was reserved for American slave-holders to present to the world the
hideous anomaly of a code of laws, beginning with the emphatic
declaration of the inalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, and closing with a deliberate and systematic
denial of those rights, in respect to a large portion of their
countrymen; engrossing on the same parchment the antagonist laws of
liberty and tyranny. The very nature of this unnatural combination has
rendered it necessary that American slavery, in law and in practice,
should exceed every other in severity and cool atrocity. The masters of
Greece and Rome permitted their slaves to read and write and worship the
gods of paganism in peace and security, for there was nothing in the
laws, literature, or religion of the age to awaken in the soul of the
bondman a just sense of his rights as a man. But the American
slaveholder cannot be thus lenient. In the excess of his benevolence, as
a political propagandist, he has kindled a fire for the oppressed of the
old world to gaze at with hope, and for crowned heads and dynasties to
tremble at; but a due regard to the safety of his "peculiar
institution," compels him to put out the eyes of his own people, lest
they too should see it. Calling on all the world to shake off the
fetters of oppression, and wade through the blood of tyrants to freedom,
he has been compelled to smother, in darkness and silence, the minds of
his own bondmen, lest they too should hear and obey the summons, by
putting the knife to his own throat.--Proclaiming the truths of Divine
Revelation, and sending the Scriptures to the four quarters of the
earth, he has found it necessary to maintain heathenism at home by
special enactments; and to make the second offence of teaching his
slaves the message of salvation punishable with _death_!

What marvel then that American slavery even on the _statute book_
assumes the right to transform moral beings into brutes:[A] that it
legalizes man's usurpation of Divine authority; the substitution of the
will of the master, for the moral government of God: that it annihilates
the rights of conscience; debars from the enjoyment of religious rights
and privileges by specific enactments; and enjoins disobedience to the
Divine lawgiver: that it discourages purity and chastity, encourages
crime, legalizes concubinage; and, while it places the slave entirely in
the hands of his master, provides no real protection