em, according to the American Missionary Association, in the
dire effects of "that enduring legacy which, with its foul, pestilential
influences, still blights, like the mildew of death, every thing in
society that should be lovely, virtuous, and of good report." Now, were
it believed, generally, that the colored people of the United States are
equally as degraded as those of Jamaica, upon what grounds could any one
advocate the admission of the blacks to equal social and political
privileges with the whites? Certainly, no Christian family or community
would willingly admit such men to terms of social or political equality!
This, we repeat, is the logical conclusion from the Reports of the
American Missionary Association and the American and Foreign
Anti-Slavery Society--a conclusion, too, the more certain, as it makes
no exceptions between the condition of the colored people under the
slavery of Jamaica and under that of the United States.

But in this, as in much connected with slavery, abolitionists have taken
too limited a view of the subject. They have not properly discriminated
between the effects of the original barbarism of the negroes, and those
produced by the more or less favorable influences to which they were
afterward subjected under slavery. This point deserves special notice.
According to the best authorities, the colored people of Jamaica, for
nearly three hundred years, were entirely without the gospel; and it
gained a permanent footing among them, only at a few points, at their
emancipation, twenty-five years ago; so that, when liberty reached them,
the great mass of the Africans, in the British West Indies, were
heathen.[73] Let us understand the reason of this. Slavery is not an
element of human progress, under which the mind necessarily becomes
enlightened; but Christianity is the _primary_ element of progress, and
can elevate the savage, whether in bondage or in freedom, if its
principles are taught him in his youth. The slavery of Jamaica began
with savage men. For three hundred years, its slaves were destitute of
the gospel, and their barbarism was left to perpetuate itself. But in
the United States, the Africans were brought under the influence of
Christianity, on their first introduction, over two hundred and thirty
years since, and have continued to enjoy its teachings, in a greater or
less degree, to the present moment. The disappearance from among our
colored people, of the savage condition