Calumny Refuted by Facts From Liberia

"In 1620, the very same year in which the Pilgrims landed on the cold and rocky shores of New England, a Dutch ship, freighted with souls, touched the banks of James river, where the wretched people were employed as Slaves in the cultivation of that hateful weed, tobacco. Wonderful coincidence! The angel of liberty hovered over New England, and the demon of Slavery unfurled his black flag over the fields of the 'sunny south.'

"But, latterly, the Slave-trade has been pronounced to be piracy by almost all of the civilised world. Great Britain has discarded the chattel principle throughout her dominions. In 1824, Mexico proclaimed freedom to her Slaves. The Pope of Rome, and the sovereigns of Turkey and Denmark, and other nations, bow at the shrine of liberty. But France has laid the richest offering upon the altar of freedom, that has been presented to God in these latter days. In achieving her almost bloodless revolution, she maintained an admirable degree of consistency. The same blast of the trumpet of Liberty that rang through the halls of the Tuilleries, and shattered the throne of the Bourbons, also reached the shores of her remotest colonies, and proclaimed the redemption of every Slave that moved on French soil. Thus does France remember the paternal advice of La Fayette, and atone for the murder of Toussaint. Thanks be to God, the lily is cleansed of the blood that stained it. The nations of the earth will gaze with delight upon its democratic purity, wherever it shall be seen, whether in the grape-grown valleys where it first bloomed, or in the Isles of Bourbon, Guadaloupe, Martinique, or in Guiana.7 The Coloured people of St. Bartholomew's, who were emancipated by a decree of the king of Sweden last year, have lately sent an address to their liberator. Hayti, by the heroism of her Age, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Dessalines, Christophe, and Petion, has driven the demon of Slavery from that island, and has buried his carcase in the sea.

"Briefly and imperfectly have I noticed the former condition of the Coloured race. Let us turn for a moment to survey our present state. The woeful volume of our history, as it now lies open to the world, is written with tears and bound with blood. As I trace it, my eyes ache and my heart is filled with grief. No other people have suffered so much, and none have been more innocent. If I might apostrophise that bleeding country, I would say, O Africa, thou hast bled, freely bled, at every pore! Thy sorrow has been mocked, and thy grief has not been heeded. Thy children are scattered over the whole earth, and the great nations have been enriched by them. The wild beasts of thy forests are treated with more mercy than they. The Libyan lion and the fierce tiger are caged to gratify the curiosity of men, and the keeper's hands are not laid heavily upon them. But thy children are tortured, taunted, and hurried out of life by unprecedented cruelty. Brave men, formed in the divinest mould, are bartered, sold, and mortgaged. Stripped of every sacred right, they are scourged if they affirm that they belong to God. Women, sustaining the dear relation of mothers, are yoked with the horned cattle, to till the soil, and their heart-strings are torn to pieces by cruel separations from their children. Our sisters, ever manifesting the purest kindness, whether in the wilderness of their father-land, or amid the sorrows of the middle passage, or in crowded cities, are unprotected from the lust of tyrants. They have a regard for virtue, and they possess a sense of honour, but there is no respect paid to these jewels of noble character. Driven into unwilling concubinage, their offspring are sold by their Anglo-Saxon fathers. To them, the marriage institution is but a name, for their despoilers break down the hymenial altar and scatter its sacred ashes on the winds.

"Our young men are brutalised in intellect, and their manly energies are chilled by the frosts of Slavery. Sometimes they are called to witness the agonies of the mothers who bore them, writhing under the lash, and as if to fill to overflowing the already full cup of demonism, they are sometimes compelled to apply the lash with their own hands. Hell itself cannot overmatch a deed like this – and dark damnation shudders as it sinks into its bosom and seeks to hide itself from the indignant eye of God."

The writer of the foregoing Discourse was formerly a Slave; his forefathers, stolen from Africa, lived and died in Slavery; he himself was born a Slave, and would have remained in that condition until the present time, had he not been so fortunate as to escape from the galling yoke of fetters and chains. Such an example of elevated humanity as he affords, compels the conviction, that out of the countless millions now doomed to perpetual bondage, many of them, though forcibly degraded to a level with the brute, are qualified to become ornaments, not only to their race but to humanity.

The contents of these pages demonstrate the Negro race to be possessed of intelligent and reflecting minds, capable of occupying a very different station in life to that which has been generally assigned to them, and which they now mostly occupy. Although their sufferings in Slavery have long excited the interest and sympathy of the benevolent, little has been done to advance their position in society. Almost insurmountable obstacles exist, tending to counteract that improvement and elevation of character, to which, under more favourable circumstances, they are capable of attaining.

It may, perhaps, be fairly questioned, whether any other people could have endured the privations or the sufferings to which they have been subjected, without becoming still more degraded in the scale of humanity. Nothing has been left undone, to cripple their intellects, to darken their minds, to debase their moral nature, and to obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind; yet, how wonderfully they have sustained the mighty load of oppression, under which they have been groaning for centuries!

The supporters and advocates of Slavery, in order to justify their oppressive conduct, allege, either in ignorance or from an affected philosophy, an inherent defect in the mental constitution of the Negro race, sufficient to exclude them from the enjoyment of the blessings of freedom, or the exercise of those rights which are equally bestowed by a beneficent Creator upon all his rational creatures.

Prejudice and misinformation have, for a long series of years, been fostered with unremitting assiduity by those interested in upholding the Slave system, and their corrupt influence has enabled them to gain possession of the public ear, and to abuse public credulity to an extent not generally appreciated. They strenuously maintain that the Negro is only fitted and designed for a servile condition. The contents of these pages prove to the contrary, and will surely stop the mouths of those who, from ignorance or something worse, affirm an absolute difference in specific character between the two races, and hence, justify the consignment of the Black to a fate which only proves the fingering barbarism of the White.

But, should the cases here recorded be considered of too isolated a nature to elucidate a theory of general equality of races, it may be observed, that they are only a very fractional part of what might have been adduced. A mass of facts is still in reserve, teeming with unequivocal evidence, that the Almighty has not left the Negro destitute or deficient of those talents and capabilities which he has bestowed upon all his rational creatures, and which, however modified by circumstances in various cases, leave no section of the human family a right to boast that it inherits by birth a superiority, which might not, in the course of events, be manifested and claimed, with equal justice, by those whom they most despise.

In order more fully to demonstrate the capabilities of the Black races of Africa, the writer has selected a mass of facts illustrative of the subject, which he has recently published, entitled "A Tribute for the Negro," in which their moral, intellectual, and religious capabilities are fully established. This Volume, including many engravings and portraits of eminent Negroes, embraces upwards of one hundred biographical sketches and anecdotes of this calumniated race, many of them not before published, which afford striking evidence that inferior abilities are not the necessary accompaniment of a Coloured skin, but demonstrating, on the contrary, that the Negro race are endowed with every characteristic constituting an identity with the great family of man, and consequently entitled to those inalienable rights which have been denied them, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," any infringement on which is a daring usurpation of the prerogative of the Most High!

1

America.

2

"Truth is powerful, and will ultimately prevail."

3

Gen. ii. 8, 9, 15.

4

Prov. xiv. 34.

5

Exod. xv. 1, 10.

6

Acts vii. 22.

7

The number of Slaves in the French colonies was almost 300,000.