Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/212

198 said the Pope was about to authorize his canonization. Whether he is yet registered as a saint in the Calendar, I know not; but many writers agree that he was a saint indeed—eminent for his virtues, which he practised in meekness and silence, desiring no witness but his God.

The moral character of Toussaint L'Ouverture is even more worthy of admiration than his intellectual acuteness. What can be more beautiful than his unchanging gratitude to his benefactor, his warm attachment to his family, his high-minded sacrifice of personal feeling to the public good! He was a hero in the sublimest sense of the word. Yet he had no white blood in his veins—he was all negro.

The following description of a slave-market at Brazil from the pen of Doctor Walsh: "The men were generally less interesting objects than the women; their countenances and hues were very varied, according to the part of the African coast from which they came; some were soot black, having a certain ferocity of aspect that indicated strong and fierce passions, like men who were darkly brooding over some deep-felt wrongs, and meditating revenge. When any one was ordered, he came forward with a sullen indifference, threw his arms over his head, stamped with his feet, shouted to show the soundness of his lungs, ran up and down the room, and was treated exactly like a horse put through his paces at a repository; and when done, he was whipped to his stall.

"Many of them were lying stretched on the bare boards; and among the rest, mothers with young children at their breasts, of which they seemed passionately fond. They were all doomed to remain on the spot, like sheep in a pen, till they were sold; they have no apartment to retire to, no bed to repose on, no covering to protect them; they sit naked all day, and lie naked all night, on the bare boards, or benches, where we saw them exhibited.

"Among the objects that attracted my attention in this place were some young boys, who seemed to have formed a society together. I observed several times in passing by, that the same little group was collected near