen goods. " There hath no 
 temptation taken you but such as is common to 
 man,'* is a text of holy writ which confronts with 
 absolute denial that universal pretence of offending 
 men that the temptation they underwent was pecu 
 liar and irresistible. And another sentence of the 
 sacred volume confirms the same truth, in pronoun 
 cing that " Every man is tempted when he is drawn 
 away of his own lust and enticed. "f 
 
 The latest exhibition that has been made of this 
 plea proceeded from certain Irish emigrants settled 
 at Pottsville in the United States, and to whom 
 their renowned countryman Daniel O'Connell had 
 addressed a letter, beseeching the exertion of their 
 influence towards the extinction of negro slavery in 
 America. In answer to this letter, they have pub" 
 lished a Memorial or Remonstrance disclaiming 
 every other opinion respecting negro slavery save 
 that which is current among native Americans ; re 
 pelling as an outrage on their personal dignity 
 O'Connell's assertion that white and black men are 
 each others equals and brethren ; and protesting 
 that " negro slavery is a burden entailed on America 
 by the tyranny and injustice of Great Britain." The 
 
 * 1 Cor. x. 13. t James i. 14. 
 
14 
 
 language of these men proves nothing but the tenor 
 of the information they have received in their 
 adopted country, and their own consciousness of the 
 danger of withstanding the stream of public senti 
 ment there. With the too common fate of Ame 
 rican colonists, they find that the deliverance they have 
 attained in America from European maltreatment of 
 themselves, is attended with the most powerful temp 
 tation to inflict or support in America the maltreat 
 ment of other men. Fugitives from oppression in 
 the old world, they have become partakers with the 
 oppressor in the new. So dangerous indeed is it to 
 express in America, even within the States where 
 slavery has been abolished, any sentiment unpalatable 
 to the existing slaveholders, that Dr. Channing of 
 Boston, long the most admired and popular writer 
 in America, has been loaded with insult and menace 
 by the planters of the Southern States for his very 
 temperate essay on the lawfulness of negro slavery : 
 and the venerable, accomplished, and excellent Dr. 
 Quincy, President of Harvard University, in pub 
 lishing the Memoirs of his noble-minded father, the 
 proto-martyr of American Independence, has judged 
 it prudent to suppress every passage in his father's 
 journal remarking on the influence exercised by 
 slavery on the social condition of the States where 
 
15 
 
 in his time it chiefly prevailed. The authors of that 
 splendid work, " The National Portrait Gallery of 
 Distinguished Americans," even in noticing with 
 praise the eloquence and energy with which Mr. 
 Calhoun has resisted every attempt to engage the 
 federal government to attempt the cure of negro 
 slavery, have not ventured to specify the object to 
 which his exertions were directed ; but merely refer 
 to it as a matter deeply interesting to the feelings 
 and interests of the people of the United States. 
 
 It would be easy to multiply instances of the 
 attempt to exculpate America by criminating Britain. 
 I regret to find the pious, liberal, and generally 
 well-informed George Ellis of Massachusetts thus 
 express himself in the oration he pronounced to his 
 fellow-citizens on the 17th of June 1841, in com 
 memoration of the battle of Bunker's Hill : " Let 
 it ever be borne in mind that negro slavery, for the 
 sin and inconsistency of which we were so severely 
 satirized during our war of Independence let it 
 ever be borne in mind that negro slavery was intro 
 duced into these colonies and perpetuated here by 
 the influence of the mother country, in defiance of 
 the frequently and earnestly expressed wishes of the 
 colonists."* In this attempt to soothe the con- 
 
 * Ellis's Oration, p. 10. 
 
16 
 
 sciences of his countrymen with the persuasion 
 that the negro slavery by which their republican 
 commonwealth is polluted, infers on their part 
 rather luckless blemish than moral guilt, rather 
 (sad choice !) the injury of rape, than the infamy 
 of prostitution, the courtesy of Mr. Ellis has 
 softened his expression of sentiments which I pre 
 sume he has derived from his preceptor George 
 Bancroft, the eloquent and ingenious though rash 
 and inaccurate historian of America a man so 
 proudly superior to the weakness of ancestral pride, 
 that he takes pleasure in vilifying the land of his 
 fathers, and not only gloatingly dwells on every re 
 proach with which British honour has ever been 
 assailed, but indulges so much exaggeration and in 
 vention in this labour of depraved love, that even 
 American criticism has reprobated the virulence of 
 his American prejudice.* 
 
 The most elaborate defensive pleading, both in 
 this and in every other strain of advocacy in behalf of 
 
 * See North American Review for January, 1841. As a specimen 
 of the accuracy of which Mr. Bancroft makes such glowing boast, 
 take his notice of the Scottish Rebellion of 1745, on which occasion, 
 says he, the vices of British character and society " left an oppor 
 tunity to the Pretender to invade Great Britain, to conquer Scotland, 
 and to advance as far as Culloden" He is just as accurate in the 
 statements by which he imputes negro slavery and every other 
 American iniquity to British influence. 
 
17 
 
 the Americans that I have ever met with, is the 
 production of the anonymous author of a pamphlet 
 published at London in 1835, and bearing the 
 title of " A Letter to Lord Brougham on the 
 subject of American Slavery, by an American," 
 replete with compliment to the learned Lord, pane 
 gyric of America, and crimination of Great Britain. 
 I know not if, in selecting Lord Brougham as the 
 subject of his courtesy and the expected patron of 
 his pleading, the writer was biassed by any reference 
 to his Lordship's first literary production, the " In 
 quiry into the Colonial Policy of the Powers of 
 Europe," in which the necessity of negro labour on 
 the domains of the white proprietors of tropical soil 
 is maintained, and the merits of negro slavery (by 
 many persons confounded and deemed identical 
 with negro labour) very daintily handled. But 
 certainly the generous efforts by which for many 
 years past Lord Brougham has signalized his un 
 compromising zeal for African freedom, seem to 
 render him a very unsuitable patron of the client 
 who has claimed his countenance. As the pamph 
 let, however, was put into my hands by an American 
 gentleman most honourably distinguished in the 
 walks of science and philanthropy, who bade me 
 read there the defence of his country and as I 
 
18 
 
 have heard it characterized with similar confidence 
 of eulogium by other Americans of no mean con 
 sideration, I have devoted some time to a careful 
 perusal of its contents, and shall now devote some 
 more to an honest exposition of the impression that 
 its statements and arguments have produced on me. 
 The strong interest long awakened in my mind by 
 the grand experiment, so interesting to human 
 nature, which is now under process of trial in 
 America, has for many years attracted my attention 
 to all the sources of American history : and I very 
 much doubt if any living man knows more of the 
 early history of America than myself. Other men, 
 indeed, may question the extent and accuracy of my 
 researches, or the impartiality of my survey. But, 
 qualified as I am, or at least believe myself to be, I 
 have no hesitation in declaring of the pamphlet to 
 which I have alluded, that it is a production more 
 disgraceful to American literature and character (in 
 so far as it is to be esteemed the representative of 
 either) than any other literary performance with 
 which I am acquainted. 
 
 " It is my purpose, my Lord," says the American 
 pleader, addressing Lord Brougham, " to endeavour 
 to demonstrate that the people of the United States 
 are neither now nor ever have been contented with 
 
19 
 
 the existence of slavery among them." " I ask, my 
 Lord, who it was that introduced slavery into the 
 then colonies of Great Britain, and imposed and 
 riveted the chains of slavery upon them ? [One 
 might suppose the writer to be complaining that his 
 countrymen were made slaves, rather than slave 
 owners.] No one knows better than your Lordship 
 does, that it was the British Government. It was from 
 first to last a measure of that Government in order to 
 promote its commerce, and, above all, its navigation 
 interests. It is a statement which needs no proof 
 from me ; for it is known to every one who knows 
 any thing of the history of Great Britain and those 
 colonies." What this writer means by any thing, I 
 cannot pretend to say. But I have rarely found his 
 countrymen well acquainted with the early history 
 of their commonwealth ; and if he himself be not a 
 sheer fabulist and inventor, his own historical know 
 ledge is somewhat less than nothing. " And what 
 was the course pursued by the colonies? they 
 opposed the introduction of negro slaves amongst 
 them. This was done so generally that it may 
 with propriety be said that the opposition was 
 universal. But still the horrid work went on. Some 
 persons were found in the colonies who were willing 
 to buy slaves ; for cupidity is to be found in all 
 
 B2 
 
20 
 
 countries and in every age of the world. By 
 degrees, slavery gained a lodgment in every colony, 
 though the greatest accumulation of it was in the 
 Southern colonies which were less free in their 
 forms of government and more under the control 
 of the British crown than those of the North. Other 
 causes also co-operated to create that accumulation. 
 
 " To the evils of slavery as well as to those of 
 any other sort, people may become gradually ac 
 customed, and even to too great an extent recon 
 ciled. It was so in some measure with the colonies. 
 Stern necessity shut them up to this alternative. 
 But were they entirely contented ? No : they 
 petitioned the government of Great Britain again 
 and again not to allow slavery to be perpetuated 
 amongst them. Virginia did so ; Massachusetts 
 did so ; Pennsylvania did so : others did so. And 
 all would have done so, if they had not been 
 discouraged by the unsuccessful attempts of their 
 sister colonies. The power which turned a deaf 
 ear to the cries of these infant colonies intreating 
 that slavery might not be forced upon them at its 
 commencement, still refused to hear when they 
 besought that it might not be rendered perpetual."* 
 
 If the complimentary tribute of this writer to 
 * " Letter," &c. p. 5 7. 
 
21 
 
 Lord Brougham be aught else than an instance 
 of the vulgar artifice with which a fawning pleader 
 attempts to seduce the ear of a judge if Lord 
 Brougham previously believed or has subsequently 
 acquiesced in the statements thus coupled with 
 an appeal to his name, he is a most ignorant and 
 credulous statesman, remiss to ascertain truth, 
 little acquainted with the history of his country, 
 and little careful of her honour. He needs no 
 protestation from me that the very reverse of all 
 this, is the character which he actually sustains. 
 
 The conduct of Great Britain during her long 
 sanction of the Slave Trade is indefensible. Her 
 government and domestic population were long de 
 ceived by that which forms the only apology that 
 with any show of reason can be pleaded for the 
 origin of the piratical traffic, or the first introduc 
 tion of negro slavery into any country the fal 
 lacious hope that was entertained, that enforced 
 servitude would prove not merely a gentle and 
 transient yoke, but a moral discipline through which 
 the negroes might be conducted to the benefits of 
 knowledge and the blessings of religion. Louis 
 XIII. of France* and Elizabeth Queen of England 
 severally refused to authorize the slave-trade, till 
 
 * See Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade. 
 
22 
 
 they were induced to believe that they would pro 
 mote the temporal and eternal welfare of the 
 negroes by suffering them to be transported as 
 labourers to the European settlements in America 
 and the West Indies. The original admission of 
 the Hebrews into Egypt was an act of benevo 
 lence : and it was only when they had waxed nu 
 merically strong, that they experienced the rigours 
 of bondage. So blinded were the minds of men 
 to the sin and danger of negro slavery, in the com 
 mencement of this practice, that when that most 
 benevolent, intrepid, and uncompromising of Re 
 formers, George Fox, the Quaker Patriarch, found 
 at Barbadoes his fellow sectaries in possession of 
 negro slaves, he merely urged them to treat the 
 negroes with gentleness, to afford them education, 
 and "after certain years of servitude," to make 
 them free.* De Foe, though himself a pious man, 
 and ascribing his own sentiments to his hero Robin 
 son Crusoe, yet represents him as reconciled to the 
 cruel sale of the boy Xury by the purchaser's 
 promise to free him if he became a Christian. 
 Britain trod the same evil and deceptive path that 
 was trodden by every other state, European or 
 American ; and exceeded her competitors in slave- 
 
 * Fox's Journal. 
 
23 
 
 stealing, for the same reason for which she ex 
 celled them in every other branch of what was 
 then esteemed legitimate traffic. But censure 
 of her conduct comes with a very bad grace 
 from her colonial progeny, who greedily absorbed 
 all the cargoes of negro flesh and blood that her 
 merchants or the merchants of other countries ever 
 tendered to their acceptance ; and, as soon as they 
 had formed a domestic commercial navy, became 
 themselves active participants in the vile traffic 
 keenly pursuing the slave trade for many years both 
 prior and posterior to their revolt from British 
 dominion. The behaviour of Britain to her colo 
 nies was unwise and unjust; yet withal, far more 
 liberal than the colonial policy of any other parent 
 state in ancient or in modern times. 
 
 But let us look a little more narrowly into the 
 facts of the case. The first cargo of negro slaves 
 imported into North America, was conveyed by a 
 Dutch vessel in 1620 to Virginia, where they were 
 readily purchased by the planters, without the 
 permission or even the knowledge of the British 
 Government. Indeed this government did not 
 then nor till several years after, exercise the political 
 administration of Virginia, which was originally 
 confided to a numerous society of English gentle- 
 
24 
 
 men established at London. Moreover, the first 
 of the British Statutes of Navigation was not 
 enacted till the Restoration of Charles II. in 1660 : 
 and the slave-trade was not comprehended within 
 the scope and operation of the commercial policy of 
 the British Government till the reign of Queen Anne 
 prior to which negro slavery was established in 
 every one of the American provinces that finally 
 revolted from Britain, of course with the excep 
 tion of Georgia, which was not planted till the 
 year 1733. The number of slaves in every pro 
 vince was regulated by its soil, climate, and other 
 physical circumstances, and not by the degree of 
 its subjection to British control. The Puritan 
 colonists of New England, at a time when their 
 provincial government was practically independent 
 of Great Britain, reduced to slavery the captives 
 whom they took in their wars with the Indians. 
 Maryland and the Carolinas acquired negro slaves 
 while they were subject not to the British crown 
 but to proprietary dominion : and, undeterred by 
 the threats and remonstrances of the British pro 
 prietaries to whom they owed allegiance, the Caro 
 linian planters adopted and long persisted in the 
 practice of kidnapping and enslaving the unoffend 
 ing Indians who had the misfortune to be their 
 
25 
 
 neighbours. Slavery was established in the terri 
 tory of New York and New Jersey, before this 
 territory ceased to be a province of Holland. The 
 British government was far stronger in New York, 
 after it became a British province, than in Virginia, 
 Maryland, or the Carolinas : yet in each of these 
 last mentioned States, the slave population far ex 
 ceeded that of New York. The Quaker colonists 
 of Pennsylvania became slave-holders while they 
 depended not on the crown but on a Quaker pro 
 prietary, and before the British government had 
 extended the grasp of its commercial policy to 
 the slave trade : and the Quaker Assembly of 
 this province and of the Swedish plantation 
 of Delaware with which it was then united, 
 flatly rejected the overture of their proprietary 
 William Penn to alleviate by legal ordinance 
 the bondage of their negro slaves ?* Maryland 
 and Pennsylvania were allowed to retain their 
 proprietary constitutions as long as their colonial 
 relation to Britain endured : yet, while the first 
 swarmed with slaves, the other never possessed more 
 than a very small number. In Virginia and Caro 
 lina, the government finally became completely 
 
 * " Though Pennsylvania boasts her peaceful plain, 
 
 Yet there in blood her petty tyrants reign." GREGORY. 
 
26 
 
 regal, and the slave population was always large. 
 Precisely the same change of government took 
 place in Massachusetts and New Hampshire ; and 
 yet there, the slave-population was always insigni 
 ficant ?* Connecticut and Rhode Island, escaping 
 the fate of their New England sisters, were enabled 
 to retain their pristine peculiarity of exemption from 
 British control. Yet slaves, about as rare in Con 
 necticut as in Massachusetts, were more numerous 
 in Rhode Island than in any of the other States of 
 New England ; and the merchants of Rhode Island 
 were long notorious for the avidity with which they 
 pursued the slave-trade. 
 
 All the foregoing statements, as well as others 
 which are to follow, I have already advanced and 
 supported by proof in a historical work to which 
 American criticism has allowed the character of 
 scrupulous regard to truth, minute acquaintance 
 with American history, and liberal appreciation of 
 American merit. 
 
 Indeed, the man who, with the map of America 
 and the tables of American population before him, 
 will assert that the number of slaves in the several 
 
 * It is a remarkable fact that New Hampshire, though it pos 
 sessed fewer slaves, retained slavery within her limits longer than 
 any other State in New England. 
 
27 
 
 American provinces depended on the various de 
 grees of control exercised by the British crown 
 over their domestic government, or on any other 
 circumstance than on the varying degrees of tempta 
 tion presented by the diversities of their soils, 
 climates, and other local peculiarities, wants either 
 sense to see the truth, or honesty to tell it. 
 
 Of the thirteen provinces, then, that united in 
 revolting from British supremacy, there were twelve 
 in whose precincts negro slavery was established 
 before the commercial policy of the British Govern 
 ment could operate on their population, or before 
 this policy was extended to the slave-trade. The 
 assertion is false that from any one of those pro 
 vinces a petition or remonstrance was addressed to 
 British authority against the first introduction of 
 negro slaves or the perpetuation of negro slavery. 
 In some of the Northern provinces, where, from the 
 inaptitude of the soil and climate to the profitable 
 employment of negro labour, the existence of negro 
 slavery was soon felt to be an unrewarded inconve 
 nience and disgrace, occasional languid and partial 
 attempts were made (especially about the beginning 
 of the revolutionary quarrel) to prevent the farther 
 import of slaves and these demonstrations no 
 doubt were always discouraged and withstood by the 
 
28 
 
 British Government: but not the slightest general 
 demonstration was made by an American province 
 of a wish or purpose to abolish slavery. Individual 
 colonists may have protested against the injustice of 
 slavery, as individual Englishmen likewise did with 
 greater virtue (for they only heard of its evils with 
 out witnessing them), and as individual Americans 
 do at present ineffectually to the American Con 
 gress. The Pennsylvanian Quakers protested among 
 themselves (though very gently) against slavery even 
 while a majority of their religious society retained 
 slaves* just as they protested against war at the 
 very time when they suffered a militia bill to pass in 
 the legislative assembly of which they possessed the 
 command. There was nothing within the compe 
 tence of the British crown to prevent any one of 
 the provincial governments from abolishing slavery 
 within its limits, and so putting an end at once to 
 slavery and the slave-trade. But not one of them 
 was disposed to make any such sacrifice : nor would 
 they have suffered Great Britain (had she been so 
 minded) to have imposed it on them. I do not 
 believe that even in those provinces where the 
 
 * See the Lives of those excellent American Quakers, Woolman 
 and Chalkley, edited by my revered friend, the truly great and good 
 William Allen of London j and the Life of Anthony Benezet, by 
 Robert Vaux. 
 
29 
 
 crown possessed a direct negative on the provincial 
 statutes, any royal governor would have ventured to 
 disaffirm a law proclaiming that the province was a 
 land of freedom, and that its soil, like that of Great 
 Britain, was incapable of being tainted by the exist 
 ence of slavery. And in Connecticut, Rhode Island, 
 Maryland, and Pennsylvania, the governors from 
 whose final assent the laws derived their ratification, 
 did not owe their offices to British appointment. 
 What some of the northern provinces proposed, and 
 what the British government withstood, was that 
 they should continue slave-holding States, and yet 
 suffer no more slaves to be imported into their terri 
 tory or purchased by their people. Now, without 
 slavery, there can be no slave-trade. The one is the 
 demand; the other, the supply. But it was pro 
 posed in the Northern provinces of which we speak, 
 at once to retain the demand, and to prohibit the 
 supply ; to sanction property in slaves, and yet de 
 bar their people, or rather a part of their people, 
 from acquiring it. It was not till many years after 
 American revolt from British dominion had been 
 crowned with success, and the Americans had been 
 bitterly taunted by all Europe for combining resist 
 ance of a certain degree of oppression of themselves 
 with the infliction of far greater oppression on 
 
30 
 
 others, that even those Northern States undertook 
 to abolish negro slavery within their own limits. 
 And when at last this measure was actually em 
 braced by them, they conducted it (as we shall pre 
 sently see) in a style the most tenderly regardful of 
 the iniquitous interests of the white slave-owners, 
 and disdainfully negligent of the just rights of the 
 injufed blacks, who have ever since experienced 
 " the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely," 
 even in the territory where empty statute declares 
 them free, and practically continue slaves in every 
 circumstance except the name. 
 
 It is likewise true that various applications were 
 unsuccessfully addressed to the British government 
 from some even of the Southern States, against the 
 further importation of negro slaves. But in every 
 case of the kind with which I have been able to 
 acquaint myself, these applications were the selfish 
 suggestions of men who themselves possessed abun 
 dance of slaves, and who were desirous of preventing 
 others from rivalling them in wealth and provincial 
 influence, and from endangering the public peace 
 and the stability of slavery by additional importa 
 tions of negroes unaccustomed to the yoke. They 
 desired to retain and fortify their own aristocratic 
 position by excluding new colonists from the 
 
1 31 
 
 means of sharing it, and by making the increase 
 of the white population contribute more effectually 
 to the general safety against the disproportioned 
 numbers of the blacks. When in consequence 
 of the Revolution, the government of these States 
 fell into the hands of the majority of the people 
 instead of an aristocratical faction, not one of them 
 renewed the proposal to limit or discontinue the 
 slave trade ; but all united in giving it a prolonged 
 endurance of twenty years. Britain acted heinously 
 ill in permitting slavery and protecting the slave- 
 trade ; but she acted neither inconsistently nor un 
 justly in refusing to permit one class of Americans 
 at once to revel in the possession of negro slaves, 
 and to exclude all the rest of the colonial population 
 from the same means of enrichment and indulgence. 
 But, of a truth, the slave-trade itself, though 
 patronized by the British crown, might at any time 
 have been effectually resisted by any American 
 colony whose provincial government was heartily 
 supported in such purpose, not by a mere class, but 
 by a decided majority of the inhabitants. In the 
 year 1703, the provincial assembly of Massachu 
 setts imposed a duty of 41. on every negro imported 
 into the province ; and nine years after, passed an 
 act prohibiting the importation of any more Indian 
 
32 
 
 servants or negro slaves. Maryland, attached to 
 slavery by evil interests which Massachusetts was 
 exempt from, could and did abridge the British 
 share of the slave-trade, in order to enlarge the 
 share which her own merchants obtained in that 
 traffic. By an early statute of her domestic legisla 
 ture, a duty was imposed on negroes imported in 
 vessels of which all the owners were not resident 
 colonists.* 
 
 The only one of the thirteen American colonies 
 united in revolt against British supremacy which 
 was founded after the establishment of the British 
 Navigation System, and the application of the 
 principles of that system to the slave-trade, was 
 Georgia. Let us see what the American pleader 
 to Lord Brougham has to say with respect to the 
 introduction of slavery into this province, whose 
 peculiar circumstances, he is fully sensible, afford 
 the surest test by which the justice of the American 
 complaint can be tried. Instead of condensing 
 his meaning, I shall transcribe his words, as the 
 only fit vehicle for such meaning as he has shown 
 a head to conceive and a tongue to express : 
 " The case of the colony of Georgia," says he, 
 " was if possible more remarkable and afflictive 
 
 * Holmes' American Annals, adannos 1703, 1712, and 1715. 
 
33 
 
 than that of any of the others. That colony was 
 not founded in the darkness of the seventeenth 
 century, but almost in the middle of the eighteenth. 
 It was the last in the order of time of the whole 
 thirteen British colonies which afterwards formed the 
 United States. The worthy and beloved General 
 Oglethorpe was its founder and first governor. As 
 usual, no sooner was the colony established or 
 rather commenced, than slaves began to be forced 
 upon it. The governor and council besought the 
 British Government not to allow slaves to be 
 brought for market to that colony. This they did 
 at a time when the parent country might easily 
 have prevented the evil." " All that Georgia could 
 do was to petition and to remonstrate. This was 
 done nine or ten times, as can be proved by the 
 records of that colony, until the British Govern 
 ment, wearied by the importunities of the vener 
 able Oglethorpe and his council, dismissed him 
 from his office ! These, my Lord, are matters of 
 fact ; and if they are not known to the world, it 
 is time that they should be."* 
 
 A more monstrous mass of impudent fiction than 
 the American pleader here presents to the accept 
 ance of Lord Brougham has never insulted the 
 
 * f< Letter," &c. pp. 7, 8. 
 C 
 
34 
 
 credulity of human nature since the days when 
 Titus Gates published his Narrative of the Popish 
 Plot under the auspices of Lord Shaftesbury. Of 
 such men as this writer were probably composed 
 those London juries in the reign of Henry VIII., of 
 whom it was said by an eminent personage of the 
 time, that they would find Abel guilty of the murder 
 of Cain. The Americans are as little honoured by 
 his patronage, as Lord Brougham is by his corre 
 spondence. What would be the statesman of whom 
 this were the instructor! And what must be the 
 cause of which this is the champion ! 
 
 I appeal to all the annals of Georgia, and to 
 every general History of the United States in which 
 the particular fortunes of Georgia are recounted, 
 for the truth of the following counter-statement of 
 facts. When the plantation of Georgia was com 
 menced in the year 1733, the administration of 
 political authority over its territory was committed 
 by royal charter, not to any branch or department 
 of the British Government, but to a Board of 
 Trustees composed of those generous philanthro 
 pists by whom the colonial project had been devised 
 and digested. It was by this board that General 
 Oglethorpe, one of its own members, was appointed 
 to preside over the colony : and it was during the 
 
35 
 
 subsistence of its authority, that Oglethorpe was 
 finally recalled to England in 1743, ten years after 
 the foundation of the settlement, nine years before 
 a single negro slave did or could enter its territory, 
 and for reasons that had no connection whatever 
 either with negro slavery or with any affair or con* 
 cernment of the colony.* One of the earliest 
 acts of the Board of Trustees, after the first band 
 of emigrants had been transported to the colony, 
 was to frame and publish a code of fundamental 
 laws and constitutions for the infant society, by 
 which negro slavery was absolutely prohibited in 
 Georgia. No sooner was this ordinance promul 
 gated, than it excited the most violent and general 
 discontent among the colonists, who were chiefly 
 composed of a class of unfortunate men very ill 
 adapted to a scene of rough labour and patient 
 poverty, and whose complaints of the privation of 
 negro aid in their toils were provoked by the ex 
 ample and abetted by the counsel of their neigh 
 bours the planters of South Carolina. Accepting 
 the invitation of these coun sellers to share with 
 them the envied privilege of possessing negro 
 slaves, so many of the Georgian colonists aban- 
 
 * See in particular, the Life of General Oglethorpe, in the " Col 
 lections of the Georgia Historical Society," vol. i. 
 
 c 2 
 
36 
 
 doned their colonial soil, that fears began to be 
 entertained of the total desertion of the young 
 province ; and in the year 1?37, a general meeting 
 of the remanent planters, in a petition and re 
 monstrance to the Board of Trustees, protested 
 vehemently that this catastrophe was inevitable un 
 less the prohibition of negro slavery were repealed. 
 From this claim of the Georgian colonists to be 
 indulged with the possession of slaves, the only 
 dissenters were a handful of Scottish Highlanders 
 who had recently resorted to the province, and some 
 German members of the Moravian brotherhood, 
 who, in spite of the protection of the Trustees, 
 were soon after expelled from the province 
 by the jealousy and persecution of their fellow- 
 planters. The Trustees refused to hearken to 
 the desire of the petitioners, or to suffer a single 
 slave to enter Georgia ; and firmly persisted in this 
 refusal till the year 1752, when, disgusted with the 
 languishing condition and incurable murmurs and 
 discontent of their people, they gladly surrendered 
 their chartered authority to the Crown. Then, and 
 not till then, did the Crown, in accordance with the 
 earnest and general importunities of the colonists, 
 bestow on them a "constitution precisely similar to 
 that of South Carolina, and including, among other 
 
37 
 
 more worthy but not more coveted boons, the 
 privilege of acquiring and employing negro slaves. 
 But, as the British Government, though it might 
 permit, could not force its colonial subjects to buy 
 negroes, so, though it might encourage, it could not 
 force its merchants to sell them : and little effect 
 was produced in Georgia by her altered constitution 
 till after the Peace of Paris in 1763, when begin 
 ning to flourish under the improved husbandry which 
 she owed to the example and direction of the British 
 Governor Sir James Wright, her planters acquired 
 sufficient wealth and credit to invite the resort of 
 slave merchants and stock their territory with a 
 numerous servile population. This was but two 
 years before the commencement of the revolutionary 
 quarrel between Britain and her American colonies. 
 Of petitions presented in the brief interim or at 
 any other period by the Georgians to the British 
 Government for the withdrawment or restriction of 
 the boon they had so long and earnestly solicited, I 
 believe that no traces are extant, except in the ima 
 gination of the writer who has hazarded so incre 
 dible an assertion. In none of the other American 
 States has negro slavery proved so bitter a bondage 
 as in Georgia, which owed its colonization to the 
 most humane and benevolent of mankind, and whose 
 
38 
 
 primitive colonists were men delivered from the 
 bonds of merciless creditors, or flying from the 
 rigour of ecclesiastical persecution. 
 
 With curious infelicity, the American writer on 
 whose work I have been remarking, appeals to the 
 transactions of the American Congress at the pe 
 riod of the assumption of National Independence, in 
 proof of the reluctance with which his countrymen 
 had endured the introduction of negro slavery 
 into their territory, and the honest grief and in 
 dignation with which its continued existence in 
 spired them. Those transactions, he maintains, 
 warrant the conclusion that one of the reasons that 
 moved the Americans to revolt against Britain was 
 their resentment of her wicked policy in planting 
 negro slavery among them and preventing them 
 from abolishing the slave-trade. It is to their 
 words, not their deeds, that he refers, and (with 
 enterprising reach of grasp) not merely to the lan 
 guage which they actually employed, but to that 
 which, after deliberate consideration of its politic 
 propriety, they finally declined to employ. Let us 
 see what was this language, whether actually em 
 ployed or ineffectually suggested. 
 
 The proclamation by which the American Con 
 gress, in 1775, sought to justify its military prepara- 
 
39 
 
 tions against Great Britain, commences in the fol 
 lowing terms : " If it were possible for men who 
 exercise their reason to believe that the Divine 
 Author of our existence intended one part of the 
 human race to hold an absolute property in and an 
 unbounded power over others, marked out by His 
 infinite goodness and wisdom as the objects of a 
 legal domination never rightly resistible however 
 severe and oppressive, the inhabitants of these 
 colonies might at least require from the parliament 
 of Great Britain some evidence that this dreadful 
 authority over them has been granted to that body. 
 But, a reverence for our Great Creator, principles 
 of humanity, and the dictates of common sense must 
 convince all those who reflect upon the subject, that 
 government was instituted to promote the welfare 
 of mankind, and ought to be administered for the 
 attainment of that end." The Declaration of In 
 dependence which was embraced and published by 
 the Congress in the following year, after an exor 
 dium professing that "a decent respect to the 
 opinion of mankind" required the Americans to 
 promulgate their reasons for revolting from British 
 domination, thus proceeds : " We hold these truths 
 to be self-evident; that all men are created equal, 
 and endowed by their Creator with certain unalien- 
 
40 
 
 able rights ; that among these are, life, liberty, and 
 the pursuit of happiness." It was impossible for a 
 man like Jefferson, who is known to have been the 
 author of this famous Manifesto, and who, though 
 himself a slaveholder in a State which even now 
 retains negro slavery, did all his life, or at least 
 during the greater part of it, express regretful dis 
 approbation of that unjust and tyrannical system 
 it was impossible for him not to perceive that his 
 countrymen (especially when avowing "a decent 
 respect to the opinion of mankind") solicited with 
 very bad grace the sympathy and assistance of the 
 world by an appeal to principles which in their own 
 daily treatment of their fellow men they violated to 
 an extent far transcending any outrage they could 
 impute to Great Britain. Accordingly, with policy 
 more intrepid than honourable, he proposed to de 
 feat by anticipating the reproaches of mankind, and 
 to diminish the dangerous scandal by shifting the 
 main part of its moral opprobrium from the brow of 
 his countrymen to the head of the British monarch. 
 Perhaps Franklin, who was associated with him in 
 the composition of the Manifesto (which, however, 
 is acknowledged to have flowed exclusively from 
 Jefferson's pen) was equally sensible of the expe 
 diency of an artificial conductor that might divert 
 
41 
 
 the flash of the world's indignation. In prosecution 
 of this ambidextrous device, the following passage 
 was introduced into the first draft of the Declara 
 tion of Independence that was submitted to the 
 general review of the Congress : " He [the 
 British King] has urged cruel war against hu 
 man nature itself, violating its most sacred rights 
 of life and liberty in the persons of a distant 
 people who never offended him, captivating and 
 carrying them into slavery in another hemi 
 sphere, or to incur a miserable death in their 
 transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the 
 opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the 
 Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to 
 keep open a market where men should be bought and 
 sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing 
 every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this 
 execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of 
 horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he 
 is now exciting those very people to rise in arms 
 amongst us, and to purchase that liberty of which 
 he has deprived them by murdering the people on 
 whom he also obtruded them'' 
 
 But the colleagues of Jefferson, less passionate, 
 less cunning, perhaps less intrepid, and certainly 
 more considerate in their self regard than he, rejected 
 
42 
 
 this suggestion of ingenious but short-sighted 
 policy; and the passage we have just perused was 
 expunged from the Declaration of Independence. 
 Not one of the thirteen States represented by the 
 Congress was then prepared to abolish slavery 
 within its limits, or even to debar its people from 
 pursuing the slave-trade ; and five of them, includ 
 ing Virginia the oldest and Georgia the youngest of 
 the States, cherished the fixed purpose (from which 
 they have never yet departed) of retaining their 
 negro population in perpetual or at least indefinite 
 bondage. Every American acquainted with the 
 history of his country must have been sensible of the 
 injustice and absurdity of making Britain the scape 
 goat of American iniquity ; and every man of ma 
 ture age must have remembered the first introduc 
 tion of slavery into Georgia, and the clamorous soli 
 citations by which the Georgians extorted this boon 
 from the British Government. Political parties 
 have commonly shown themselves far more eager to 
 maintain that God was on their side, than earnest to 
 ascertain that they were on His : and all the American 
 States, while invoking the blessing of God and the 
 sympathy of mankind for their own violent revolt 
 against oppression, were prepared to pour the vials 
 of wrathful vengeance and malediction on the de- 
 
43 
 
 voted heads of every one of their negro brethren 
 who should imitate their example and attempt to be 
 free. In such circumstances, the Congress could 
 not embrace the Machiavellian counsel of Jefferson, 
 without stultifying their Declaration of Independence. 
 Stigmatizing the system that formed their own daily 
 practice, without even affecting a purpose or de 
 sire to renounce it, the only effect of their 
 frontless and precarious imputation of its origin 
 to the British Government would have been to pro 
 claim to the world that Britain could force the Ame 
 ricans to be oppressors, though she could not force 
 them to be slaves ; that they were capable of 
 resisting her injustice, but not of discontinuing their 
 own ; and that they " reverenced their Great 
 Creator" too far to believe other men entitled to 
 be their tyrants, but not far enough to distrust their 
 own title to be tyrants of other men. 
 
 Jefferson himself (a man endowed with many 
 useful and admirable qualities, wedded in heart and 
 soul to democracy, intensely earnest in the prosecu 
 tion of immediate purpose, but rarely candid, and 
 not always sincere*) was far too well acquainted 
 
 * His published correspondence shows that he privately ridiculed 
 and depreciated Lafayette even while professing in public the most 
 unbounded admiration of him ; and one of the most distinguished 
 
44 
 
 with American history to have regarded the plea 
 which he unsuccessfully recommended to the Con 
 gress in any other light than that of a controversial 
 artifice sanctioned by the all-sanctioning necessity of 
 guarding public safety in a season of imminent peril 
 a consideration to which politicians have always 
 ascribed that legal or super-legal supremacy which 
 over-rides the authority and qualifies the obligation 
 of all other rules and principles of human duty. 
 When the mighty cloud of passion and prejudice 
 engendered by the revolutionary contest was dissi 
 pated, he practically avowed the hollowness of the 
 rejected plea, by forbearing to repeat it in the ablest 
 and most interesting of his literary productions, his 
 " Notes on Virginia," first published in 1787. 
 There, with every inclination to extol the virtues 
 and extenuate the failings of his countrymen, he 
 confesses his inability to suggest any other apo 
 logies for the subsistence of negro slavery amongst 
 them, than the natural inferiority, which he as 
 serts, of the negro race (an assertion which the 
 late Abbe" Gregoire assured me that Jefferson in a 
 private letter to him did subsequently retract) and 
 
 men in America, an intimate friend of Jefferson, informed me that 
 when he taxed him one day with insincerity in professing Unita- 
 rianism, Jefferson answered with a smile, "I regard Unitarianism as 
 the Euthanasia of Christianity." 
 
45 
 
 the fatal effect of those wrongs which the white men, 
 in the natural exorbitance of unrighteous and unli. 
 mited power, had inflicted on their sable brethren. 
 " Deep-rooted prejudices," says he, " entertained 
 by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the 
 blacks, of the injuries they have sustained ; new pro 
 vocations ; the real distinctions which nature has 
 made ; and many other circumstances will divide us 
 into parties, and produce convulsions which will 
 probably never end but in the extermination of the 
 one or the other race." So far from pretending to 
 shift the opprobrium of negro slavery from America, 
 or to demur to her liability to divine vengeance for 
 bereaving any race of men of those liberties which 
 are the gift of God, he says expressly " I tremble 
 for my country when I reflect that God is just" 
 and adds that in the too probable event of a general 
 insurrection of the negro slaves against their white 
 masters, " the Almighty has no attribute which can 
 take side with us in such a contest."* Thus, ac 
 cording to Jefferson's conviction, the justice of God 
 is on the side of negro revolt in America ; and not 
 one of the divine attributes is in favour of the white 
 
 * Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia." So also thought Dr. Johnson 
 when he gave for his toast at dinner, " Here's to the next insurrec 
 tion of the negro slaves against their oppressors." 
 
46 
 
 men's tyrannical dominion, or of their efforts to re 
 sist its overthrow. 
 
 Widely different is the opinion entertained by the 
 American correspondent of Lord Brougham. " Much 
 as we may desire the abolition of slavery in the 
 United States," says he, " and no one can desire 
 it more sincerely than I do, yet it will not do for a 
 moment to think of effecting it through violence. 
 No, my Lord, that must be opposed at the very 
 threshold : and I am sure it will be by every 
 good man in the United States. That course is 
 too horrible to be spoken of ; and the man 
 deserves everlasting infamy who dares to suggest 
 it."* According to this writer, then, every good 
 man in the United States is opposed to what the 
 great champion and founder of American democracy 
 regarded as the course of God's justice ; and Jeffer 
 son (whose unsuccessful suggestion to Congress he 
 warmly extols and characterizes as the universal and 
 honourable sentiment of America) is a man deserv 
 ing everlasting infamy. The sentence thus fulmi 
 nated must extend also to Dr. Channing, who, in 
 his late treatise, entitled " The Duty of the Free 
 States," has expressly proclaimed that a slave risk 
 ing his life and slaying his master for the attainment 
 
 * "Letter," &c. pp. 21, 22. 
 
47 
 
 of his own liberty, is not only guiltless of murder, 
 but an object of just admiration. This dealer in 
 eternal vengeance ought to tell us the duration of 
 the punishment merited by his own countrymen, for 
 seeking " through violence" their deliverance from 
 a British yoke incomparably more righteous and 
 merciful than the yoke to which they subject their 
 own negro slaves. 
 
 Very unwisely, I think, has the American pleader 
 contrasted the conduct of Britain and America 
 since the dissolution of their colonial relations, with 
 regard to slavery and the slave trade; and most 
 unsuccessfully has he laboured to clothe the con 
 trast in colours favourable to the proud pretensions 
 of his countrymen. Let us briefly consider what 
 the conduct of the two nations actually has been. 
 
 When, by the long and glorious exertions of that 
 band of philanthropists whose ostensible parlia 
 mentary leader was William Wilberforce, but whose 
 real Chief and earliest and most abundant labourer 
 was Thomas Clarkson, the eyes of the people of 
 Great Britain were fully opened to the cruelty and 
 wickedness committed at the distance of many thou 
 sand miles from their shore ; and when the falsehood 
 and sophistry by which a powerful host of slave 
 merchants and slave-owners veiled the iniquity of 
 
48 
 
 their proceedings, had been fully exposed, the 
 British people, in 1807, compelled their oligarchal 
 government at once and instantly to abolish the 
 slave-trade : and as soon as they obtained a re 
 formed parliament, they, by its agency, abolished 
 slavery itself within all the quarters and dependen 
 cies of the British empire, and taxed themselves to 
 the amount of twenty millions sterling as an indem 
 nity to the slave-owners for the real or supposed 
 pecuniary loss incurred by the privation of their 
 unrighteous power, and a just penalty on themselves 
 for having suffered that power to exist. By this 
 last act, Britain has afforded America the generous 
 example of self-sacrifice in the cause of justice and 
 humanity,* and taught her the valuable economical 
 lesson that negro labour, however appropriate to 
 particular climes and soils, is not inseparable 
 from negro slavery. So much for the one coun 
 try : Now for the other. The American Con 
 vention by which the Constitution of the United 
 States was framed in 1788 (composed, as the 
 American pleader very justly represents, of en 
 lightened and benevolent men fully awake to the 
 cruelty and wickedness that was transacted on their 
 
 * " We, after our ability, have redeemed our brethren : and will 
 ye even sell your brethren ?" Nehemiah v. 8. 
 
49 
 
 own shore and under their eyes) declared the slave- 
 trade an outrage on human nature that must cease 
 to exist ; but, by way of indemnity to the American 
 slave-traders for the loss of their occupation and to 
 the slave-owners for the cessation of their supplies, 
 authorized the prosecution of the traffic for twenty 
 years longer thus rendering a cheap tribute to the 
 principles of justice and humanity, securing to the 
 whole existing generation of the Americans the en 
 joyment of the slave-trade, and sanctioning an enor 
 mous addition to the difficulty of ever afterwards 
 abolishing slavery. It was reckoned that America 
 possessed nearly enough of negro slaves, and that 
 twenty years more of slave trading would collect a 
 stock sufficient for the safety and convenience of the 
 country, Since then, the only transactions of the 
 Federal Government that have had any relation to 
 slavery are those by which it voluntarily adopted into 
 federal membership and deliberately incorporated with 
 the United States, vast additional provinces swarming 
 with the slave population that had grown up there 
 under the colonial dominion of France and Spain ; 
 and its obstinate rejection (on the plea of national 
 dignity) of the proposal of the British Government 
 to secure the extirpation of the still existing though 
 contraband slave-trade, by conceding a right of 
 
50 
 
 search of suspected vessels of either nation. And 
 although foreign slave-trade is declared illegal 
 by American jurisprudence, an internal traffic 
 in negroes is permitted and practised in most of 
 the American States. Striking indeed has been 
 the contrast between the proceedings of the two 
 countries in this important matter. Nor has 
 the old parent country any reason to apprehend 
 therein an eclipse of her glory from the superior 
 lustre of her emancipated progeny. The Federal 
 State of Columbia, the offspring of American 
 Independence, is stained by the admission of 
 slavery : and the Republican metropolis, the seat 
 of Congress, and on which the illustrious name of 
 Washington has been bestowed, is the focus of the 
 domestic slave-trade of America. 
 
 The American pleader affects to regret that the 
 Convention of 1788 took no step to secure either 
 the immediate or even the gradual abolition of sla 
 very throughout the whole American territory. But 
 the members of that Convention would have acted 
 with the most ludicrous and glaring inconsistency in 
 pretending to undertake the performance of a task 
 of which they had so effectually increased the diffi 
 culty. They made no such hypocritical demonstra 
 tion : but, having rendered the extirpation of sla- 
 
51 
 
 very from the American soil impracticable for 
 twenty years, and less practicable at the end 
 of that period than it was before, they remitted 
 to each separate State the exclusive power of dealing 
 with the system of slavery within the limits of its 
 own peculiar jurisdiction. What has been the con 
 sequence ? In the Northern States, where the in 
 habitants were never exposed to the temptations by 
 which slavery was invited and extended in the 
 South, where the slaves were few, the white popu 
 lation numerous and rapidly increasing, and white 
 labour at once easily procurable and fittest for the 
 soil there, where slavery reflected the greatest dis 
 grace on the national name, afforded the least profit 
 to the slave-owners, and injured the community by 
 discrediting the occupation of free labourers, a 
 gradual abolition of slavery was brought to pass by 
 laws which indulged the slave-owners with the choice 
 of selling their negroes to the Southern planters, or 
 of retaining their service for a limited period deemed 
 sufficient for their own protection from pecuniary 
 loss. In the Southern States, widely differenced 
 from their northern sisters in all the circumstances 
 which I have particularized, the number of slaves 
 was progressively augmented by copious importa 
 tions, and their bondage aggravated by laws restrict- 
 
 D 2 
 
52 
 
 ing manumission, prohibiting negro education, and 
 subjecting even freed men of colour to such priva 
 tions and indignities as must repress the desire as 
 well as the hope of freedom in the bosoms of the 
 negro slaves. This last feature of Southern policy 
 has been responsively copied in the manners and 
 even in the laws of those Northern States within 
 which slavery has ceased to exist, where free per 
 sons of colour are sternly excluded from all social 
 equality with the whites, from all political franchises 
 and most civil rights, and where in the year 1828, 
 it was decided by the legal tribunals of Connecticut 
 that " free people of colour are not citizens of the 
 United States." Harsh as this may appear, it is 
 milder than the sentiments which are openly avowed 
 in the South, where the right of free people of 
 colour even to breathe nature's air in America is 
 disputed. " What right,'* says Mr. Custiss, an 
 American orator and slave-holder, " what right, / 
 demand, have the children of Africa to a home 
 stead in the white man's country?" / answer 
 the same God-given right that white men have to 
 dwell there, and a far truer right than Mr. Custiss him 
 self possesses to turn any part of God's earth into a 
 scene of bondage of his unoffending fellow men. A 
 late address published by the Colonization Society of 
 
53 
 
 Connecticut (a State, be it remarked, which has long 
 plumed itself on the abolition of negro slavery with 
 in its limits) contains the following protestation : 
 "The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of so 
 ciety prejudices which neither refinement, nor argu 
 ment, nor education, nor even religion itself can 
 subdue mark the people of colour, whether bond or 
 free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and 
 incurable." And in another recent American publi 
 cation, the author frankly avows that " I am clear 
 that whether we consider it with reference to the wel 
 fare of the State or the happiness of the blacks, 
 it were better to have left them in chains than to 
 have liberated them to receive such freedom as they 
 enjoy : and greater freedom we cannot, must not 
 allow them."* Even in Pennsylvania, so renowned 
 for the equity of her laws and the liberality of her 
 citizens, the French writer De Tocqueville informs 
 us that no free man of colour dare present himself to 
 vote at an election. Nominally enfranchised by the 
 laws of the State, they are actually disfranchised by 
 the more powerful manners of the people. Surely 
 the American who vaunts to strangers what his 
 
 * These and many other passages of similar import in the works 
 of American writers, are cited in Jay's " Inquiry into the Character 
 and Tendency of the American Colonization and American Anti- 
 Slavery Societies," 
 
54 
 
 countrymen have done to ameliorate the lot of the 
 coloured members of the family of man, confounds 
 the specious show of a whited sepulchre with the 
 substantial honour of wisdom and virtue. Such has 
 been the result of that measure of the American Con 
 vention, and of those measures of the Northern 
 States where slavery has been nominally abolished, 
 that La Fayette, after his last visit to America, 
 protested with grief and surprise that the achieve 
 ment of American Independence had brought 
 only increased misery and oppression on the 
 African race. In the modest mansion of La 
 Fayette at Paris, I have seen that great and good 
 man greet the approach of a negro visitor from 
 Haiti with a kindness and courtesy which the 
 meanest white man in America would disdain to 
 extend to any sable member of his species. Africa 
 indeed has had reason to curse the Independence of 
 North America. 
 
 No man is so blind as he that will not see. With 
 such damning facts staring him in the face, the 
 American writer who addresses himself to Lord 
 Brougham persists in asserting that the generality of 
 his countrymen treat free persons of colour with 
 liberality, and slaves with kindness; that they de 
 plore the subsistence of negro slavery among them ; 
 
55 
 
 and that, entertaining a fixed purpose of purging 
 their pure soil from such poisonous product, they 
 are steadily and successfully pursuing the wisest 
 means of accomplishing this desirable consumma 
 tion. Such assertions from such a writer can have 
 no weight with any impartial mind. So far from 
 believing the representation he gives of the senti 
 ments of the generality of his countrymen, I disbe 
 lieve even the prevalence of such sentiments with 
 himself. His humanity seems to be of that unsolid, 
 vague, and vapoury cast on which the Roman slave, 
 masters prided themselves when at the theatre they 
 warmly applauded the celebrated words of Terence 
 (himself an enfranchised slave) Homo sum, humani 
 nil a me alienum puto. Little reliance can be 
 placed on a man's fixed purpose to forsake the vice 
 or extirpate the crime for which he eagerly seeks 
 and promptly finds excuses and still less when he 
 shows, like this writer, more appetite to swallow 
 excuse than honesty or discrimination to ascertain 
 its legitimacy. Loving the praise of men rather 
 than the praise of God, he is far less sensitive to 
 the evil of American slavery than to the human 
 reproach which it provokes; and, lavishing the 
 tenderest indulgence on slave-holders and all their 
 inhuman tyranny and prejudice, he heaps abuse on 
 
56 
 
 the Irish statesman O'Connell for the passionate 
 strain in which he has characterized negro bondage, 
 denounced its abettors, and urged its abolition. 
 With taunting purpose (in which the supposed sym 
 pathy of Lord Brougham is more artfully studied 
 than wisely addressed) he says, " I understand that 
 Mr. O'Connell is only an eleventh hour man in 
 the anti-slavery cause ; and I suppose that he feels 
 that it is incumbent on him to establish his sincerity 
 and zeal by an uncommon amount of violence."* 
 Every man who has read his Bible must recollect 
 the Divine estimate of him whose envy depreciated 
 the labourers of the eleventh hour. With peculiar 
 propriety is the reproach again employed by the 
 champion of falsehood, injustice, and hypocrisy : 
 and with perfect propriety might O'Connell reply to 
 him, " Is thine eye evil because I am good ?" 
 
 That free people of colour are not treated with 
 liberality but are subjected to the vilest indignities 
 in the United States, is manifest not only from the 
 American avowals which I have already cited, but 
 from the concurring reports of every traveller of 
 every nation that has recently visited America, and 
 communicated his observations in discourse or by 
 the press. With close (though perhaps uncon- 
 
 * "Letter," &c. p. 41. 
 
57 
 
 scious) copy of the policy of ancient Egypt towards 
 the children of Israel, America denies to free men 
 of colour every liberal motive and every generous 
 style, solace, and recompense of industry ; and 
 then insults them with the calumnious reproach 
 " Ye are idle, ye are idle." The Americans them 
 selves admit that (from the evil tempers of indi 
 vidual white masters) many of their slaves are 
 treated with a cruelty far exceeding the necessary 
 rigour of bondage : and I, on the other hand, 
 admit that very many of their slaves, as long as 
 they show themselves so brutalized by slavery as 
 to be content with their degradation, and willing 
 to display the mirth and sing the songs that were 
 required of the enslaved Jews by their Babylonian 
 captors, are treated with a kind, patient forbear 
 ance unexampled in the intercourse of masters 
 with hired servants. But this says little for the 
 virtue of the masters, and still less for the happiness 
 of the slaves. Cotters have been known to stint 
 their own and their children's meals in order to 
 fatten their pigs : and the contented and gently- 
 used negro slave would have as much reason as 
 the cotter's pig to be satisfied with his treatment, 
 if he possessed only a brutal capacity of enjoy 
 ment. 
 
58 
 
 " If thou mayest be free, use it rather," says an 
 inspired apostle to enslaved men. He to whom the 
 sentiment thus divinely sanctioned is unknown, has 
 lost a powerful spring of manly purpose and active 
 virtue, an important feature of the image of God 
 in man. His right hand has lost its cunning, who 
 prefers the flesh-pots of the oppressor to the dignity 
 of freedom. " Happy shall he be that rewardeth 
 thee as thou hast served us," is the natural sen 
 timent of enslaved men. The slave who can 
 contentedly behold himself and all that are dear 
 to him, all their possessions and all their mutual 
 ties, the performance of all their mutual duties* 
 and the indulgence of all their mutual affections, 
 dependent on the fluctuating interest or caprice 
 of a fellow creature arrogating right to sunder what 
 God has united, the slave who can behold and 
 endure all this without directing his wishes and 
 purposes to a condition better and more elevated, 
 has parted with every trace of moral manhood, 
 and lost in worth what he has gained in tranquillity. 
 But all testimony unites in proving that as soon as a 
 negro slave in America betrays an appetite for 
 knowledge or any other symptom betokening dis 
 content with his condition or aspiration to freedom, 
 he becomes the object of deadly jealousy, hatred, 
 
59 
 
 fear, and cruelty to his master.* Par cere subjectis 
 et debellare superbos, is the domestic policy of many 
 an American slave-owner ; as it has been the policy 
 of every tyrant prince and tyrant people by whom a 
 reserve of specious virtue was nourished to appease 
 the rebellions of conscience, and silence the re 
 proaches of mankind. In none of the slaveholding 
 States is it permitted to teach letters either to 
 slaves or to free persons of colour. In all the 
 slaveless States, the education of the free coloured 
 race is discouraged ; and in New England which 
 has so long boasted her exemption from negro 
 slavery, so late as the year 1833, Miss Crandall, a 
 pious and benevolent lady, was thrown into prison 
 and prosecuted as a malefactor for having established 
 a school for the education of free mulatto girls. 
 The slaveless States are bound to re-deliver up to 
 bondage all slaves who seek shelter in them from 
 the South ; and in the slaveless States, many of the 
 rich inhabitants, as creditors and mortgagees of the 
 Southern planters, are both in legal effect and moral 
 truth proprietors of negro slaves. 
 
 * It is the business of the free, their safety requires it, to keep the 
 slaves in ignorance. The treatment of the slaves is in general as 
 good as circumstances and the cruel necessity of the case will per 
 mit." Transactions of the New York Colonization Society, Second 
 Year. 
 
60 
 
 But it is asserted that the generality of the Ameri 
 cans deplore the existence of negro slavery in their 
 country. I believe that many of them indeed deplore 
 it as England's Lincolnshire farmers deplore the ex 
 istence of their fen-fever, which they would willingly 
 banish from among them, if in depriving their land 
 of the qualities that engender the endemic malady, 
 they could preserve in it the qualities that contribute 
 to their own pecuniary enrichment. But by a 
 numerous party of the Americans, both in the slave- 
 holding and the slaveless States, is the system of 
 negro slavery neither condemned nor deplored, 
 neither excused nor palliated, but gloried in, ap 
 plauded, and panegyrized. A Spartan severity or 
 Roman dignity of pride, they maintain, is educated 
 in white men by the habitual consciousness of supe 
 riority and predominance over a different race of 
 men whom they at once pity, despise, protect, and 
 ameliorate ; and this pagan sentiment is represented 
 as quite capable of the closest alliance with 
 Christian consideration. No surprise was excited 
 in the South, and little if any was awakened in 
 the North, when the Governor of one of the 
 Southern States lately protested in a message to the 
 legislative assembly of his province, that if he were 
 on his death-bed, his latest prayer for his children 
 
61 
 
 would be that they might never inhabit a country 
 in which negro slavery was not established ; " Sla 
 very," says Governor Miller of South Carolina to 
 the assembly of this province, in 1829, " Slavery 
 is not a national evil: on the contrary, it is a 
 national benefit. Slavery exists in some form every 
 where ; and it is not of much consequence, in a 
 philosophical point of view, whether it be voluntary 
 or involuntary." Milton acquiesces, like this ma 
 gistrate, in the necessary existence of tyranny, but 
 differs widely from his estimate of its merit. 
 
 "Tyranny must be ; 
 Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse." 
 
 It seems to me impossible to read Governor Miller's 
 words without perceiving that a proprietor of slaves 
 quaffs a draught of power too strong for the head 
 and heart of man. If some wretch were to seduce 
 or compel that gentleman's son to swallow as much 
 rum or brandy as would debase his reason and 
 destroy his constitution, would the father hold his 
 peace on being defensively told that since ardent 
 spirits must and will be abused by mankind, it 
 matters little whether the abuse be voluntary or 
 involuntary on the part of the victims ? " I am 
 thoroughly convinced," says a later governor of 
 the same State in a similar official declaration, " that 
 
62 
 
 the institution of domestic slavery, paradoxical as 
 it may seem, is an indispensable element in an 
 unmixed representative republic. How sacred 
 then is our obligation to provide for our posterity 
 all the necessary means of defending and preserv 
 ing an institution so essential to their existence 
 and liberty."* 
 
 While America was subject to British domination, 
 no magistrate of an American State ever gave the 
 sanction of magisterial authority to such sentiments 
 as these ; and no pulpit was ever profaned with the 
 apologies for slavery which the clergymen of repub 
 lican America are now not ashamed to preach. 
 Jonathan Edwards, the most admirable teacher of 
 Christian doctrine and pattern of Christian character 
 that America or perhaps the world has produced 
 since the apostolic age, during the ascendancy of 
 Britain, denounced the system of slavery and urged 
 its immediate abolition by his countrymen, with a 
 boldness and security of unreproved freedom to 
 which the present race of Americans are utter 
 strangers. And was it then to make America a 
 theatre for such disgraceful display as we have wit 
 nessed, that the pious Puritans undertook their 
 pilgrimage to New England that the peaceful 
 
 * These speeches are quoted in Jay's Inquiry. 
 
63 
 
 Quakers retired to Pennsylvania that Catholics 
 flying from persecution in Britain, set to the world 
 the first example of religious toleration in Maryland 
 that La Fayette and Kosciusko shed their blood 
 in the cause of American Independence and that 
 Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Jay, and 
 Henry, made for themselves and their country a 
 glorious and immortal name ? Every one of these 
 men entertained and expressed a strong abhorrence 
 of negro slavery.* If, by fatal necessity, America 
 must copy in her civil policy the vices as well as the 
 virtues of Greece and Rome f if the lawless abuse 
 
 * Washington, writing to his friends Morris and Mercer in 1786, 
 protested that he would never again purchase a slave, and that he 
 ardently desired the abolition of negro slavery. Patrick Henry and 
 Jefferson made the same profession. Franklin attacked the system 
 of negro slavery by an ironical defence of the practice of Christian 
 slavery in Morocco. During the revolutionary war, John Jay de 
 clared that "Till America embrace this measure [abolition of 
 slavery] her prayers to Heaven will be impious." Some of the 
 most distinguished champions of the Revolution emancipated their 
 slaves by testamentary bequest as Judith, the deliverer of Israel, 
 prior to her death, " made her maid free." 
 
 f The eminence which the fine arts attained in the classical 
 States of antiquity has been ascribed by many writers to the leisure 
 which freemen there derived from the possession of slaves. If I 
 could subscribe to this theory, I should deem the boasted advantage 
 a "bad eminence," and far too dearly bought: but I believe it 
 utterly unsound and erroneous. In modern times, we have found the 
 leisure of the great and wealthy produce but few and feeble recruits 
 to the ranks of science, literature, or art. Rome with more slaves 
 than Greece, never equalled Greece in the fine arts : and Sparta, which 
 
64 
 
 must always be proportioned to the legitimate en 
 joyment of freedom then is America fated to afford 
 the most humiliating illustration ever witnessed by 
 the world, of Milton's melancholy sentiment : 
 
 " Since the original lapse, true liberty 
 Is lost, which always with right reason dwells 
 Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being." 
 
 True liberty is indeed not more a pleasurable 
 possession than a generous virtue a principle that 
 enforces restraint of our own, as well as prompts to 
 resistance of other men's usurpation. They know 
 the nymph only in one part, and the least noble part 
 of her capacity to bless and dignify mankind, who 
 pursue her merely as the object of selfish gratifica 
 tion, without yielding the homage of reverence to 
 her authority, and obedience to her will who recog 
 nize in her the power of an impulse, but not of a 
 law, " the perfect law of liberty." Vainly does he 
 term himself free, who is the slave of his own vicious 
 habit, insolent prejudice, or selfish lust of domi 
 nation. Liberty, national or individual, is not en 
 titled to respect unless it be founded on justice ; 
 
 of all the Grecian States most resembled North America in the treat 
 ment of slaves, never made any figure in the arts at all. Some of 
 the brightest ornaments of Roman literature were themselves slaves, 
 and the sons of slaves. The glories of Italian art followed the 
 Christian abolition of slavery in Italy. One of the greatest philoso 
 phers that Greece ever produced was Epictetus, an emancipated slave. 
 
65 
 
 and if it be, it cannot sanction tyranny wtthout repu 
 diating its own foundation. Merely selfish in its 
 aim, it is such liberty as the prince of darkness 
 claimed against the Lord of light, and more success 
 fully taught fallen man to covet and pursue. The 
 Roman commonwealth was repeatedly brought to 
 the brink of deserved destruction by the conspira 
 cies of slaves ; and finally, the number of these do 
 mestic enemies contributed in no small degree to the 
 downfall of the Roman empire. 
 
 Panegyrics on negro slavery as'an ennobling in 
 stitution, whose proper effect is to elevate the dig. 
 nity of the whites, and to impart to the blacks as 
 much utility and happiness as is adapted to the 
 capacity of their peculiar nature, are common in the 
 South : and I have heard them uttered in conver 
 sation by accomplished Americans who were them 
 selves the citizens of Northern and slaveless States. 
 This party has found various lettered and argumen 
 tative champions, of whom the ablest is a man 
 whose genius deserved the championship of a better 
 cause Professor Tucker of Virginia, whose elo 
 quent, interesting, and in many respects admirable 
 biography of Jefferson, presents the following esti 
 mate of the moral value of negro slavery : " Do 
 mestic slavery places the master in a state of moral 
 
66 
 
 discipline ; and according to the use he makes of it, 
 is he made a worse or a better man. If he exercise 
 his unrestricted power over the slave in giving ready 
 indulgence to his humours or caprice if he habi 
 tually yields to impulses of anger, and punishes when 
 ever he is disobeyed or obeyed imperfectly, he is 
 certainly the worse for the institution which has thus 
 afforded aliment to his evil propensities. But if, on the 
 other hand, he has been taught to curb these sallies 
 of passion or freaks of caprice, or has subjected 
 himself to a course of salutary restraint, he is con 
 tinually strengthening himself in the virtues of 
 self-denial, forbearance, and moderation ; and he is 
 all the better for the institution which has afford 
 ed so much occasion for the exercise of those vir 
 tues." 
 
 By the same reasoning this enterprising moralist is 
 doubtless prepared to prove that a young prince of 
 unlimited power is all the better for the pimps and 
 parasites who afford him large occasion to manifest 
 his superiority to the seductions of vice and flattery- 
 The conclusion at which he arrives is that the effects 
 of a right, reasonable, temperate use of negro 
 slavery, are to dignify the dispositions of the whites 
 by generous self-command and beneficence, and to 
 embellish and ameliorate the souls of the negroes by 
 
67 
 
 the tender and endearing sentiment of grateful affec 
 tionate regard !* 
 
 My purpose at present is not to deal with the 
 soundness of this opinion, but to demonstrate its 
 existence among a people whom the American 
 correspondent of Lord Brougham represents as 
 groaning under the continuance of negro slavery as 
 a hated burden forcefully entailed on them by Great 
 Britain, and fixed in the purpose of effecting its 
 removal as an outrage on human nature. I cannot 
 however allude to it even thus cursorily, without 
 denouncing the argument on which it reposes as 
 abominable sophistry, a vilely perverted application 
 of ingenuity, and quite worthy of a moral teacher 
 who, instead of the heaven-taught prayer " Lead us 
 not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," would 
 substitute " Lead us into temptation, that we may 
 deliver ourselves from evil." Yet the divine Author 
 of the biblical prayer best knew what is in man. I 
 regret to see that highly gifted American writer and 
 truly generous and benevolent man Robert Walsh, 
 
 * Tucker's Life of Jefferson, voL i. " No one," say some Ame 
 ricans, " can value liberty so highly as he who beholds in the con 
 dition of his own slaves what slavery really is." "We certainly," 
 said Dr. Johnson, "hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the pro 
 prietors of negro slaves." Of such a votary of liberty, Thomas 
 Moore has said that " He dreams of freedom in his slave's embrace/* 
 
 E 2 
 
68 
 
 in his published Letter to Lamartine, the French 
 poet and statesman, on negro slavery in the United 
 States, allude even with qualified approbation to 
 Tucker's argument and the relative sentiment in 
 America, and further cite approvingly that execrable 
 Jesuitical axiom propounded in a late Report by a 
 Committee of the French Chamber of Peers, that 
 " there are rights of property as sacred as those of 
 liberty/' What sophistical cant ! As if any other 
 right of property could be as sacred as that right of 
 property in his own liberty which God and nature 
 give to every man : and as if any other man could 
 possibly acquire an artificial right of property in my 
 forcible privation of my natural right to liberty ! 
 Most justly has Bossuet said " II n'est point de 
 droit centre le droit." 
 
 A natural consequence of the sentiment we have 
 just remarked, is that insolent aversion (chiefly preva 
 lent in the Southern, but more or less apparent in all 
 the States) with which white men in America regard 
 the condition of domestic servants. The just and 
 reasonable effect of the republican system of America 
 should be to make service of every description a 
 liberal relation between man and man. But the spec 
 tacle of slave servants and the exaggerated notions 
 of white dignity pervert the sentiments of all white 
 
69 
 
 persons with regard to their condition : freemen 
 shrink from even a seeming assimilation to the cha 
 racter of slaves : and freedom is taxed by the world 
 with producing perverse and inconvenient results 
 which are truly the offspring of its unnatural and un 
 happy coalition with slavery. Where there are 
 rich and poor, there will be masters and servants 
 each class wanting what the other has the power to 
 bestow. But this necessary relation is corrupted in 
 America by the subsistence of negro slavery, and by 
 the sentiments which this vile institution engenders. 
 
 Every nation has been reproached, more or less 
 justly, with faults peculiar, in kind or degree, to its 
 people. Is there not reason to suppose that all or 
 almost all the faulty peculiarities with which the 
 Americans are taxed, may be imputed to the exist 
 ence of negro slavery among them ? Can any 
 virtue associate with any vice, without being defiled 
 by its neighbourhood ? Can any member of a 
 body moral, corporate, or politic, be gangrened and 
 corrupted, without the taint being propagated 
 through the whole collective mass ? The strongest 
 and best compacted frame must be generally affected 
 by the continued unsoundness of any one of its 
 organs, or derangement of any one of its functions. 
 The existence and sanction of slavery to any extent 
 
7Q 
 
 in a commonwealth is a practical revolt against all 
 the restraints of justice and morality. 
 
 That there is a party in America by which the 
 practice of negro slavery is sincerely deplored and 
 condemned as a heinous sin in the sight of God, 
 and a cruel outrage on the rights of man a party 
 by which the fixed purpose of extirpating the evil is 
 really cherished, and the only wise and honest means of 
 accomplishing it are virtuously pursued, is proved, 
 I gladly admit, by the formation and spread of The 
 American Anti- Slavery Society* I heartily wish 
 it were more numerous, and earnestly hope it may 
 become so. But it is not on this society that 
 the American correspondent of Lord Brougham 
 bestows his sympathy and approbation. His cham 
 pionship is all for that far more numerous and 
 powerful body, The American Colonization So 
 ciety, of which he avows himself a zealous member 
 and of which, after a careful examination of its 
 character and history, I hesitate not to affirm, that it 
 was engendered by a coalition between deluded 
 philanthropy and busy fraud, injustice, and hypo 
 crisy. The most active and influential of its patrons 
 
 * In Arthur and Lewis Tappan of New York, and a small but 
 noble band of their coadjutors, this society presents champions 
 of human rights, whose generous and heroic zeal has never been 
 exceeded in any age or country of the world. 
 
71 
 
 have been men who combined with their patronage 
 of the society, the retention of negro slaves, and 
 even a contraband prosecution of the slave-trade. 
 Its professed design is to cure the prejudice enter 
 tained by the Americans against men of colour, and 
 to lay a foundation for the total abolition of negro 
 slavery by colonizing a part of Africa (which has 
 been called Liberia) with freed negroes and mu- 
 lattoes from America : its real object is the security 
 and perpetuation of negro slavery in America, by ex 
 pelling all coloured free men, and depriving the negro 
 slaves of the spectacle and idea of freedom in any 
 other guise than that of a white skin : and its 
 agency has produced only increased maltreatment 
 of the freed blacks, and more confirmed and rigor 
 ous bondage of the enslaved ones. Instead of here 
 adducing (as it would cost but the labour of tran 
 scribing to do) the proof I possess of the justice of 
 this charge, I refer for such proof every honest and 
 impartial man who desires it, to an admirable little 
 work published at New York in 1835, and entitled 
 " An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the 
 American Colonization and American Anti- Slavery 
 Societies by William Jay" a work of which the 
 perusal may be accomplished by any reader in a very 
 brief space of time, and which every man who de- 
 
72 
 
 sires the welfare and happiness of the African race 
 ought carefully to consider. 
 
 In evidence of the successful prosecution of that 
 fixed purpose of emancipation which Lord Broug 
 ham's correspondent imputes to his countrymen, he 
 hails with confident triumph and praise the dawning 
 prospect of abolition of the negro slavery by which 
 Virginia and certain other of the more happily 
 situated (si sua bona norinf) provinces of the South 
 have been so long disgraced and afflicted. I am not 
 qualified to estimate the solidity of this prospect: I see 
 no cheering quality in its features : and the praise that 
 is bestowed on the relaxing grasp of certain of the 
 slaveholders, seems to me much akin to the merit 
 sometimes affected by exhausted debauchees who 
 profess to forsake their vices when, in reality, their 
 vices forsake them. The commercial interest and 
 position of Virginia, once highly favourable to slave 
 labour, have so completely changed of late years, 
 and her social circumstances in respect to slavery 
 have become so closely assimilated to those of the 
 white population of the Northern provinces, that one 
 of her own statesmen, Mr. Randolph of Roanoke, 
 has repeatedly said in Congress that " the time was 
 coming when the masters would run away from the 
 slaves, and be advertised by them as runaways in 
 
73 
 
 the public papers."* Various attempts have been 
 made by patriotic individuals and societies in Ame 
 rica to engage the people and state government of 
 Virginia to abolish an institution clearly proved to 
 have now become there nearly if not wholly profit 
 less to the slave-owners, burdensome to the general 
 resources of the community, hostile to domestic 
 comfort, and perilous to public safety. Of the 
 genius and policy of these exertions, some notion 
 may be derived from the following sentences, which 
 I transcribe from an able and elaborate article in 
 The American Quarterly Review for September 
 and December, 1832, in which the whole argument 
 that has been addressed to the Virginians is repro 
 duced with the merit, at least, of singular skill and 
 perspicuity. " We believe that there is not the 
 slightest moral turpitude in holding slaves under 
 existing circumstances in the South." " Our solici 
 tations to the slaveholders, it will be perceived, 
 are founded but little on the miseries of the blacks. 
 We direct ourselves almost exclusively to the in 
 juries that slavery inflicts on the whites." " The 
 whole scope of this article will be to show the 
 necessity of her [Virginia] promptly doing some 
 thing to check the palpable mischiefs her pros- 
 
 * American Quarterly Review for September and December, 1832. 
 
74 
 
 perity is suffering from slavery. We design to 
 shew that all her sources of economical prosperity 
 are poisoned by slavery ; and we shall hint at its 
 moral evils only as they occasion or imply destruc 
 tion to the real prosperity of a nation." Shades of 
 Washington and La Fayette ! behold the worship 
 that is offered in the temple erected by your valour 
 and virtue ! " Unless we first make this position 
 impregnable, we shall ask no one to sacrifice merely 
 to abstract humanity and justice. Nor shall we 
 insist on Virginia's beginning action on this mo 
 mentous subject, until we have shown that her 
 genuine ultimate interest will be promoted by it. 
 The best way of persuading men of this world 
 to deeds which involve the sacrifice of present 
 interests, is to convince them that a greater 
 prospective interest may be thereby secured." 
 This is sheer error and absurdity. A depraved 
 taste is corrected by changing its nature, not by 
 altering its direction : the calculations of avarice 
 and cruelty are perverse and short-sighted : and it 
 is too much to expect that he who is such a fool as 
 to be a knave, should be uniformly prudent and 
 clear-sighted in his knavery. If we would alter 
 the conduct and habits of that man who believes 
 that it can profit him to make worldly gain at the 
 
75 
 
 expense of his soul, we must seek to rectify his 
 views of profit, instead of attempting the impossi 
 bility of beguiling him into the service of God by 
 blending it in his estimate and purpose with the 
 service of mammon. No pecuniary motive or com 
 pensation was tendered to the young man in Scrip 
 ture for the surrender he was required to make of 
 those possessions which he could not continue to 
 retain without violation of his duty to God. But 
 in the Essay which we are considering, all other 
 human interests are regarded but as the small dust 
 in the balance, compared with the interests which a 
 man can reckon on his ten fingers ; all other fears 
 are tenderly considered, except the fear of God ; all 
 other cautions enforced and applauded, except cau 
 tion to ascertain and obey His will ; the Coloniza 
 tion Society is extolled with glowing encomium ; 
 and the strongest prejudices against men of African 
 descent are avowed and defended. The author is 
 manifestly either incapable of comprehending, or 
 convinced of the incapacity of his American audi 
 ence to appreciate the maxim of Charles Fox, 
 that that which is morally wrong, can never be 
 politically right. But let us return to himself; and 
 let him clothe his own sentiments in his own 
 language. " Hence, even if we should succeed in 
 
76 
 
 making out our case as to Virginia, it will be in 
 stantly remarked that we have said very little that 
 will touch South Carolina and Georgia, and scarcely 
 anything applicable to Louisiana, Mississippi, and 
 Alabama. If the prosperity of any of these is 
 founded in circumstances of soil, climate, products, 
 &c., of such nature and degree as that it will not sink 
 under the precarious specific (neck or nothing) of 
 slave labour, a la bonne heure, let them go on. 
 This is undoubtedly the case more or less of the 
 sugar, cotton, and rice plantation States. But it is 
 not the case of Virginia.'* 
 
 But, like some of the vice-bred maladies of the 
 human frame, from which it is hardly possible for 
 the victims to obtain deliverance, negro slavery 
 exerts an influence so blinding and corruptive, that 
 all these attempts have hitherto proved ineffectual ; 
 and the Virginian slaveholders, in default of the 
 profitable employment of negro labour at home, 
 have betaken themselves to the infamous brothel- 
 like occupation of slave-breeding (what a destina 
 tion of American ground !) for the supply of the more 
 Southern quarters of their national confederacy.* 
 
 * Several others of the (now) thirteen slave-holding States have 
 followed the example of Virginia in addicting themselves to slave- 
 breedingwhence the increasing extent and horrors of the domestic 
 slave-trade of North America. 
 
77 
 
 They are as reluctant to set free their negroes as 
 were Pharaoh and his people to suffer the departure 
 of the enslaved Israelites, even when the retention 
 of these bondmen was proved to be the ruin of the 
 land of Egypt. And even if hereafter the exertions 
 to which I have alluded should succeed is it on 
 such policy as they disclose that the divine blessing 
 can be honestly implored or reasonably expected ? 
 Is it a happy and respectable social edifice that is 
 likely to be reared by builders who lay their founda 
 tion in avowed disregard of God's will and law ? 
 Or, what other result is to be rationally anticipated, 
 than the reproduction and extension of that state of 
 society (exemplified in the now slaveless provinces) 
 which furnishes a theme of outward boast to the 
 Americans, but extorts, as we have seen, their 
 admission to each other that the happiness of the 
 blacks and the general welfare of the common 
 wealth are more effectually promoted by the un 
 disguised bondage of coloured men than by any 
 permissible result of American emancipation ? 
 
 Whatever be the true moral character of negro 
 slavery in North America, with regard either to 
 its first introduction, or its continued and actual sub 
 sistence, it belongs to the Americans themselves* 
 They, and they only, are entitled to the blushing 
 
78 
 
 honour, or liable to the blush-impressing blame. 
 In common with many European friends (not 
 flatterers) of the Americans, I have long been 
 persuaded that, whether the horrid practice which 
 exists among them be remediable or not, it will 
 never be cured whilst a fallacious soul-soothing 
 theory of its origin is current among the American 
 people, or propounded with hopeful defence by 
 them in answer to the moral reproach of the world. 
 The radical cure of deeply fixed malady will never 
 be found by the sick man whom passion prompts 
 and sophistry enables to misrepresent the source 
 and underrate the malignity of his disease. They 
 that be whole or deem themselves whole, seek not 
 to the physician, though perchance they may seek 
 to such fallacious quackery and dupery as that of 
 the Colonization Society. 
 
 The main cause, it seems to me, or at least one 
 of the main causes of the present subsistence of 
 negro slavery and maltreatment of coloured persons 
 in America, is the violent prejudice that divides the 
 two races of men in that country itself in a great 
 measure the effect of negro slavery. I have already 
 cited an American avowal most distinct and most 
 impious, of the force of this prejudice. Unhappily, 
 it is easier to multiply than to select citations of a 
 
79 
 
 similar import. " Prejudices," says the American 
 correspondent of Lord Brougham, " numerous and 
 long cherished, must be overcome, Those who 
 have never owned slaves, and who have not grown 
 up in the midst of them, can have no correct idea 
 of either the nature or the strength of these 
 prejudices. That those who have held slaves and 
 governed them all their lives, and who have been 
 influenced by prejudices which have descended 
 from generation to generation, should at once 
 become reconciled to the idea of not only setting 
 their slaves free, and thus losing what they consider 
 their property, but also of seeing those same slaves 
 become entitled to every privilege of freedom 
 which they themselves enjoy, however desirable, is 
 yet the most improbable of all moral or political 
 changes."* I believe this writer completely mis 
 taken in supposing Europeans less capable than 
 Americans of comprehending the prejudices of 
 slaveholders. We know how difficult it is to re 
 deem any part of the violated liberties of mankind 
 from the usurping hands of royal despots ; and can 
 easily conceive the force of pride and prejudice with 
 which citizen slave-holders must cling to a system 
 that elevates them to the rank of rulers of a con- 
 
 * "Letter," &c. p. 27. 
 
80 
 
 siderable portion of the human race, and the over 
 throw of which would strip them of their import 
 ance, and level them with the men whom they now 
 govern with an authority more absolute than belongs 
 to any sovereign in Europe. It is, indeed, a horrid 
 consideration that in America the vilest of mankind, 
 even the wretch whom his crimes have made a fugi 
 tive from European society, may for a small sum 
 of money acquire such power over his sable brethren 
 as the Americans would die rather than entrust to 
 the wisest and best of men over themselves. We 
 are as well aware as the Americans of the strength 
 of the slaveholder prejudice, and have a far more 
 correct idea of its nature. But, not having been 
 exposed to its infection, nor trained to partake it, 
 (the very cause of the superior correctness of our 
 idea) we regard it with a far less indulgent eye. 
 Strangers behold with shrinking horror the goitres 
 that are compassionately or negligently considered 
 by the natives of those regions where that afflictive 
 blemish prevails. 
 
 Of every country in the world, I believe, the pa 
 triotic vindicators and apologists are apt to say to its 
 foreign censors, You cannot judge our national cha 
 racter and institutions, without having lived amongst 
 us. Now, this consideration, though doubtless partially 
 
81 
 
 just, is generally pressed far beyond the limits of its 
 legitimate application. When I am told that I can 
 not rightly estimate slavery, without having lived in a 
 society where slavery is established, and actually 
 breathed its pestilential atmosphere, it seems to me 
 that I might as reasonably be told that I cannot 
 rightly estimate debauchery and libertinism, without 
 first becoming the fellow and familiar associate of 
 libertines and debauchees. Is a sot or gambler the 
 only proper arbitrator of the merits of gamblers and 
 sots ? Must the philanthropists of Europe distrust 
 their judgments and feelings, because they have not 
 been exposed to an influence of which the continued 
 operation has transformed Henry Clay of Kentucky 
 from the generous emancipator which he showed 
 himself in his youth, to the champion of slavery 
 which he has become in his old age ? 
 
 But this leads me to remark that, in one particu 
 lar, some of the European advocates of the abolition 
 of slavery in America do (according at least to my 
 thoughts) very greatly err. To the prejudices and 
 antipathies subsisting between the whites and the 
 blacks, they refer with a frequency doubtless be 
 coming the importance of such a consideration. 
 But they regard it too exclusively as a matter of 
 condemnation, and too little as a naked fact or cir- 
 
82 
 
 cum stance that must if possible ', or as far as pos 
 sible, be remedially dealt with. They rub the sore, 
 when they should, if they can, produce the plaster ; 
 and show too little indulgence for the force of 
 temptations which their own lot has happily exempted 
 them from experiencing. Much of their language 
 tends to irritate slave-holders, and so far to fortify 
 (by thickening the mist of passion) the obstructive 
 fact and circumstance that confronts their own view 
 and desire. They "speak the truth;" but not "in 
 love." We may condemn vice, while we regard 
 its victims with more of regret than condemna 
 tion. That a woman has been bred among women 
 lost to virtue and honour, and that her first 
 recollections of human kindness are blended with 
 the impression of their manners, may be the expla. 
 nation, perhaps the apology of her personal profli 
 gacy, though it will not render her society the less 
 unacceptable, or her conduct the less illaudable. 
 Such a woman is at once more justly treated, and 
 more likely to be amended by the mild address of a 
 humble Christian than by the scornful rebuke of 
 a haughty and self-righteous Pharisee. Let us, as 
 an inspired teacher recommends, " consider our 
 selves, lest we also be tempted." Horace tells us 
 that all the splendour of his genius, aided by the 
 
83 
 
 Favour of Augustus, the patronage of Maecenas, 
 and the friendship of Virgil, could not defend him 
 from general contempt at Rome as the son of a 
 freedman !* And yet Horace was a man of the 
 same bodily colour as the persons who regarded 
 him with disdain, and whose insignificant existence 
 has been rescued from oblivion only by the immor 
 tal verse of the man whom they presumed to de 
 spise. I suspect that many an European condemner 
 of American prejudice, many a man of pure moral 
 habit and sincere (though of course imperfect) re 
 ligious conviction, would be less shocked to hear 
 that his son had corrupted the virtue of a negro or 
 mulatto woman, than that he had made her his wife. 
 Every man discerns the mote in his brother's eye ? 
 and condemns the degree in which another's preju 
 dice transcends his own. 
 
 Yet, be it always remembered that between dif 
 ferent degrees and different operations of the same 
 prejudice, there may be a wide moral distinction^ 
 Degree is an important element in moral considera 
 tion, and often constitutes the whole difference 
 between innocence and criminality. Scripture con- 
 
 * Freedmen at Rome were compelled to wear a distinctive dress, 
 and were not admitted to the entire privileges of citizenship. They 
 were generally regarded at Rome much as free persons of colour are 
 regarded in America. 
 
 F 2 
 
84 
 
 demns alike inordinate affection and destitution of 
 affections. If I am willing to admit men of every 
 bodily complexion to an equal share with me in civil 
 rights and political franchises ; and, in my personal 
 intercourse with them, to fulfil all the duties of 
 courtesy and humanity if I am willing to plead my 
 cause before a coloured judge, to obey a civil or 
 military officer of sable hue, to attend the ministry of 
 a preacher in whom I recognize no colour save the 
 colour of his sentiments and opinions, and to receive 
 the sacrament from negro hands, I am not to be 
 classed with the votaries of American prejudice, 
 because (neither judging nor restraining the liberty 
 of others) I may personally shrink from conjugal 
 ties with an African complexion, and might regret to 
 see any of my children contract them. Even this 
 man's modified prejudice (little if at all stronger 
 than the repulsion that separates him from a white 
 woman coarsened by exposure to weather, toil, igno 
 rance, depression, and vulgarity) may be traced, 
 more or less directly, to the existence of negro sla 
 very, and the light in which it causes coloured people 
 to appear. Slavery at once corrupts the nature and 
 discredits in universal estimation the peculiar colour 
 of its victims ; and the prejudice against the colour 
 reacts on the injustice which produced it, and is pas- 
 
85 
 
 sionately cherished as an apology by those to whom 
 the continuance of the injustice is convenient. In 
 the course of half a century's experience and survey 
 of human life in various countries of the world, I 
 have felt and seen the utmost force of prejudice on 
 the human mind. But I have also seen and 
 felt that prejudice frequently owes its prolonged 
 sway to an erroneous opinion that it is insur 
 mountable. " Find, if you can," says a great 
 moral bard, " in what you cannot change." And 
 when Americans tell me that they cannot change 
 their prejudices with respect to coloured men, then, 
 in the language of the same poet, I presume to tell 
 them that 
 
 " I, who think more highly of our kind, 
 (And surely Heaven and I are of a mind)," 
 
 deem them completely mistaken, and blindly unjust 
 to the noblest capacity of their nature. Our 
 Creator, who has commanded us to " honour all 
 men," never gave a command without imparting 
 sufficient ability to perform it. I have no doubt 
 (Heaven correct my conviction if wrong, or com 
 mend it to others if right) that universal emancipa 
 tion of the coloured race, with free communication 
 of the happiness of refined intelligence to them, 
 would be attended with many instances of intermar- 
 
riage of the two races whence, from the ascertained 
 predominance of the nobler colour and feature, 
 would arise a complexion with which even the most 
 fastidious delicacy of the most prejudiced white men 
 would not disdain to commingle. But at present, 
 such commixture, in legitimate guise, is not only 
 rejected, but disallowed by the ruling sentiment in 
 America. Its potential efficiency, however, has 
 been forcibly illustrated in many parts of America, 
 and especially at New Orleans, by the progressive 
 results of that licentious intercourse from which the 
 two races have never been debarred. 
 
 It is a remarkable circumstance, and well worthy 
 of more extended consideration than at present I 
 have leisure to bestow on it, that the Turks and 
 Moors, though long wedded to the system of slavery, 
 were never tainted (or very slightly tainted) by pre 
 judice of colour. Why were they exempt from this 
 prejudice ? Because the legitimate designation of a 
 slave with them was not distinction of colour but 
 distinction of faith their faith expressly permitting 
 them to make slaves of all who do not embrace it. 
 And when negro slavery was yet in its infancy, ere 
 yet its corruptive influence was fully effused on 
 mankind, the practice seems to have derived little 
 or no support from the sentiments of white men 
 
87 
 
 with respect to colour. Bertrandon de la Broe- 
 quiere, one of the ministers of Philip the Good, 
 Duke of Burgundy, in the very interesting Journal 
 he has left of his Travels in Palestine in the years 
 1432 and 1433, relates with equal horror that he 
 saw white Christians exposed to sale at Bursa, and 
 a black girl similarly treated at Damascus. What 
 shall we say when Mahometans, unguided save by 
 the light of nature, relax the tyrant grasp which 
 men calling themselves Christians are fain to con 
 tinue? What but corruptio bonorum pessima, or, 
 with citation of higher wisdom, " Hath a nation 
 changed their gods, which are yet no gods ? but my 
 people have changed their glory." 
 
 The American prejudice, engendered by the 
 depraving influence of slavery both on masters and 
 slaves, and fomented by the distinctive colour of 
 the Africans, has been carried so far as to have 
 suggested the apologetic theory current among 
 some philosophical slave-owners, that the negroes 
 are an unalterably distinct, inferior, and semi- 
 brutal race of beings a notion by which the 
 degradation that human beings inflict on their 
 fellows in reducing them to the level of the brute 
 creation is charged upon God, whose word assures 
 us that he created man after his own image, and 
 
88 
 
 formed of one blood all the families on earth. 
 Alas ! man seems to be the only creature capable 
 of provoking from his fellow man such cruelty as 
 the blacks have experienced from the whites. But' 
 interest and pride harden the heart ; a deceived 
 heart perverts the understanding; and men are 
 easily persuaded to consider those as brutes whom 
 they deem it convenient to treat as such.* Strange 
 and horrid, that such sentiments should be en 
 tertained or professed by the parents of a 
 mulatto race ! The best philosophical refuta 
 tion of their impious theory that I have ever 
 seen, is the production of an American writer, 
 and occurs in Dr. S. Smith's interesting " Essay 
 on the Causes of the Variety of Figure and Com 
 plexion in the Human Species. " f Anthony 
 Benezet, the Quaker, himself a very ingenious and 
 accomplished man, living in Pennsylvania at the 
 
 * " Ye be but brutes, and no more fit to advise me than a blind 
 man is fit to discourse of colours," was the answer of Henry VIII. 
 to a remonstrance from a numerous body of the peasantry of Eng 
 land. Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Pym, in impeaching Lord Straf- 
 ford for his misgovernment of Ireland, protested that he had treated 
 the Irish as brutes ; and indignantly asked, " If it be treason against 
 man to embase the current coin of a country, is it not treason 
 against God to corrupt and vilify that nobler coinage on which He 
 has impressed His own divine image and superscription ?" 
 
 f See also on the same subject, Clarkson's " Researches, Antedi 
 luvian, Patriarchal," &c. 
 
89 
 
 time when it was a slaveholding State, and who had 
 conversed extensively with negroes both enslaved and 
 free, and personally undertaken the education of a 
 great number of them, pronounced, as the result of 
 his experience, that this race is perfectly equal to 
 the whites in all the endowments of nature. The 
 prevalence of an opposite opinion, he ascribed partly 
 to the debasing effect of slavery on the minds of the 
 negroes, and partly to the influence of ignorance, 
 pride, and cruelty on those white men who, pluming 
 themselves on a wide separation from their co 
 loured fellows, are incompetent to form a sound 
 judgment on the capacities of this race.* Dr. 
 Foure of Nantes, one of the greatest physicians and 
 most learned and intelligent men in France, a man 
 whose vigorous, penetrative, and comprehensive 
 genius has been enlightened by the widest experience 
 and is warmed and elevated by the most generous 
 and benevolent heart, who resided and practised 
 long at Haiti both prior and posterior to its revolu 
 tionary change, who endured severe persecution 
 and incurred still greater danger from the prejudice 
 of the blacks against the whites, and hardly saved 
 his life by consenting to act for a while as physician 
 to the negro army of General Rigaud, declares to 
 
 * Vaux's Life of Benezet. 
 
90 
 
 me, as the result of his experience, that he could 
 never discern any natural distinction between 
 white and coloured men,* nor any moral dif 
 ference between the races that was not clearly 
 referable to the depraving operation of slavery. 
 Some white men cannot pardon the blacks 
 whom they have injured ; but Dr. Foure" can 
 forgive the blacks who injured him, and regard 
 the exasperation from which he suffered with 
 the liberal indulgence of exalted wisdom. The 
 experience of every age has confirmed Homer's 
 maxim that the day which makes man a slave 
 takes half his worth away. Impudently seeking 
 a defence of their crueltv even in the most de- 
 
 w 
 
 testable of its fruits, slave owners appeal to the 
 degradation inflicted by slavery on the negro race 
 as a proof that the race is naturally degraded to 
 an aptitude for slavery. That the mental de 
 basement of the negro race is produced not by 
 
 * Human nature appears least respectable to its own least respect 
 able members. The wise and good are ever prompt to recognize, and 
 liberal in appreciating the worth and capacity of other men. The 
 Malay and Hottentot slaves at the Cape of Good Hope used to be 
 regarded by their masters very much as negroes are regarded in 
 America. But the greatest genius that ever visited the Cape of 
 Good Hope, Sir John Herschel, assures me that there appeared to 
 him to exist no substantial distinction, moral or intellectual, between 
 those men and the natives of Europe. 
 
91 
 
 the qualities of their physical constitution, but by 
 the moral operation of their misfortunes and mal 
 treatment, is strongly inferred by the similarly 
 debased estate of those numerous families and 
 classes of men in Hindostan whom the tyrannical 
 and brutifying system of castes has depressed 
 beneath the civil and political level of their country 
 men. The natural superiority which a white slave 
 holder arrogates to himself over a negro is not 
 greater than the superiority affected by a Hindu of 
 high caste over one whose caste is reckoned servile 
 and plebeian. 
 
 How is the fatal and inhuman prejudice, fraught 
 with so much wickedness and woe, to be success 
 fully combated and finally subdued in America ? 
 A great step would be made towards this desirable 
 end, by universal emancipation. For, while the great 
 majority or even any considerable portion of the 
 blacks remain in slavery, the freed portion con 
 tinue allied by colour to a degraded race, and 
 must partake the contempt inspired by proscribed 
 and felon hue. While a black skin is reckoned 
 the hue of slavery, every approach to it will be as 
 much repudiated and despised, even by persons of 
 mixed breed, as humble though honest employ 
 ments are scouted by wealthy upstarts in white 
 
92 
 
 society. Even while the prejudice remains, let it not 
 sanction the continuance of cruelty and injustice. 
 
 But it is the influence of religion, from which 
 this grand consummation is to be expected. 
 And though an American writer whom I have 
 already quoted denies that even religion itself 
 is capable of exerting an influence so mighty, 
 I confidently ascribe to religion the power 
 which he refuses it, and receive no other con 
 viction from his words than that he knows not 
 what true and undefiled religion is. He looks at 
 this celestial principle in the foul and feeble 
 copy of the world's depraved practice. I look 
 at its original picture in the word of God, from 
 which, I am firmly persuaded that more of the light 
 and truth and force of the Gospel has yet to break 
 forth on mankind than, except in brief and partial 
 flashes, the world has ever yet seen. Scripture has 
 promised that the time will come when " the earth 
 shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the 
 waters cover the sea" when none shall hurt or op 
 press within the extent of Divine dominion, but all 
 hearts and knees shall bow to Him before whose pre 
 sence every valley shall be filled and every mountain 
 brought low, and " in whom is neither Jew nor Gen 
 tile, Greek nor Barbarian, Bond nor Free :" And 
 
93 
 
 I believe God rather than man. " Revelation," says 
 the excellent Bishop Trevor, " may be slow in work 
 ing the full purpose of Heaven, but it must be sure. 
 Religion must one day be a very different thing from 
 what we at present behold it. Christian charity 
 cannot always be to the world a light without heat, 
 a pale cold fire. Its warmth at length must be uni 
 versally felt." His arm is not shortened, who in 
 days of old gave bondmen favour in the eyes of those 
 who had dragged them from their homes and de 
 tained them in captivity who caused their op 
 pressor himself to break their chains and re 
 build their city.* The increased effusion of re 
 ligious light and influence will lead men to find in 
 every instance of human weakness, misfortune, and 
 inferiority, not invitations to tyranny and usurpation, 
 but motives to compassion and opportunities of 
 beneficence ; and teach their hearts to feel the force, 
 as well as their eyes to see the meaning of our 
 Saviour's answer to the lawyer's question, " And 
 who is my neighbour?" No person who has 
 studied Clarkson's History of the Abolition of the 
 Slave-Trade, and walked in spirit by that man's side 
 
 * " He [Cyrus] shall build my city, and he shall let go my cap 
 tives, not for price nor reward, saith the Lord of hosts." Isaiah 
 xlv. 13, 
 
94 
 
 up the steep hill that he gloriously climbed, will 
 despair of the final triumph of pious energy and 
 single hearted benevolence over the most obstinate 
 resistance that prejudice, interest, and habit can 
 oppose to human welfare and improvement. 
 " Greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the 
 world." From every temptation that assails human 
 nature, the Almighty has provided a way to escape : 
 and when the will exists, the way will be found. It 
 is the fearful, the unbelieving, the slothful, who says, 
 " There is a lion in the way ;" and shuts his heart 
 against the light and warmth of Christianity, lest its 
 flame should burn his fingers. The faithful believer 
 finds the yoke of virtue made easy, and its burden 
 light. 
 
 The descendants of the New England Puritans, 
 of the Maryland Catholics*, and of the New Jersey 
 and Pennsylvanian Quakers, must carry out to its 
 
 * The Church of Rome, to which these Catholics ascribe infallible 
 wisdom, has not only anathematized negro slavery as an outrage to 
 religion and nature, but repeatedly conferred the rank of priesthood 
 on negroes, and even canonized some of the negro priests as saints. 
 See Gregoires " Traite de la Noblesse de la Peau" The greatest 
 champion of African rights that has ever appeared in Maryland 
 was Elisha Tyson a Quaker. Of the heroic labours, the super 
 human courage and fortitude with which this Christian Hercules 
 stemmed the flood of iniquity at its fiercest height, a striking pic 
 ture is preserved in the appendix to Mr. Sturge's " Visit to the 
 United States." 
 
95 
 
 full extent the principle that conducted their fathers 
 to America. It was the boast of those fathers 
 that the Almighty, in giving them the heritage of 
 the new world, had distinguished them by a spe 
 cialty of divine favour akin to that by which the land 
 of promise was granted to the people of Israel : and 
 it is the opprobrium of their descendants, as it was 
 of the degenerated children of Israel, that " He 
 looked for judgment, but behold oppression ; for 
 righteousness, but behold a cry." The race of white 
 men must acquire and exercise the truly Christian 
 virtue of Forgiveness not that spurious copy of the 
 virtue, better deserving to be termed a proud self- 
 glorious disdain of other men's real or imagined 
 trespasses against us, but a hearty repentance of our 
 trespasses against them, with humble forgiveness of 
 the moral superiority over ourselves to which our in 
 justice has elevated them, and of the abhorrence of 
 ourselves with which it has inspired them. We have 
 seen that Jefferson, in alluding to the separative influ 
 ence of the American prejudice between the two 
 races of people, deduces his melancholy conclusion 
 of the hopelessness of its cure, as much from the 
 juster resentment of the blacks as from the less just 
 but equally natural and far stronger fear and fear- 
 bred hatred of the whites. I am convinced that he 
 
96 
 
 is mistaken. Proprium est humani generis, says 
 Tacitus, odisse quern laeserit : And, with fuller ex 
 pression of the same sentiment, a tuneful moralist 
 of Britain has said that 
 
 " Forgiveness to the injured does belong : 
 They never pardon who commit the wrong :" 
 
 certainly, they neither do nor can, till (seeking and 
 finding) they are endowed with the strength of 
 divine sentiment from on high till the full know 
 ledge that they are themselves at once indefensibly 
 guilty and divinely forgiven, generates the full virtue 
 of forgiveness in their minds. If the whites will 
 forgive the blacks for having been socially degraded 
 and for having resented their degradation, the blacks 
 will undoubtedly forgive the whites for having been 
 their degraders. Emancipation of slaves is an act 
 of beneficence : but, like other beneficent acts, it is 
 one which is too often erroneously estimated, and 
 marred in the performance. Human benefactors of 
 their fellows delight to account their benefactions, 
 and to have them regarded by the world as noble 
 gratuitous effusions of superior worth and liberality, 
 rather than as humble and truly generous recogni 
 tions of duty and equality. " Let the brother of 
 low degree," says the precept of inspired wisdom, 
 " rejoice in that he is exalted : but the rich in that 
 
97 
 
 he is made low" that he has descended from the false 
 elevation of a brief, unjust, and delusive superiority. 
 No man can feel a warmer or more friendly in 
 terest than I do in North America, where already 
 great things have been done for human welfare and 
 dignity, and where the mighty problem of Republi 
 canism is in process of solution for the benefit and 
 glory or the detriment and humiliation of the whole 
 human race. But my regard cannot separate her 
 virtue from her happiness and renown : and highly 
 as I prize her favour, I would (if the choice must 
 be made) far rather deserve than obtain it. Her 
 solid and lasting fame is ill consulted by those flat 
 tering friends who deny or palliate the faults which 
 sully its lustre and impair or pervert its just impres 
 sion on mankind. Were the dark and horrible blot 
 of negro slavery obliterated from the surface of her 
 great commonwealth, the brightness of its social 
 aspect would awaken universal admiration, and 
 shed a cheering and ameliorating ray through 
 the whole expanse of human nature and society. 
 The rise and early progress of every one of 
 her primitive States is a noble monument of 
 fortitude and virtue. Her war of Independence 
 casts the historic glories of Greece, of Rome, of 
 Switzerland, and of Holland into the shade. The 
 
 G 
 
98 
 
 scene disclosed by the Philadelphia Convention that 
 assembled in 1788 for the establishment of the Ame 
 rican Constitution, maugre the acts and omissions 
 respecting slavery and the slave-trade, this scene, I 
 say, in its main transactions and their general issue, 
 does in dignity, wisdom, and worth, transcend the 
 highest conception suggested by the political annals 
 of any other people in ancient or in modern times. 
 A clear, just, and lively portraiture of it, I think, 
 might be sufficient (beneficially) to revolutionize the 
 world, to awaken throughout the whole range of 
 humanity a force of sentiment and opinion incompat 
 ible with the subsistence of unjust and tyrannical 
 authority. But y while the national flag that was 
 unfurled with such happy promise, floats in ex 
 panded pride and glory along the stream of time, 
 a black cloud, like the monitory slave in the car of 
 the victorious Roman, o'ercasts while it pursues the 
 triumph, and taints while it partakes the gale. 
 
99 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 THE foregoing sheets were ready for the press, 
 when four remarkable Works reached my hands 
 1st, a Pamphlet recently published at Paris entitled 
 " Essai sur les moyens d'extirper les prejuges des 
 Blancs centre la couleur des Africains et des sang- 
 mele's,'' by Mr. Linstant, an accomplished negro 
 inhabitant of Haiti, to which a prize has been 
 awarded by a French philanthropic society, a 
 circumstance which, if it had been prophesied to the 
 French people sixty years ago, they would have 
 scouted as a baseless and extravagant vision. 2d, A 
 Pamphlet published at London in 1840, bearing the 
 strange and melancholy title of " The American 
 Churches, the Bulwarks of American Slavery," 
 and though anonymous, yet sufficiently known to 
 be the production of James Gillespie Birney, a 
 zealous American Abolitionist who once pos 
 sessed negro slaves, but emancipated them all, 
 like Zaccheus, who no sooner beheld the Redeemer 
 
 G2 
 
100 
 
 of the human race than he joyfully restored every 
 particle of his property which he could not retain 
 without wrongful encroachment on the rights of his 
 fellow men. 3d, The recently published volume en 
 titled "A Visit to the United States in 1841" 
 by Joseph Sturge ; and 4th, a pamphlet intended for 
 Trans- Atlantic circulation, printed (not published) 
 at London in 1841, entitled " A Letter to the 
 Clergy of various Denominations, and to the Slave- 
 holding Planters in the Southern parts of the United 
 States of America," by the truly venerable and 
 venerated Thomas Clarkson. 
 
 Of Mr. Linstant's Essay, the historical portion 
 is more valuable and interesting than the doctrinal 
 or preceptive. He is far more successful in paint 
 ing and discreditably tracing the evil prejudice of 
 which he complains, than in indicating its cure. 
 With great force and clearness, he has demon 
 strated that the prejudice of colour is not a pri 
 mitive but a derivative prejudice, which has its 
 source not in nature, but in the accidental associa 
 tion of slavery with negro hue. He gives an inte 
 resting list of negroes and men of negro descent who 
 have gained the highest eminence in the arts of 
 war and of peace : But, in citing Toussaint L'Ouver- 
 ture, he should have related (as surely he knows) 
 
101 
 
 that the French General Laveaux termed him " the 
 Negro Spartacus foretold by Raynal," and that the 
 Spanish Marquis D'Hermona declared, in the fer 
 vour of his admiration, that " if the Supreme Being 
 were to descend upon earth, the habitation he would 
 choose would be the breast of Toussaint." Mr. Lin- 
 stant advocates gradual abolition of slavery, through 
 the preparatory process of moral and religious educa 
 tion to be administered by masters or the ecclesias 
 tical delegates of masters to slaves ! But let those 
 (and there are many) who embrace this specious and 
 delusive view, reflect seriously on the great disadvan 
 tage with which Christianity is preached by white 
 men to the negro slaves of other whites. The 
 preachers are visibly allied by colour, by social 
 position, and by profession of faith with the ty 
 rant slave masters. Delivered from their lips, 
 the precepts of the Gospel are the words of 
 the oppressor to the slave. The preachers seem to 
 be seeking to rivet chains, to silence well-founded 
 complaint, and to be offering visionary consolation 
 for substantial wrong. The course in which the 
 Gospel has spread and Christian teaching been 
 divinely blessed, has not been from superiors to 
 inferiors, from masters to slaves, from the allies and 
 confederates to the victims of human power : the. 
 
102 
 
 course appointed to its progress is from the little to 
 the great, and not from the great to the little, lest 
 the power should appear to be of men. Our 
 Saviour himself became poor like the poorest of us y 
 that he might enlighten our minds and elevate our 
 condition and prospects ; and His charge to all who 
 would undertake his service was that they must divest 
 themselves of the influence of human authority, if they 
 would arm themselves with the power that is from 
 on high ; and that they who would be greatest 
 must become least of all. " Your servants for 
 Christ's sake," is the description which the preachers 
 of the ^Gospel must assume and realize towards 
 the persons to whom they are sent. One of the 
 first lessons that Christian doctrine teaches to 
 a slave, is the iniquity of his bondage. The 
 Bible indeed, while it expressly sanctions his wish 
 and his peaceable endeavour to be free, directs 
 him to submit with resignation to his lot while only 
 strife and violence can alter it just as it directs all 
 Christians to endure without retorting blows, and to 
 suffer wrong and injustice rather than go to law 
 before unchristian tribunals. But a literal or even 
 a substantial conformity with these precepts implies 
 a degree of Christian attainment of which the his 
 tory of man affords very few examples : and the 
 
103 
 
 instance of Onesimus who fled from his master, is 
 more likely to be repeated, than the influence of 
 St. Paul in persuading the slave to return, and the 
 master to receive him not as a culpable deserter but 
 as a brother beloved. If we would effectually preach 
 Christianity to enslaved negroes, we must begin by 
 showing them the effects of Christianity on ourselves 
 in constraining us to break their bonds. But it is 
 needless to expatiate on this point particularly in 
 noticing the Essay of Mr. Linstant, who has himself 
 contrived in the historical part of his performance, 
 completely (though I suppose unconsciously) to 
 refute his own erroneous doctrine. 
 
 Even in the historical part of Mr. Linstant's 
 Essay, there are some errors one of which, more 
 especially, I regret, because I think it highly desirable 
 that the peculiar merits, positive and comparative, of 
 the slavery systems that existed in the colonial pos 
 sessions of the different States of Europe, and indeed 
 in all the various States of the world, should be 
 accurately known. When slavery is no more, and 
 when its history comes to be dispassionately written, 
 a correct picture of the moral form and pressure it 
 assumed in different countries, will afford a curious 
 insight into the shades and varieties of national cha 
 racter. Now, it appears to me that Mr. Linstant 
 
104 
 
 has viewed with most erring indulgence and super 
 ficial appreciation, the conduct of the Spaniards as 
 slave masters. The history of slavery will be a 
 black page in the annals of every people that has 
 possessed slaves : and Spain will see no darker page 
 than her own, except perhaps in the annals of Hol 
 land and North America. Licentious in their own 
 conduct and example, and yet bigoted and super 
 stitious, the Spanish colonists sought to gratify their 
 priests and bribe the rage of Heaven by what they 
 called the religious and moral instruction of their 
 slaves the religious part consisting in cramming the 
 memories of the negroes with Latin orisons which 
 they did not understand ; and the moral part con 
 sisting in attempts to tyrannize over the coarsest 
 and strongest appetites of their nature by the re 
 straints, at once irritating and ineffectual, of bolts and 
 bars. They indulged their own pride and deceived 
 the eyes of strangers by the pompous attire which in 
 public decked the attendant slaves, who on their 
 return to domestic privacy were stripped as naked 
 as worms; and, when (with more or less cause) 
 offended, they treated these slaves with the unbridled 
 fury common to provoked despots, and the stern 
 unsparing cruelty that has always formed a promi 
 nent trait of Spanish character. 
 
105 
 
 The pamphlet of Mr. Birney, I regret to find 
 fully justifies its title ; and afflictingly demon 
 strates that the American clergy, very generally 
 throughout the whole commonwealth, but especially 
 in the Southern States, have, with increasing pro 
 clivity to evil, become of late years the pillars 
 and champions of negro slavery.* Half corrupted 
 by evil example, half terrified by insolent menace, 
 they seem to stand between the consciences and 
 the delusions of their flocks, like the priests of 
 St. Januarius between the fears of the Neapolitan 
 populace and the anxious desire of the same popu 
 lace to be soothed by the pretended liquefaction 
 of their favourite Saint's blood. When Mount 
 Vesuvius is in combustion, the populace are ready 
 to tear their priests in pieces if the Saint's blood 
 is said to delay or refuse to liquefy ; but pass 
 from rage and fear to security and triumph when 
 ever the priests proclaim that the miraculous lique 
 faction has taken place. Many shocking passages 
 
 * Dr. Channing's admirable pamphlet " The Duty of the Free 
 States," &c. most honourably distinguishes him from those Ameri 
 can clergymen who comply with the popular cry " Prophesy not 
 unto us right things ; speak unto us smooth things, prophesy 
 deceits." He rebukes his countrymen's declension from the prin 
 ciples on which repose the virtue, happiness, and renown oj 
 America, with the concern of a patriot, the dignity of a sage, and 
 the fire of a prophet. 
 
106 
 
 are cited by Mr. Birney from the published dis 
 courses of American clergymen. One of these 
 new proclaimers of " Glory to God in the highest, 
 and on earth Bondage to men/' one of these 
 preachers of the doctrine that "the labourer is 
 not worthy of his hire," says of slavery, " It is 
 not a moral evil. It is the Lord's doing, and 
 marvellous in our eyes : And had it not been 
 done for the best, God alone, who is able, long 
 since would have overruled it. It is by Divine 
 appointment." Another reverend champion of 
 oppression says "The right to hold a slave is 
 founded on this rule, ' Therefore, all things what 
 soever ye would that men should do to you, do 
 ye even so to them ; for this is the law and the 
 prophets.'"!!! Such interpreters of divine pre 
 cept might have afforded a transient solace to the 
 young man who departed sad from the presence 
 of Christ because he was directed to surrender 
 his possessions if he would fulfil the will of God. 
 The execrable effusions of their madness or hy 
 pocrisy remind me of a work which, whatever 
 reputation it may have enjoyed in its day, is now 
 forgotten by all the world except by a few scholars 
 who remember it only with amazement and con 
 tempt : I allude to the History of the Inquisition 
 
107 
 
 by a Spanish ecclesiastic, Luiz de Paramo Arch 
 deacon of Leon, first printed at Madrid in 1598, 
 and subsequently at Antwerp in 1614. It is there 
 with great learning, gravity, and sincerity, main 
 tained that God introduced the Inquisition into 
 the world, and was Himself the first Inquisitor ; 
 that he furnished a precedent for the usual process 
 of the Inquisition, by judging Adam and Eve with 
 out the presence of spectators, or the assistance of 
 witnesses ! and that he sanctioned the usual judg 
 ments of the Inquisition, directly, by confiscating 
 Adam's property in Paradise and assigning a pecu 
 liar dress to the culprits, and indirectly, by suggest 
 ing to the disciples of our Saviour the invocation of 
 fire from heaven on the Samaritan village where 
 hospitable entertainment was denied them ! ! ! &c. 
 &c. &c.* It would be neither pleasant nor profita 
 ble to follow the Spaniard any farther through the 
 dark phrenzied evolutions of his blasphemous non 
 sense. And it would be equally superfluous for me 
 to pursue his American rivals with comments on a 
 system of doctrine (a hell-bred edition of Chris- 
 
 * See an account of Paramo (written I believe by Dr. Southey) 
 jn Aikin's General Biography, vol. vii. A copy of his History of 
 the Inquisition exists in Dr. Williams' Library in Red Cross Street^ 
 London. 
 
108 
 
 tianity) which has already undergone the commen 
 tary of Theodore Weld,* Joseph Sturge, and 
 Thomas Clarkson. I place the votaries of that sys 
 tem in the category of those of whom Scripture 
 pronounces, " Woe unto them that call evil good, 
 and good eyil ; that put darkness for light, and 
 light for darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and 
 sweet for bitter !" They are certainly not the true 
 followers of Him who declared His office to be " to 
 proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of 
 the prison to them that are bound." From such 
 deceitful pastors who cry " peace " to the disturbed 
 conscience " when there is no peace," will God of a 
 surety require the blood of all whom they have hard 
 ened in guilt and delusion. 
 
 The two other works to which I have alluded, 
 need no extraneous assistance to recommend them 
 and their authors to the respect and admiration of 
 mankind. Mr. Sturge has given an excellent and 
 interesting picture of the present state of American 
 sentiment and practice with regard to enslaved and 
 coloured men. That the slave-owners themselves 
 are not free from a confused perception of the ini 
 quity of slavery, he deduces, I think, very justly 
 
 * See an extract from Mr. Weld's writings in the work of Mr. 
 Sturge. 
 
109 
 
 from the absurd contempt with which they regard 
 the slave-traders with whom they deal. Among 
 other instances of blasphemous practice worthy of 
 the speculative blasphemy which I have already 
 cited, he relates that a congregation of Catholics in 
 Maryland recently sold some of their own church 
 members who were slaves, and applied the proceeds 
 of the sale to the erection of a place of worship ! 
 thus, with daring impiety, giving the lie direct to 
 God's own word, and setting Him forth as a Being 
 who delights in sacrifice rather than in mercy, and 
 whom a man may propitiate by offering at the altar 
 a gift which he has procured by wronging his 
 brother. 
 
 To such false worshippers may well be addressed 
 the question of the prophet : ".Is it such a fast 
 that I have chosen ? Is not this the fast that I have 
 chosen, to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo 
 the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, 
 and that ye break every yokeT* Still more ap 
 plicable to them is the prophetic imprecation : 
 " Woe unto him that buildeth his house by un 
 righteousness, and his chambers by wrong ; that 
 useth his neighbour's service without wages, and 
 giveth him not for his work !" Will the malediction 
 be eluded, will it not rather be aggravated by the 
 
110 
 
 plea that the house so unrighteously erected was to 
 be called a house of prayer ? 
 
 Alluding to the American prejudice against colour, 
 Mr. Sturge declares (in conformity with the opinion 
 of the wise and good ex-President of the United States 
 John Quincy Adams) that "Philadelphia seems to be 
 the metropolis of this odious prejudice ; and there 
 is probably no city in the known world, where dis 
 like, amounting to hatred, of the coloured popula 
 tion prevails more than in the city of brotherly 
 love." One of the most pleasing features of Mr. 
 Sturge's Work, is the noble value he entertains of 
 exertions in the cause of humanity, that remind 
 every body but himself of what his own exertions 
 have teen. Mr. Clarkson (now in the eighty-third 
 year of his illustrious life) has with earnest vehe 
 mence, tempered and adorned by "meekness of 
 wisdom" remonstrated with the Southern planters of 
 America, and especially with their clergy, on the 
 blasphemy of their pretended grafture of negro 
 slavery on the stock of Christianity. May God 
 open the hearts of those to whom His good and 
 faithful servant has spoken ! I heartily wish that I 
 had wealth and other power enough to place these 
 two works in the hands of every honest man in 
 Europe and America. 
 
Ill 
 
 If La Fayette travelled in bodily presence to 
 assist the national emancipation of America, La 
 Fayette's dearest and most revered friend Clarkson 
 has now travelled in spirit to emancipate the Ameri 
 cans from a bondage of soul far more vile and 
 odious than any yoke that other nations can ever 
 impose upon them. In generous desire and sorrow, 
 but not the sorrow of those who "sorrow with 
 out hope," are his age-dimmed and venerable eyes 
 turned to that noble and interesting though slavery- 
 stained land. If they must (as soon they must) 
 close, without witnessing there the recognition of 
 Universal Emancipation, we may at least hope 
 that the mantle of Thomas Clarkson will descend 
 on the shoulders of Joseph Sturge. 
 
 The land that produced John Howard must re 
 joice to see his travels of mercy emulated and his 
 peculiar glory extended and partaken by such asso 
 ciates as Sturge and his friend and fellow Quaker 
 John Joseph Gurney. In addition to the other 
 services rendered by these men to the cause of 
 human improvement, they strengthen this cause by 
 making its friends in different countries known to 
 each other warming their hearts by the contempla 
 tion, and uniting them by the sympathy of virtue. 
 Many an American name have they rendered dear 
 
LI 2 
 
 to the friends and valuable to the interests of virtue 
 in England. 
 
 Beyond a doubt, the day is coming when slavery 
 will be known to our posterity merely as a mortifying 
 historical fact ; and be regarded by them just as we 
 regard the crusades, the auto-da-fes, and the witch- 
 burnings of our prejudiced and deluded forefathers. 
 Happy they whose exertions shall have contributed 
 to so great a reformation of human nature ! 
 
 THE END. 
 
 London : Printed by STEWART and MURRAY, Old Bailey. 
 

IU 
 
 349613 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY