But, Sir, your whole enginery of death has never accomplished such a total destruction as this. You may have _degraded mind_, and you _have_, but oh! thanks to God, you have not made such awful havoc with a deathless spirit as this. No! you have only poured gall into wounded spirits; you have only torn open deeply lacerated bosoms;—you have only plucked the most glorious pearl from man’s diadem; you have only heaped insult upon a son or a daughter of God Almighty, who is redeemed by the blood of the Lamb;—and your stroke or bolt of woe, that unchained the spirit, only open a passage-way for it to the gates of eternal glory. But, you have done enough God knows! You have done enough to heap up fuel for your own damnation; and encircled by those faggots, “you shall burn, and none shall quench them,” through eternal ages, unless you are cleansed by atoning blood.
The truth is yet to be told. The slave is not contented and happy—more, no slave in the universe ever was, or can be contented, till God shall strip him of his divinity which makes him a man. I have conversed with several thousands in bondage, and many who have got free, and never did I hear such a sentiment fall from human lips. It is estimated by facts already in our possession, (viz. the numbers who win their way to freedom, and those who are advertised as run-aways who are caught,) that more than fifty thousand slaves attempt their escape from bondage every year. And yet so anxious are their masters to still bind the chains, that many of them are chased over one thousand miles. What bare-faced hypocrisy in a man, to give money to transport to an inhospitable and barbarous clime, a worn-out slave, and yet to chase _his brother_ one thousand miles to reduce him again to bondage, or to death!!
IV. _The low and base meanness of slave-holding._ Nothing is accounted _meaner_ than theft and _stealing_! ☜ And yet ☞ every slaveholder is necessarily a constant, and perpetual thief. ☜ He steals the slave’s body and soul. And if there is one kind of theft which is worse than all others, it is to steal the wages of the poor, three hundred and sixty-five days in the year! It would be accounted very mean in a rich man, to employ a poor day laborer and then follow him to his home at night, after the toils of the day were over, and steal from his pocket the price of his day’s labor, which he had paid to him to buy bread for his children, and such a man would be called a wretch all over the world;—and yet every slaveholder as absolutely steals the slave’s wages every night—for he goes to his dwelling and family, if he have one, pennyless after a day of hard toil. It would be considered the worst kind of _meanness_ to go, and divide, and separate by an impassable distance the members of a poor family; and yet not a slave lives in the South, who has not at some time or other, seen the same barbarous practice in the circle of his own relationship, and love.