[Footnote B:  I mean by this phrase, “right to property in man,” a right to hold man as property; and I do not see with what propriety certain writers construe it to mean, a property in the mere services of a man.]

But it would be treating you indecorously to stop you at this stage of the discussion, before we are a third of the way through your book, and thus deny a hearing to the remainder of it.  We will proceed to what you say of the slavery which existed in the time of the New Testament writers.  Before we do so, however, let me call your attention to a few of the specimens of very careless reasoning in that part of your book, which we have now gone over.  They may serve to inspire you with a modest distrust of the soundness of other parts of your argument.

After concluding that Abraham was a slaveholder, you quote the following language from the Bible; “Abraham obeyed my voice and kept my charge, my commandments, my statutes, and my laws.”  You then inquire, “How could this be true of Abraham, holding as he did, until he was an old man, more slaves than any man in Mississippi or Louisiana?” To be consistent with your design in quoting this passage, you must argue from it, that Abraham was perfect.  But this he was not; and, therefore, your quotation is vain.  Again, if the slaveholder would quiet his conscience with the supposition, that “Abraham held more slaves than any man in Mississippi or Louisiana,” let him remember, that he had also more concubines (Gen. 25:  6), “than any man in Mississippi or Louisiana;” and, if Abraham’s authority be in the one case conclusive for slaveholding, equally so must it be in the other, for concubinage.

Perhaps, in saying that “Abraham had more concubines than any man in Mississippi or Louisiana,” I have done injustice to the spirit of propagation prevailing amongst the gentlemen of those States.  It may be, that some of your planters quite distance the old patriarch in obedience to the command to “multiply and replenish the earth.”  I am correctly informed, that a planter in Virginia, who counted, I know not how many slaves upon his plantation, confessed on his death-bed, that his licentiousness had extended to every adult female amongst them.  This planter was a near relative of the celebrated Patrick Henry.  It may be, that you have planters in Mississippi and Louisiana, who avail themselves to the extent that he did, of the power which slaveholding gives to pollute and destroy.  The hundreds of thousands of mulattoes, who constitute the Southern commentary on the charge, that the abolitionists design amalgamation, bear witness that this planter was not singular in his propensities.  I do not know what you can do with this species of your population.  Besides, that it is a standing and deep reproach on Southern chastity, it is not a little embarrassing and puzzling to those who have received the doctrine, that the descendants of Africa amongst us must be returned to the land of their ancestors.  How the poor mulatto shall be disposed of, under this doctrine, between the call which Africa makes for him, on the one hand, and that which some state of Europe sends out for him on the other, is a problem more difficult of solution than that which the contending mothers brought before the matchless wisdom of Solomon.