Page:Narrative of the life and adventures of Henry Bibb, an American slave.djvu/217

Rh slave's lobging for freedom—of his deception, tricks and stratagems to escape his condition, is just, though humiliating. His narrations of the cruelty of individual slaveholders, is natural, and we doubt not in every essential particular is true. We deem the work a most valuable acquisition to the anti-slavery cause; and we hope that it may be widely circulated throughout the country."

"This fugitive slave literature is destined to be a powerful lever. We have the most profound conviction of its potency. We see in it the easy and infallible means of abolitionizing the free states. Argument provokes argument, reason is met by sophistry. But narratives of slaves go right to the hearts of men. We defy any man to think with any patience or tolerance of slavery after reading Bibb's narrative, unless he is one of those infidels to nature who float on the race as monsters, from it. but not of it. Put a dozen copies of this book into every school district or neighborhood in the Free States and we have known candidates of the Free Soil party whose wealth would not miss the requisite to do it—and you might sweep the whole north on a thorough going Liberty Platform for abolishing slavery, everywhere and every how. Stir up honest men's souls with such a book and they won't set much by disclaimers, they won't be squeamish how radically they vote against a system which surpasses any hell which theology has over been able to conjure up. "We believe this to be an unvarnished tale, giving a true picture of slavery in all its features, good, bad and indifferent, if it has so many. The book is written with perfect artlessness, and the man who can read it unmoved must be fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. "One conclusion forced upon the philosophical reader of such narratives of runaway slaves is this, that however tolerable chattel slavery may be as an institution for savage and barbarous life, when you bring it into the purlieus of civilization and Christianity, it becomes unspeakably iniquitous and intolerable. If Mr. Calhoun really means to uphold slavery he must—there is no help for it—abolish Christianity, printing, art, science, and take his patriarchs back to the standard of Central Africa or the days of Shem, Ham and Japhet."