civilized and enlightened portions of the
world at the time of the Declaration of Independence and when the
Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted. But the
public history of every European nation displays it in a manner
too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before
been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit
to associate with the white race, either in social or political
relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly
and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought
and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and
traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it.

Quoting the provisions of several early slave codes, he continued:

[Sidenote] Ibid., p. 409.

They show that a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to
be erected between the white race and the one which they had
reduced to slavery and governed as subjects with absolute and
despotic power, and which they then looked upon as so far below
them in the scale of created beings that intermarriages between
white persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural
and immoral, and punished as crimes, not only in the parties, but
in the person who joined them in marriage. And no distinction in
this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the
slave, but this stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon
the whole race.

Referring to the phrase in the Declaration of Independence, which
asserts that all men are created equal, he remarked:

[Sidenote] 19 Howard, p. 410.

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole
human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at
this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute,
that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included,
and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this
declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would
embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the
Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly
inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the
sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they
would have deserve