rican captive had ever been introduced thereon, were reduced to the
most abject slavery, toiling day and night in the mines, under the
relentless hands of heartless Spanish taskmasters, but being a race of
people raised to the sports of fishing, the chase, and of war, were
wholly unaccustomed to labor, and therefore sunk under the insupportable
weight, two millions and a half having fallen victims to the cruelty of
oppression and toil suddenly placed upon their shoulders. And it was
only this that prevented their farther enslavement as a class, after the
provinces were absolved from the British Crown. It is true that their
general enslavement took place on the islands and in the mining
districts of South America, where indeed, the Europeans continued to
enslave them, until a comparatively recent period; still, the design,
the feeling, and inclination from policy, was the same to do so here, in
this section of the continent.

Nor was it until their influence became too great, by the political
position occupied by their brethren in the new republic, that the German
and Irish peasantry ceased to be sold as slaves for a term of years
fixed by law, for the repayment of their passage-money, the descendants
of these classes of people for a long time being held as inferiors, in
the estimation of the ruling class, and it was not until they assumed
the rights and privileges guaranteed to them by the established policy
of the country, among the leading spirits of whom were their relatives,
that the policy towards them was discovered to be a bad one, and
accordingly changed. Nor was it, as is frequently very erroneously
asserted, by colored as well as white persons, that it was on account of
hatred to the African, or in other words, on account of hatred to his
color, that the African was selected as the subject of oppression in
this country. This is sheer nonsense; being based on policy and nothing
else, as shown in another place. The Indians, who being the most foreign
to the sympathies of the Europeans on this continent, were selected in
the first place, who, being unable to withstand the hardships, gave way
before them.

But the African race had long been known to Europeans, in all ages of
the worlds history, as a long-lived, hardy race, subject to toil and
labor of various kinds, subsisting mainly by traffic, trade, and
industry, and consequently being as foreign to the sympathies of the
invaders of the continent as the Indian