ught, no
purpose, save revenge.

"These good people bid me forgive my enemies. Easy enough for
them, who have no enemies to forgive. Forgive? Forgive injustice,
oppression, baseness, cruelty? Forgive the devil, and bid him go in
peace, and work his wicked will? Why have they put into my hands,
these last three years, books worthy of a free nation?--books which
call patriotism divine; which tell me how in every age and clime men
have been called heroes who rose against their conquerors; women
martyrs who stabbed their tyrants, and then died? Hypocrites! Did
their grandfathers meekly turn the other cheek when your English taxed
them somewhat too heavily? Do they not now teach every school-child to
glory in their own revolution, their own declaration of independence,
and to flatter themselves into the conceit that they are the lords of
creation, and the examples of the world, because they asserted that
sacred right of resistance which is discovered to be unchristian in
the African? They will free us, forsooth, in good time (is it to be
in God's good time, or in their own?) if we will but be patient,
and endure the rice-swamp, the scourge, the slave-market, and shame
unspeakable, a few years more, till all is ready and safe,--for them.
Dreamers as well as hypocrites! What nation was ever freed by others'
help? I have been reading history to see,--you do not know how much
I have been reading,--and I find that freemen have always freed
themselves, as we must do; and as they will never let us do, because
they know that with freedom must come retribution; that our Southern
tyrants have an account to render, which the cold Northerner has no
heart to see him pay. For, after all, he loves the Southerner better
than the slave; and fears him more also. What if the Southern
aristocrat, who lords it over him as the panther does over the ox,
should transfer (as he has threatened many a time) the cowhide from
the negro's loins to his? No; we must free ourselves! And there lives
one woman, at least, who, having gained her freedom, knows how to use
it in eternal war against all tyrants. Oh, I could go down, I think at
moments, down to New Orleans itself, with a brain and lips of fire,
and speak words--you know how I could speak them--which would bring me
in a week to the scourge, perhaps to the stake. The scourge I could
endure. Have I not felt it already? Do I not bear its scars even now,
and glory in them; for they were won by speaking