"Signed for and in behalf of his fellow-sufferers, by
[Footnote 94: History of the War with Tripoli, pp. 69-71.]
The cause in which this document was written will indispose the candid reader to any criticism of its somewhat exuberant language. Like the drama of Cervantes, setting forth the horrors of the galleys of Algiers, "it was not drawn from the imagination, but was born far from the regions of fiction, in the very heart of truth." Its earnest appeals were calculated to touch the soul, and to make the very name of slavery and slave dealer detestable.
And here I should do injustice to the truth of history, if I did not suspend for one moment the narrative of this Anti-Slavery movement, in order to exhibit the pointed parallels then extensively recognized between Algerine and American slavery. The conscientious man could not plead in behalf of the emancipation of his white fellow-citizens, without confessing in his heart, perhaps to the world, that every consideration, every argument, every appeal urged for the white man, told with equal force in behalf of his wretched colored brother in bonds. Thus the interest awakened for the slave in Algiers embraced also the slave at home. Sometimes they were said to be alike in condition; sometimes, indeed, it was openly declared that the horrors of our American slavery surpassed that of Algiers.
John Wesley, the oracle of Methodism, addressing those engaged in the negro slave trade, said, as early as 1772, "You have carried the survivors into the vilest of slavery, never to end but with life--_such slavery as is not found among the Turks at Algiers_."[95] And another writer, in 1794, when the sympathy with the American captives was at its height, presses the parallel in pungent terms: "For this practice of buying and selling slaves," he says, "we are not entitled to charge the Algerines with any exclusive degree of barbarity. The Christians of Europe and America carry on this commerce one hundred times more extensively than the Algerines. It has received a recent sanction from the immaculate Divan of Britain. Nobody seems even to be surprised by a diabolical kind of advertisements, which, for some months past, have frequently adorned the newspapers of Philadelphia. The French fugitives from the West Indies have brought with them a crowd of slaves. These most injured people sometimes run off, and their master advertises a reward for apprehending them. At the same time, we are commonly informed that his sacred name is marked in capitals on their breasts; or, in plainer terms, it is stamped on that part of the body with a red-hot iron. Before, therefore, we reprobate the ferocity of the Algerines, we should inquire whether it is not possible to find in some other region of this globe a systematic brutality still more disgraceful."[96]