vania is to be applauded for her conduct, that
of South Carolina can never be too strongly execrated.[7] The legislature
of that state, at no very remote period, brought in a bill for prohibiting
the use of letters to their slaves, and forbidding them the privilege of
being taught to read!--This was a deliberate attempt to enslave the minds
of those unfortunate objects, whose persons they already held in arbitrary
subjection:--Detestable deviation from the becoming rectitude of man.

One more peculiarly distressing circumstance remains to be recounted,
before I take my final leave of the subject.--In the ordinary course of the
business of the country, the punishment of relatives frequently happens on
the same farm, and in view of each other:--The father often sees his
beloved son--the son his venerable sire--the mother her much-loved
daughter--the daughter her affectionate parent--the husband the wife of his
bosom, and she the husband of her affection, cruelly bound up without
delicacy or mercy, and punished with all extremity of incensed rage, and
all the rigour of unrelenting severity, whilst these unfortunate wretches
dare not even interpose in each other's behalf. Let us reverse the case and
suppose it ours:--all is silent horror!

Othello
Maryland, May 23, 1788.

--_American Museum_, IV, 509-512.

LETTER ON SLAVERY BY A NEGRO

I am one of that unfortunate race of men, who are distinguished from the
rest of the human species, by a black skin and wooly hair--disadvantages
of very little moment in themselves, but which prove to us a source of
greatest misery, because there are men, who will not be persuaded that
it is possible for a human soul to be lodged within a sable body. The
West Indian planters could not, if they thought us men, so wantonly
spill our blood; nor could the natives of this land of liberty, deeming
us of the same species with themselves, submit to be instrumental in
enslaving us, or think us proper subjects of a sordid commerce. Yet,
strong as the prejudices against us are, it will not, I hope on this
side of the Atlantic, be considered as a crime, for a poor African not
to confess himself a being of an inferior order to those, who happen to
be of a different colour from himself; or be thought very presumptuous,
in one who is but a negro, to offer to the happy subjects of this free
government, some reflections upon the wretched condition of his
countrymen. They will not, I trust, think w