Denying that “the slaves are contented and happy,” the abolitionists have argued, that, from the structure of his moral nature—­the laws of his mind—­man cannot be happy in the fact, that he is enslaved.  True, he may be happy in slavery, but it is not slavery that makes him so—­it is virtue and faith, elevating him above the afflictions of his lot.  The slave has a will, leading him to seek those things which the Author of his nature has made conducive to its happiness.  In these things, the will of the master comes in collision with his will.  The slave desires to receive the rewards of his own labor; the power of the master wrests them from him.  The slave desires to possess his wife, to whom God has joined him, in affection, to have the superintendence, and enjoy the services, of the children whom God has confided to him as a parent to train them, by the habits of the filial relation, for the yet higher relation that they may sustain to him as their heavenly Father.  But here he is met by the opposing will of the master, pressing his claims with irresistible power.  The ties that heaven has sanctioned and blessed—­of husband and wife, of parent and child—­are all sundered in a moment by the master, at the prompting of avarice or luxury or lust; and there is none that can stay his ruthless hand, or say unto him, “What doest thou?” The slave thirsts for the pleasures of refined and elevated intellect—­the master denies to him the humblest literary acquisition.  The slave pants to know something of that still higher nature that he feels burning within him—­of his present state, his future destiny, of the Being who made him, to whose judgment-seat he is going.  The master’s interests cry, “No!” “Such knowledge is too wonderful for you; it is high, you cannot attain unto it.”  To predicate happiness of a class of beings, placed in circumstances where their will is everlastingly defeated by an irresistible power—­the abolitionists say, is to prove them destitute of the sympathies of our nature—­not human.  It is to declare with the Atheist, that man is independent of the goodness of his Creator for his enjoyments—­that human happiness calls not for any of the appliances of his bounty—­that God’s throne is a nullity, himself a superfluity.

But, independently of any abstract reasoning drawn from the nature of moral and intelligent beings, FACTS have been elicited in the discussion of the point before us, proving slavery everywhere (especially Southern slavery, maintained by enlightened Protestants of the nineteenth century) replete with torments and horrors—­the direst form of oppression that upheaves itself before the sun.  These facts have been so successfully impressed on a large portion of the intelligent mind of the country, that the slaves of the South are beginning to be considered as those whom God emphatically regards as the “poor,” the “needy,” the “afflicted,” the “oppressed,” the “bowed down;” and for whose consolation he has said, “Now will I arise—­I will set him in safety from him that puffeth at him.”