The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 262 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4.

The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4 eBook

American Anti-Slavery Society
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 262 pages of information about The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4.

[Footnote 102:  Of the truth of this remark, the trustees of the Episcopal Theological Seminary at New-York, lately (June, 1839) afforded a striking illustration.  A young man, regularly acknowledged by the Bishop as a candidate for orders, and in consequence of such acknowledgment entitled, by an express statute of the seminary, to admission to its privileges, presented himself as a pupil.  But God had given him a dark complexion, and therefore the trustees, regardless of the statute, barred the doors against him, by a formal and deliberate vote.  As a compromise between conscience and prejudice, the professors offered to give him private instruction—­to do in secret what they were ashamed to do openly—­to confer as a favor, what he was entitled to demand as a right.  The offer was rejected.

It is worthy of remark, that of the trustees who took an active part against the colored candidate, one is the PRESIDENT of the New York Colonization Society; another a MANAGER, and a third, one of its public champions; and that the Bishop of the diocese, who wished to exclude his candidate from the theological school of which he is both a trustee and a professor, lately headed a recommendation in the newspapers for the purchase of a packet ship for Liberia, as likely to “render far more efficient than heretofore, the enterprize of colonization.”]

In 1836, a black man of irreproachable character, and who by his industry and frugality had accumulated several thousand dollars, made application in the City of New York for a carman’s license, and was refused solely and avowedly on account of his complexion!  We have already seen the effort of the Ohio legislature, to consign the negroes to starvation, by deterring others from employing them.  Ignorance, idleness, and vice, are at once the punishments we inflict upon these unfortunate people for their complexion; and the crimes with which we are constantly reproaching them.

9.  LIABILITY TO BE SEIZED, AND TREATED AS SLAVES.

An able-bodied colored man sells in the southern market for from eight hundred to a thousand dollars; of course he is worth stealing.  Colonizationists and slaveholders, and many northern divines, solemnly affirm, that the situation of a slave is far preferable to that of a free negro; hence it would seem an act of humanity to convert the latter into the former.  Kidnapping being both a lucrative and a benevolent business, it is not strange it should be extensively practised.  In many of the States this business is regulated by law, and there are various ways in which the transmutation is legally effected.  Thus, in South Carolina, if a free negro “entertains” a runaway slave, it may be his own wife or child, he himself is turned into a slave.  In 1827, a free woman and her three children underwent this benevolent process, for entertaining two fugitive children of six and nine years old.  In Virginia all emancipated

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The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Part 4 of 4 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.