th which they are unacquainted, expressed in
comprehensible language, therefore we have studiously avoided using
political and legal phrases, that would serve more to perplex than
inform them. To talk about the barons, King John, and the Magna Charta,
would be foreign to a work like this, and only destroy the interest that
otherwise might be elicited in the subject. Our desire is, to arrest the
attention of the American people in general, and the colored people in
particular, to great truths as heretofore but little thought of. What
claims then have colored men, based upon the principles set forth, as
fundamentally entitled to citizenship? Let the living records of history
answer the enquiry.

When Christopher Columbus, in 1492, discovered America, natives were
found to pay little or no attention to cultivation, being accustomed by
hereditary pursuit, to war, fishing, and the sports of the chase. The
Spaniards and Portuguese, as well as other Europeans who ventured here,
came as mineral speculators, and not for the purpose of improving the
country.

As the first objects of speculation are the developments of the mineral
wealth of every newly discovered country, so was it with this. Those who
came to the new world, were not of the common people, seeking in a
distant land the means of livelihood, but moneyed capitalists, the
grandees and nobles, who reduced the natives to servitude by confining
them to the mines. To have brought large numbers of the peasantry at
that early period, from the monarchies of Europe, to the wilds of
America, far distant from the civil and military powers of the home
governments, would have been to place the means of self-control into
their own hands, and invite them to rebellion against the crowns. The
capitalist miners were few, compared to the number of laborers required;
and the difficulty at that time of the transportation of suitable
provisions for their sustenance, conduced much to the objection of
bringing them here. The natives were numerous, then easily approached by
the wily seductions of the Europeans, easily yoked and supported, having
the means of sustenance at hand, the wild fruits and game of the forest,
the fish of the waters and birds of the country. All these as naturally
enough, European adventurers would be cautious against introducing into
common use among hundreds of thousands of laborers, under all the
influences incident of a foreign climate in a foreign country, in its