And what inducement, I ask, have colored men to defend with their lives the United States in any case; and what is there to incite them to deeds of bravery?

Wherever men are called upon to take up arms in defense of a country, there is always a consciousness of approaching wrong and oppression, which arouses their patriotism and incites to deeds of daring.  They look abroad over fields of their own cultivation; they behold too, churches, schools, and various institutions, provided by their labor, for generations yet to come; they see their homes, their cherished hearthstone, about to be desecrated, and their wives and little ones, with their aged sires, exposed to the oppression of a ruthless foe.  Then, with what cheerful and thrilling enthusiasm, steps forward the husband, the father, the brother, and bares his bosom to the sword,—­his head to the storm of the battle-field, in defence of his country’s freedom, and the God-given rights of himself and family!  But what sees the oppressed negro?  He sees a proud and haughty nation, whose Congressmen yearly meet to plot his ruin and perpetuate his bondage!  He beholds, it is true, a few Christ-like champions, who rise up with bleeding hearts to defend his cause; but while his eye kindles with grateful emotion, he sees the bludgeon of the South—­ already reeking in the blood of freemen—­raised and ready to fall with murderous intent upon the head of any one, who, like the illustrious Sumner, dare open his mouth in defence of Freedom, or speak of the wrongs of the poor negro, and the sins of the Southern autocrat!

What inducement then, has the slave to shoulder his musket, when the American drum beats the call, “To Arms!  To Arms!” Does he not remember that the wife of his bosom; the children,—­“bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh,”—­and the rude hearth-stone they for a time are allowed to surround, belong not to himself, but to the tyrannical master, who claims dominion over all he possesses.  As his property then, let the slave owner go forth in defence of his own, and lay down his life if he please; but the poor slave has no home, no family to protect; no country to defend; nor does he care to assist in sustaining a government that instead of offering him protection, drives him from the soil which has been cultivated by his own labor,—­to beg at the hand of England’s Queen, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Humiliating as it is for an American citizen to name these things, they are nevertheless true; and I would to God that America would arise in her native majesty, and divest herself of the foul stain, which Slavery has cast upon her otherwise pure drapery!  Then would she be no longer a hissing and by-word among the nations; but indeed what she professes to be, “the land of the free, and the home of the brave;” an asylum for the oppressed of every clime.