14.  The laws operate most oppressively upon free people of color[A].

[Footnote A:  See Mrs. Child’s Appeal, Chap.  II.]

Shall I ask you now my friends, to draw the parallel between Jewish servitude and American slavery?  No!  For there is no likeness in the two systems; I ask you rather to mark the contrast.  The laws of Moses protected servants in their rights as men and women, guarded them from oppression and defended them from wrong.  The Code Noir of the South robs the slave of all his rights as a man, reduces him to a chattel personal, and defends the master in the exercise of the most unnatural and unwarrantable power over his slave.  They each bear the impress of the hand which formed them.  The attributes of justice and mercy are shadowed out in the Hebrew code; those of injustice and cruelty, in the Code Noir of America.  Truly it was wise in the slaveholders of the South to declare their slaves to be “chattels personal;” for before they could be robbed of wages, wives, children, and friends, it was absolutely necessary to deny they were human beings.  It is wise in them, to keep them in abject ignorance, for the strong man armed must be bound before we can spoil his house—­the powerful intellect of man must be bound down with the iron chains of nescience before we can rob him of his rights as a man; we must reduce him to a thing; before we can claim the right to set our feet upon his neck, because it was only all things which were originally put under the feet of man by the Almighty and Beneficent Father of all, who has declared himself to be no respecter of persons, whether red, white, or black.

But some have even said that Jesus Christ did not condemn slavery.  To this I reply, that our Holy Redeemer lived and preached among the Jews only.  The laws which Moses had enacted fifteen hundred years previous to his appearance among them, had never been annulled, and these laws protected every servant in Palestine.  That he saw nothing of perpetual servitude is certain from the simple declaration made by himself in John, viii, 35.  “The servant abideth not in the house for ever, the son abideth ever.”  If then He did not condemn Jewish temporary servitude, this does not prove that he would not have condemned such a monstrous system as that of AMERICAN slavery, if that had existed among them.  But did not Jesus condemn slavery?  Let us examine some of his precepts. “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.”  Let every slaveholder apply these queries to his own heart; Am I willing to be a slave—­Am I willing to see my husband the slave of another—­Am I willing to see my mother a slave, or my father, my white sister, or my white brother?  If not, then in holding others as slaves, I am doing what I would not wish to be done to me or any relative I have; and thus have I broken this golden rule which was given me to walk by.