killed them off by scores. When they
died their bodies were pitched into the sea, without pity or remorse.

After a wearisome voyage the survivors, on being carried into some port,
were sold to the highest bidder. No regard was paid to their
relationship. One man bought a husband, another a wife. The child was
taken to one place, the mother to another. Thus they were scattered
abroad over the colonies. Fresh loads arrived continually, and thus
their numbers increased. Others were born on the soil, until now, after
the lapse of some two centuries, there are nearly four millions of negro
slaves in the country, besides large numbers of colored people who in
various ways have been made free.

You can now see how easy it was for the masters to make the wicked laws
by which the slaves are now held in bondage. They began when the slaves
were few in number, when they spoke a foreign language, and when they
were too few and feeble to offer any resistance to their oppressors, as
their masters did to old England when she tried to oppress them.

I want you to remember one great truth regarding slavery, namely, that a
slave is a human being, held and used as property by another human
being, and that _it is always_ A SIN AGAINST GOD _to thus hold and me a
human being as property_!

You know it is not a sin to use an ox, a horse, a dog, a squirrel, a
house, or an acre of land as property, if it be honestly obtained,
because God made these and similar objects to be possessed as property
by men. But God did not make _man to be the property of man_. He never
gave any man the right to own his neighbor or his neighbor's child.

On the contrary, he made all men to be free and equal, as saith our
Declaration of Independence. Hence, every negro child that is born is as
free before God as the white child, having precisely the same right to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as the white child. The law
which denies him that right does not destroy it. It may enable the man
who claims him as a slave to deprive him of its exercise, but the right
itself remains, for the wicked law under which he acts does not and
cannot set aside the divine law, by which he is as free as any child
that was ever born.

But if God made every man, woman, and child to be free, and not
property, then he who uses a human being as property acts contrary to
the will of God and SINS! Is it not so, my children?

Yet that is what every slaveholder does. _He