that this mighty world-wide imposture has engendered or drags in its midst, rest upon the dogma, the single assumption, the sole elementary foundation falsehood, that a negro is a black man."
This bold ground is not as often taken at the South as by
desperate bidders for Southern confidence among ourselves.
I have heard Christian men, however, when pushed for a
justification of the sealing up of the printed Bible, of the legal
disregard of marriage, of giving power to rascally traders to
forcibly separate families, and so on, refer to it as a hypothesis
not at all to be scouted under such circumstances. Yet, as
they did so, there stood behind their chairs, slaves, in whose
veins ran more Anglo-Saxon blood than of any African race's
blood, and among their other slaves, it is probable there were
many descendants of Nubians, Moors, Egyptians, and Indians,
all interbred with white and true negro tribes, so that it
would be doubtful if there remained one single absolutely pure
negro, to which animal alone their argument would strictly
apply. If the right or expediency of denying the means of
preparing themselves for freedom to these beings could even
be held to be coexistent with the evident preponderance in
them of certain qualities of form, colour, etc., the number of
those who are held unjustly or inexpediently in the bonds of
a perpetual slavery is already quite large in the South, and is
gradually but surely increasing—is increasing much more
rapidly than are their means of cultivating habits which are
necessary to be cultivated, before the manliest child of white
men is capable of enjoying freedom.
There are but two methods of vindicating the habit of depending on the labour of slaves for the development of wealth in the land, which appear to me, on the face of them, entitled to be treated gravely. One of these, assuming the beings held in slavery to be as yet generally incompetent to take care of themselves in a civilized manner, and dangerous
