ceedings toward us, and to establish the fact before, they attempt
to draw any conclusions from it. Nor let them imagine that this can be
done, by merely asserting that such is our universal character. It is
the character, I grant, that our inhuman masters have agreed to give us,
and which they have so industriously and too successfully propagated, in
order to palliate their own guilt, by blackening the helpless victims of
it, and to disguise their own cruelty under the semblance of justice. Let
the natural depravity of our character be proved--not by appealing to
declamatory invectives, and interested representations, but by showing that
a greater proportion of crimes have been committed by the wronged slaves of
the plantation, than by the luxurous inhabitants of Europe, who are happily
strangers to those aggravated provocations, by which our passions are every
day irritated and incensed. Show us, that, of the multitude of negroes, who
have within a few years transported themselves to this country,[8] and who
are abandoned to themselves; who are corrupted by example, prompted by
penury, and instigated by the memory of their wrongs to the commission of
crime--shew us, I say (and the demonstration, if it be possible, cannot be
difficult) that a greater proportion of these, than of white men have
fallen under the animadversions of justice, and have been sacrificed to
your laws. Though avarice may slander and insult our misery, and though
poets heighten the horror of their fables, by representing us as monsters
of vice--the fact is, that, if treated like other men, and admitted to a
participation of their rights, we should differ from them in nothing,
perhaps, but in our possessing stronger passions, nicer sensibility, and
more enthusiastic virtue.

Before so harsh a decision was pronounced upon our nature, we might have
expected--if sad experience had not taught us, to expect nothing but
injustice from our adversaries--that some pains would have been taken,
to ascertain, what our nature is; and that we should have been considered,
as we are found in our native woods, and not as we now are--altered and
perverted by an inhuman political institution. But, instead of this, we
are examined, not by philosophers, but by interested traders: not as
nature formed us, but as man has depraved us--and from such an inquiry,
prosecuted under such circumstances, the perverseness of our dispositions
is said to be established. Cruel that you