I had reason, in a former part of this communication, to charge some of the sentiments of Professor Hodge with being alike reproachful to the memory of our fathers, and pernicious to the cause of civil liberty.  There are sentiments on the 72d page of your book, obnoxious to the like charge.  If political “independence”—­if a free government—­be the poor thing—­the illusive image of an American brain—­which you sneeringly represent it, we owe little thanks to those who purchased it for us, even though they purchased it with their blood; and little pains need we take in that case to preserve it.  When will the people of the Northern States see, that the doctrines now put forth so industriously to maintain slavery, are rapidly undermining liberty?

On the 43d page of your book you also evince your low estimate of man’s rights and dues.  You there say, “the fact that the planters of Mississippi and Louisiana, even while they have to pay from twenty to twenty-five dollars per barrel for pork the present season, afford to their slaves from three to four and a half pounds per week, does not show, that they are neglectful in rendering to their slaves that which is just and equal.”  If men had only an animal, and not a spiritual and immortal nature also, it might do for you to represent them as well provided for, if but pork enough were flung to them.  How preposterous to tell us, that God approves a system which brings a man, as slavery seems to have brought you, to regard his fellow man as a mere animal!

I am happy to find that you are not all wrong.  You are no “gradualist.”  You are not inconsistent, like those who admit that slavery is sinful, and yet refuse to treat it as sinful.  I hope our Northern “gradualists” will profit by the following passage in your book:  “If I were convinced by that word (the Bible) that slavery is itself a sin, I trust that, let it cost what it would, I should be an abolitionist, because there is no truth, more clear to my mind, than that the gospel requires an immediate abandonment of sin.”

You have no doubt of your right to hold your fellow men, as slaves.  I wish you had given your readers more fully your views of the origin of this right.  I judge from what you say, that you trace it back to the curse pronounced by Noah upon Canaan.  But was that curse to know no end?  Were Canaan’s posterity to endure the entailment of its disabilities and woes, until the end of time?  Was Divine mercy never to stay the desolating waves of this curse?  Was their harsh and angry roar to reach, even into the gospel dispensation, and to mingle discordantly with the songs of “peace on earth and good will to men?” Was the captivity of Canaan’s race to be even stronger than He, who came “to bind up the broken-hearted, and proclaim liberty to the captives?” But who were Canaan and his descendants?  You speak of them, and with singular unfairness, I think, as “the posterity of Ham, from whom, it is supposed, sprang the Africans.”