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untouched the white race. Perhaps he does not know that, in the worst days of the Polish aristocracy, this same argument was adopted as the excuse for holding white serfs in bondage, precisely as it is now put forward by the Senator, and that even to this clay the angry Polish noble addresses his white peasant as the " son of Ham." It hardly comports with the gravity of this debate to dwell on such an argument, and yet I can not go wrong if, for the sake of a much-injured race, I brush it away. To justify the Senator in his application of this ancient curse, he must mainrace, leaving

tain at least five different propositions, as essential links in the

chain of the Afric- American slave



first, that,

by

this maledic-

Canaan himself was actually changed into a " chattel," whereas he is simply made the "servant" of his brethren; secondly, that not merely Canaan, but all his posterity, to the remotest generation, was so changed, whereas the language has no such extent thirdly, that the Afric- American actually belongs to the posterity of Canaan an ethnological assumption

tion,



—

absurdly

difficult to establish

fourthly, that each of the descend-



has a right to hold an Afric-American fellow-man as a " chattel " a proposition which finds no semblance of support and fifthly, that every Slave-master is ants of

Shem and Japheth

—



truly descended from

cite

Sbem

or Japheth

—a

pedigree which no

This plain analysis, which may fitly exa smile, shows the five-fold absurdity of an attempt to found

anxiety can establish this pretension "

!

on

Any

From

title, long and dark, the mouldy rolls of Noah's ark."

successive

Drawn from

the character of these

man, I am brought again

two arguments

for property in

to its denial.

who pretend that, by the law of hold property in man, should find this preten-

It is natural that Senators

nature,

man may

sion in the Constitution.

But the pretension

out foundation in the Constitution as nature.

It is not too

—

as

much

with-

without foundation in

to say that there is not

one sentence,

—

word not a single suggestion, hint, or equivocation, out of which any such pretension can be implied while

phrase, or

even

much

it is

is



great national acts and important contemporaneous declarations in the Convention which framed the Constitution, in different

forms of language, and also controlling rules of interpretation