" I have done injustice to the spirit of
propagation prevailing amongst the gentlemen of those States. It may be,
that some of your planters quite distance the old patriarch in obedience
to the command to "multiply and replenish the earth." I am correctly
informed, that a planter in Virginia, who counted, I know not how many
slaves upon his plantation, confessed on his death-bed, that his
licentiousness had extended to every adult female amongst them. This
planter was a near relative of the celebrated Patrick Henry. It may be,
that you have planters in Mississippi and Louisiana, who avail
themselves to the extent that he did, of the power which slaveholding
gives to pollute and destroy. The hundreds of thousands of mulattoes,
who constitute the Southern commentary on the charge, that the
abolitionists design amalgamation, bear witness that this planter was
not singular in his propensities. I do not know what you can do with
this species of your population. Besides, that it is a standing and deep
reproach on Southern chastity, it is not a little embarrassing and
puzzling to those who have received the doctrine, that the descendants
of Africa amongst us must be returned to the land of their ancestors.
How the poor mulatto shall be disposed of, under this doctrine, between
the call which Africa makes for him, on the one hand, and that which
some state of Europe sends out for him on the other, is a problem more
difficult of solution than that which the contending mothers brought
before the matchless wisdom of Solomon.

In the paragraph, which relates to the fourth and tenth commandments,
there is another specimen of your loose reasoning. You say, that the
language, "In it (the Sabbath) thou shalt do no work, thou, nor thy son,
nor thy daughter, nor thy man servant, nor thy maid servant,"
"recognises the authority of the master over the servant." I grant, that
it does: but does it at all show, that these servants were slaves? Does
it recognise any more authority than the master should exercise over his
voluntary servants? Should not the head of a family restrain all his
servants, as well the voluntary as the involuntary, from unnecessary
labor on the Sabbath? You also say, that the tenth commandment
"recognizes servants as the _property_ of their masters." But how does
it appear from the language of this commandment, that the man servant
and maid servant are property any more than the wife is? We will
proceed, however, to th