Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/370

 migration southward, accomplished to a great extent through the agency of slave traders, all these ties and connections are broken up; all the horrors of the African slave trade are renewed; all the rudiments of ideas previously existing in Maryland and Virginia, and North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, that the negroes, after all, though they be slaves, are still men, and as such entitled to a certain degree of human sympathy and regard, and even to be looked upon as capable of improvement, of religious instruction, and perhaps, some time or other, of liberty; these shoots of the sentiment of humanity, which, though tender, and as it were scarcely daring to show themselves, and nipped, of late, by disastrous frosts, yet give promise and hope of a rich future harvest, — all these germs of consolation, in the transfer of the wretched slaves to the states of which I now speak, are assiduously plucked up as pernicious weeds in the nettle bed of slavery. Every better sentiment, every voice of sympathy, is carefully extinguished, the idea being sedulously inculcated by courts, and legislatures, and politicians, and newspapers, and by at least half or more of those who call themselves ministers of the gospel, that the negroes are in nature, what they are treated as being, mere merchandise, mere property, mere animals, intended to be used like horses and oxen in making cotton, and, like horses and oxen, to be kept forever under the yoke, the bridle, the goad, and the whip, never fit for or capable of being any thing but slaves.

The old English idea that liberty is to be favored — that idea which abolished slavery in Europe, and which once had considerable influence on the courts and legislatures of the more northern slave states — has, in these new hotbeds of cotton and despotism, been totally extinguished. Once a slave a slave forever, — black father or white father, whatever the complexion, — beyond the possibility even that the slave owning parent shall be able to emancipate his own children. Such is the diabolical doctrine of