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in itself right, and does not depend on difference of complexion." And a leading writer among Slave-masters, George Fitzhugh, of Virginia, in his Sociology for the South, declares: "Slavery, black or white, is right and necessary. Nature has made the weak in mind or body for slaves." And in the same vein, a Democratic paper of South-Carolina has said: "Slavery is the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, white or black."
These more extravagant pretensions reveal still further the feebleness of the pretension put forth by the Senator; while instances, accumulating constantly, attest the difficulty of discriminating between the two races. Mr. Paxton, of Virginia, tells us, that "the best blood in Virginia flows in the veins of the slaves;" and fugitive slaves have been latterly advertised as possessing "a round face," "blue eyes," "flaxen hair," and as "escaping under the pretense of being a white man."
This is not the time to enter upon the great question of race, in the various lights of religion, history, and science. Sure I am that they who understand it best, will be least disposed to the pretension, which, on the assumed ground of inferiority, would condemn one race to be the property of another. If the African race be inferior, as is alleged, then is it the unquestionable duty of a Christian Civilization to lift it from its degradation, not by the bludgeon and the chain, not by this barbarous pretension of ownership, but by a generous charity, which shall be measured precisely by the extent of its inferiority.
The second argument put forward for this pretension, and twice repeated by the Senator from Mississippi, is, that the Africans are the posterity of Ham, the son of Noah, through Canaan, who was cursed by Noah, to be the "servant" — that is the word employed — of his brethren, and that this malediction has fallen upon all his descendants, who are accordingly devoted by God to perpetual bondage, not only in the third and fourth generations, but throughout all succeeding time. Surely, when the Senator quoted Scripture to enforce the claim of Slave-masters, he did not intend a jest. And yet it is hard to suppose him in earnest. The Senator is Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, in which he is doubtless experienced. He may, perhaps, set a squadron in the field, but he has evidently considered very little the text of Scripture on which he relies. The Senator assumes, that it has fixed the doom of the colored
