commingled
with themselves, have forbidden them to be taught to read or to write,
under severe penalties; and as they will not raise them to their own
level, they sink them as nearly as possible to that of the brutes.

The hope of liberty had always been allowed to the slave to cheer the
hardships of his condition. But the Americans of the South are well
aware that emancipation cannot but be dangerous, when the freed man can
never be assimilated to his former master. To give a man his freedom,
and to leave him in wretchedness and ignominy, is nothing less than to
prepare a future chief for a revolt of the slaves. Moreover, it has long
been remarked that the presence of a free negro vaguely agitates the
minds of his less fortunate brethren, and conveys to them a dim notion
of their rights. The Americans of the South have consequently taken
measures to prevent slave-owners from emancipating their slaves in most
cases; not indeed by a positive prohibition, but by subjecting that step
to various forms which it is difficult to comply with. I happened
to meet with an old man, in the South of the Union, who had lived in
illicit intercourse with one of his negresses, and had had several
children by her, who were born the slaves of their father. He had indeed
frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but
years had elapsed without his being able to surmount the legal obstacles
to their emancipation, and in the mean while his old age was come, and
he was about to die. He pictured to himself his sons dragged from market
to market, and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of
the stranger, until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring
imagination into frenzy. When I saw him he was a prey to all the anguish
of despair, and he made me feel how awful is the retribution of nature
upon those who have broken her laws.

These evils are unquestionably great; but they are the necessary and
foreseen consequence of the very principle of modern slavery. When the
Europeans chose their slaves from a race differing from their own, which
many of them considered as inferior to the other races of mankind,
and which they all repelled with horror from any notion of intimate
connection, they must have believed that slavery would last forever;
since there is no intermediate state which can be durable between the
excessive inequality produced by servitude and the complete equality
which originates in independenc