Page:Letters on the condition of the African race in the United States.djvu/9

Rh cannot talk to him about our souls, with the freedom we do to our own ministers, who own slaves themselves, and therefore know how to feel for us."

This fume and fuss in Congress, my dear brother, about slavery, is nothing but sectional jealousy, and the want, frequently, of mental ability to make a striking speech; and therefore, this exciting subject is seized upon as a dernier resort, for the purpose of arresting the attention of the public to speeches that are otherwise so tame that they could not command a single hearer. The Southern gentlemen, who are generally planters, are rich, and lordly in their feelings. They labor severely with their brain, but not with their hands, to conduct their large establishments; and this sort of aristocratic life is hateful to some classes at the North, and they, therefore, from a natural feeling of envy, strive to impoverish us by the abolition of slavery. There may be a few, who are sincerely deluded, and have benevolent instincts in their efforts to free our slaves; but I have proved that these are those kind of fanatics, who compass the earth to carry out schemes of philanthropy, while they allow the poor blacks, immediately in their midst, to famish with hunger, and die like brute beasts, without a knowledge of their Creator, or the hell to which their crimes are hurrying them.

The black man can never rise to any equality whatsoever with any other foreigner that emigrates to the North. And the Free States are beginning to enact laws, to drive the colored people out from among them. They say, "They are a nuisance, a perfect incubus;" that all foreigners can do something; useful in manufacture or the arts, or in agriculture, which will advance the country that nestles them in its arms; but the free black man is too lazy, too unenterprising, or, what is much more true, too degraded a caste, to be allowed to compete with the white laborer. In the city of Brotherly Love, in the midst of the disciples of William Penn, I searched for some evidence of equality between the two races, and I found none. There are no professional black gentlemen there, and very few who are even mechanics. The industrious, respectable negro, in Philadelphia, accumulates the same comforts, and performs, almost universally, the same menial work that he does in Charleston, South Carolina; that is, he carries "bricks and mortar," and waits on white people as a servant, in private houses or hotels; while the lazy and immoral, who are the slaves of their own degraded natures, and have no kind masters to feed and clothe them, and control their brutishness, die like dogs, without any of the necessaries of life.