on
and temerity of subjecting those, to whom our persons must necessarily
be frequently accessible, to a state of the most savage moral
debasement, and then of tampering with their furious untamed passions.
A female slave having been flogged by her mistress, watched for an
opportunity to indulge her resentment, which she executed in a manner
too horrible to describe, and which it is not deemed prudent to specify.

20. Many instances have existed, where slaves, in a state of enraged
desperation, have involved their masters and themselves, of course, in
mutual destruction. A gentleman of high respectability lately informed
me, that he personally knew a master of slaves who retreated every night
into an upper room, the entrance into which was by a trap door, and kept
an axe by his side for defence!

21. Does not self-preservation, as well as the obligations of religious
duty and brotherly love, enjoin the education and civilization of our
sable heathen neighbours in our own dwellings, equally as imperatively
as of our tawny ones in the wilderness, and of both, on this side of the
Atlantic, as well as on the other?[6]

22. While at a public house, in Fredericktown, there came into the
bar-room (on Sunday) a decently dressed white man, of quite a light
complexion, in company with one who was totally black. After they went
away, the landlord observed that the white man was a slave. I asked him,
with some surprise, how that could be possible? To which he replied,
that he was a descendant, by female ancestry, of an African slave. He
also stated, that not far from Fredericktown, there was a slave estate,
on which there were several white females of as fair and elegant
appearance as white ladies in general, held in legal bondage as slaves.
These facts demonstrate that the peculiar hue, with which it has pleased
God to paint the surface of the body of an African, is not the only
circumstance which reconciles to the conscience of the European, (white
man) the act of depriving him of his liberty and the fruits of his
labour. Hence it appears to be a melancholy truth, that man, in a morbid
state of intellect, (which I consider to be the case with every
individual, whose rule of action is not founded upon wisdom and
virtue,) voluntarily and almost invariably, confounds right with might,
and when stimulated by avarice, frequently hesitates not to _bind and
sell_ his wife, his children, or his brother! I have received direct
informat