us, our duties are
multiplied. The terror of punishment is perpetually before our eyes; but we
know not, how to avert it, what rules to act by, or what guides to follow.
We have written laws, indeed, composed in a language we do not understand
and never promulgated: but what avail written laws, when the supreme law,
with us, is the capricious will of our overseers? To obey the dictates of
our own hearts, and to yield to the strong propensities of nature, is often
to incur severe punishment; and by emulating examples which we find
applauded and revered among Europeans, we risk inflaming the wildest wrath
of our inhuman tyrants.

To judge of the truth of these assertions, consult even those milder and
subordinate rules for our conduct, the various codes of your West India
laws--those laws which allow us to be men, whenever they consider us as
victims of their vengeance, but treat us only like a species of living
property, as often as we are to be the objects of their protection--those
laws by which (it may be truly said) that we are bound to suffer, and be
miserable under pain of death. To resent an injury, received from a white
man, though of the lowest rank, and to dare to strike him, though upon the
strongest and grossest provocation, is an enormous crime. To attempt to
escape from the cruelties exercised upon us, by flight, is punished with
mutilation, and sometimes with death. To take arms against masters, whose
cruelties no submission can mitigate, no patience exhaust, and from whom no
other means of deliverance are left, is the most atrocious of all crimes;
and is punished by a gradual death, lengthened out by torments, so
exquisite, that none, but those who have been long familiarized, with West
Indian barbarity, can hear the bare recital of them without horror. And yet
I learn from writers, whom the Europeans hold in the highest esteem, that
treason is a crime, which cannot be committed by a slave against his
master; that a slave stands in no civil relation towards his master, and
owes him no allegiance; that master and slave are in a state of war; and if
the slave take up arms for his deliverance, he acts not only justifiably,
but in obedience to a natural duty, the duty of self-preservation. I read
in authors whom I find venerated by our oppressors, that to deliver one's
self and one's countrymen from tyranny, is an act of the sublimest heroism.
I hear Europeans exalted, as the martyrs of public liberty, the sav