Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/19

Rh lies down on his pillow without arming himself with pistols and a broadsword, to protect his family, in case of midnight alarm, from the revengeful, murderous passions of those he thus tyrannizes over." These, and numerous other such like monstrous falsehoods, are the weapons that are used at the North, to create sympathy in the cause of freeing our slaves. The devil is the father of lies, and no doubt especially claims as his offspring the fabricators of such diabolical perversions of truth. I have spent my whole life in South Carolina, in the midst of numerous plantations of slaves, and yet I do here in the presence of God assert, that I never saw, never heard, never even conceived of anything approaching to the tyranny above described, and generated only in the fiendish fancies of those whose cause needs such props of lies. My only argument with any persons who have heard and believed such monstrosities about us is, that the slaveholders may be destitute, as the abolitionists would fain believe, of every benevolent virtue, but they certainly are not divested of their love of self; and, therefore, they could not hurt or be cruel to a single one of their slaves, who, if he died, would be a loss to them of six, seven, eight, nine, or ten hundred dollars. There is a Chinese proverb that asserts, "that lies have short legs," and I do therefore trust that the unmitigated falsehoods of the abolitionists, as detailed above, may soon come to a final halt; and may they never again have any power to inveigle one single lover of his country into their dangerous, treasonable, and wicked creed!

In my next letter, I will give you an account of the miseries of some of the fugitives from labor, and of the degraded colored people in the Northern cities. In the mean time, permit me to urge you, my brother, and all other planters in the South, to renewed efforts for the temporal and eternal welfare of the black race. God bless you for all the noble sensibility and numerous acts of kindness that I have seen you extend to the poor African, wherever you have found him! May God hasten the time when Ethiopia shall stretch out her hands in adoration to Jesus Christ, as the Saviour who has at length redeemed her, and all other nations, from the curses entailed upon us by Adam's transgression!