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were not derived from any of those countries which recognized the Roman law, while this law, even before the discovery of this continent, had lost all living efficacy. It is not derived from the Mohammedan law for under the mild injunctions of the Koran, a benignant servitude, unlike yours, has prevailed where the lash is not allowed to lacerate the back of a female where no knife or branding-iron is employed upon any

—



human

being, to

where the master

mark him is

as the property of his fellow-man

expressly enjoined to listen to the desires

and where the blood of the masmingling with his bond- woman, takes from her the transferable character of a chattel, and confers complete freedom upon their offspring. It is not derived from the Spanish law, for this law contains humane elements unknown to your sysof his slave for emancipation



ter,

Mohammedan Moors who so and besides, our Thirteen Colonies had no umbilical connection with Spain. Nor is it derived from English statutes or American statutes; for we have the positive and repeated averment of the Senator from Virginia, [Mr. Mason,] and also of other Senators, that in not a single State of the Union can any such statutes establishing Slavery be found. From none of these does it come. No, sir not from any land of civilization is this Barbarism derived. It comes from Africa, ancient nurse of monsters from Guinea, Dahomey, and Congo. There is its origin and fountThis benighted region, we are told by Chief- Justice Marain. shall in a memorable judgment, {The Antelope, 10 Wheaton R. tem, borrowed, perhaps, from the

long occupied Spain







66,) still asserts a right, discarded

by Christendom,

to enslave

war and this African Barbarism is the beginning of American Slavery. And the Supreme Court of

captives taken in



Georgia, a Slave State, has not shrunk from this conclusion. " Licensed to hold slave property," says the Court, u the Georgia either directly from the from those who held under him, and he from

planter held the slave as a chattel; slave-trader, or

the slave-captor in Africa.

The property of the

planter in the

slave became, thus, the property of the original captor."

(Neal

Farmer, 9 Georgia Reports, p. 555.) It is natural that a right, thus derived in defiance of Christendom, and openly founded on the most vulgar Paganism, should be exercised without

V.

.

any mitigating influence from Christianity



that the master's