s in the midst of such reflections, may
have some faint conception of the miseries which the slave trade has
inflicted on mankind. I am unable to state with accuracy the number of
the victims of this horrible traffic; but if the least dependance can
be placed on the statements of those persons who have given the most
attention to the subject, with the best means of information, it
unquestionably exceeds ten millions of human beings exported by violence
and fraud from Africa. This appalling mass of crime and suffering has
every atom of it been heaped up before the presence of enlightened men,
and in the face of a Holy God, by nations boasting of their
civilization, and pretending to respect the dictates of christianity.
The mind is overwhelmed at the magnitude of such atrocity, and the heart
sickens at the contemplation of such an amount of human anguish and
despair."

"The legislative acts which, with a cool atrocity, to be equalled only
by the preposterous folly of the claim they set up over the persons of
God's creatures, doom to slavery the free African the moment his eyes
are opened on the light of heaven, for no other offence than being the
child of parents thus doomed before him, can, in the judgment of truth
and the estimation of a just posterity, be held inferior in heinousness
only to the first act of piracy which made them slaves. It is in vain
that we cover up and avoid such reflections. They cling to us, and earth
cries shame upon us that their voice has been so long unheeded. The free
Lybian, in his scorching deserts, was as much a slave when he rushed,
in the wild chase, upon the king of beasts, as is his unhappy offspring
before our laws cleave to him. God creates no slaves. The laws of man do
oftentimes pervert the best gifts of nature, and wage an impious warfare
against her decrees. But you can discover what is of the earth and what
is from above. You may take man at his birth, and by an adequate system
make him a slave, a brute, a demon. This is man's work. The light of
reason, history and philosophy, the voice of nature and religion, the
Spirit of God himself, proclaims that the being he created in his own
image he must have been created free."

"It can be no less incorrect to apply any arguments drawn from the right
of conquest, or the lapse of time, as against the offspring of persons
held to involuntary servitude. For neither force nor time has any
meaning when applied to a nonentity. He cannot b