Page:The Barbarism of Slavery.djvu/48

 of themselves, discoloring their very souls, blotting their characters, and breaking forth in moral leprosy. This language is strong; but the evidence is even stronger. Some there may be of happy natures — like honorable Senators — who can thus feed and not be harmed. Mithridates fed on poison, and lived; and it may be that there is a moral Mithridates, who can swallow without bane the poison of Slavery.

Instead of “ennobling" the master, nothing can be clearer than that the slave drags his master down, and this process begins in childhood, and is continued through life. Living much in association with his slave, the master finds nothing to remind him of his own deficiencies, to prompt his ambition or excite his shame. Without these provocations to virtue, and without an elevating example, he naturally shares the Barbarism of the society which he keeps. Thus the very inferiority which the Slave-master attributes to the African race, explains the melancholy condition of the communities in which his degradation is declared by law.

A single false principle or vicious thought may degrade a character otherwise blameless; and this is practically true of the Slave-master. Accustomed to regard men as property, his sensibilities are blunted and his moral sense is obscured. Te consents to acts from which Civilization recoils. The early Church sold its property, and even its sacred vessels, for the redemption of captives. This was done on a remarkable occasion by St. Ambrose, and successive canons confirmed the example. But in the Slave States this is all reversed. Slaves there are often sold as the property of the Church, and an instance is related of a slave sold in South-Carolina in order to buy plate for the communion-table. Who can calculate the effect of such an example?

Surrounded by pernicious influences of all kinds, both positive and negative, the first making him do that which he ought not to do, and the second making him leave undone that which he ought to have done — through childhood, youth, and manhood, even unto age — unable while at home to escape these influences, overshadowed constantly by the portentous Barbarism about him, the Slave-master naturally adopts the bludgeon, the revolver and the bowie-knife. Through these he governs lis plantation, and secretly armed with these, he enters the