n we
make for the sake of argument. Had the Jews been authorized by God to
shut up in dungeons for life those of the heathen, whom they were
directed to have for bondmen and bondmaids, you would not claim, that
they, any more than sheriffs and jailers in our day, are to be
considered in the light of owners of the persons in their charge. Much
less then, can the Jews be considered as the owners of any person whom
they held in servitude: for, however severe the type of that servitude,
the liberty of its subject was not restricted, as was that of the
prisoners in question:--most certainly, the power asserted over him is
not to be compared in extent with that asserted by the Jew over the
Canaanite, whom he slew;--a case in which he was, indisputably, but the
executioner of the Divine wrath. The Canaanite, whether devoted to a
violent death or to an involuntary servitude, still remained the
property of God: and God no more gave him up to be the property of the
executioner of his wrath, than the people of the State of New York give
up the offender against public justice to be the property of the
ministers of that justice. God never suspends the accountability of his
rational creatures to himself: and his rights to them, He never
transfers to others. He could not do so consistently with his
attributes, and his indissoluble relations to man. But slavery claims,
that its subjects are the property of man. It claims to turn them into
mere chattels, and to make them as void of responsibility to God, as
other chattels. Slavery, in a word, claims to push from his throne the
Supreme Being, who declares, "all souls are mine." That it does not
succeed in getting its victim out of God's hand, and in unmanning and
_chattelizing_ him--that God's hold upon him remains unbroken, and that
those upward tendencies of the soul, which distinguish man from the
brute, are not yet entirely crushed in him--is no evidence in favor of
its nature:--it simply proves, that its power is not equal to its
purposes. We see, then, that the Jews--if it be true that they reduced
their fellow men to involuntary servitude, and did so as the
Heaven-appointed ministers of God's justice,--are not to be charged with
slaveholding for it. There may be involuntary servitude where there is
no slavery. The essential and distinguishing feature of slavery is its
reduction of man to property--to a thing. A tenant of one of our state
prisons is under a sentence of "hard labor f