But while the Free States sustain a law which hurls fugitives back into slavery, how can the slaves resolve to become men?  There are some who strive to protect wives and daughters from the insults of their masters; but those who have such sentiments have had advantages above the general mass of slaves.  They have been partially civilized and Christianized by favorable circumstances.  Some are bold enough to utter such sentiments to their masters.  O, that there were more of them!

Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters.  Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings?  What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave, with generations of slaves for ancestors?  I admit that the black man is inferior.  But what is it that makes him so?  It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live; it is the torturing whip that lashes manhood out of him; it is the fierce bloodhounds of the South, and the scarcely less cruel human bloodhounds of the north, who enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. They do the work.

Southern gentlemen indulge in the most contemptuous expressions about the Yankees, while they, on their part, consent to do the vilest work for them, such as the ferocious bloodhounds and the despised negro-hunters are employed to do at home.  When southerners go to the north, they are proud to do them honor; but the northern man is not welcome south of Mason and Dixon’s line, unless he suppresses every thought and feeling at variance with their “peculiar institution.”  Nor is it enough to be silent.  The masters are not pleased, unless they obtain a greater degree of subservience than that; and they are generally accommodated.  Do they respect the northerner for this?  I trow not.  Even the slaves despise “a northern man with southern principles;” and that is the class they generally see.  When northerners go to the south to reside, they prove very apt scholars.  They soon imbibe the sentiments and disposition of their neighbors, and generally go beyond their teachers.  Of the two, they are proverbially the hardest masters.

They seem to satisfy their consciences with the doctrine that God created the Africans to be slaves.  What a libel upon the heavenly Father, who “made of one blood all nations of men!” And then who are Africans?  Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?

I have spoken of the pains slaveholders take to give their slaves a bad opinion of the north; but, notwithstanding this, intelligent slaves are aware that they have many friends in the Free States.  Even the most ignorant have some confused notions about it.  They knew that I could read; and I was often asked if I had seen any thing in the newspapers about white folks over in the big north, who were trying to get