Page:A defence of the negro race in America from the assaults and charges of Rev. J. L. Tucker.djvu/11

 that "it brought its benefits and blessings." I am filled with amazement that men of sense and reason can thus travesty plain, common English, and talk such senseless stuff! "SchooolmasterSchoolmaster [sic]!" And pray what sort of a schoolmaster has slavery proven? Why, the slave system has had the black man under training two hundred years, and yet never in all this period has it developed one Negro community of strength or greatness! Never raised up anywhere an intelligent, thrifty, productive peasantry! Never built up a single Negro institution of any value to mankind! Never produced a single scientific or scholarly or learned black man! Its only fruit has been darkness, degradation, semi-barbarism, immorality, agonies, and death! , and were men of the largest mould. But each had to run away from the South to get the development of their colossal natures amid northern institutions!

And so, too, since emancipation. All the black men of conspicuous genius or character South have had to get out of the old slave region and come North for the training and development of their intellect. The little Colony of Sierra Leone, with a population of 90,000, has been in existence one hundred years. Will their Reverences show me anywhere in America any such results as that Colony exhibits in letters, civilization, commercial enterprise, manhood, and religion, which have come from two hundred years' tenure of slavery on American soil? Will they declare that their "" has bred such men, started such enterprises, and developed such missionary ventures as the handful of Negroes in that little English colony? "Schoolmaster" indeed! Is it not an abuse of the English language and of common sense to print such verbiage? Look for a few moments at the moral status and training of the black race under slavery, and