[Footnote A:  The law of North Carolina.  See Haywood’s Manual, 524-5]

[Footnote B:  The law of Louisiana.  See Martin’s Digest, 610.]

[Footnote C:  The whole amount of time secured by the law of Louisiana.  See Act of July 7, 1806.  Martin’s Digest, 610-12]

If such was God’s retribution for the oppression of heathen Egypt, of how much sorer punishment shall a Christian people be thought worthy, who cloak with religion, a system, in comparison with which the bondage of Egypt dwindles to nothing?

Let those believe who can, that God gave his people permission to hold human beings, robbed of all their rights, while he threatened them with wrath to the uttermost, if they practised the far lighter oppression of Egypt—­which robbed its victims of only the least and cheapest of their rights, and left the females unplundered even of these.  What! Is God divided against himself?  When he had just turned Egypt into a funeral pile; while his curse yet blazed upon her unburied dead, and his bolts still hissed amidst her slaughter, and the smoke of her torment went upwards because she had “ROBBED THE POOR,” did He license the VICTIMS of robbery to rob the poor of ALL?  As Lawgiver, did he create a system tenfold more grinding than that, for which he had just hurled Pharaoh headlong, and cloven down his princes, and overwhelmed his hosts, and blasted them with His thunder, till “hell was moved to meet them at their coming?”

Having touched upon the general topics which we design to include in this inquiry, we proceed to examine various Scripture facts and passages, which will doubtless be set in array against the foregoing conclusions.

OBJECTIONS CONSIDERED.

The advocates of slavery are always at their wits end when they try to press the Bible into their service.  Every movement shows that they are hard-pushed.  Their odd conceits and ever varying shifts, their forced constructions, lacking even plausibility, their bold assumptions, and blind guesswork, not only proclaim their cause desperate, but themselves.  Some of the Bible defences thrown around slavery by ministers of the Gospel, do so torture common sense, Scripture, and historical fact, that it were hard to tell whether absurdity, fatuity, ignorance, or blasphemy, predominates, in compound.  Each strives so lustily for the mastery, it may be set down a drawn battle.

How often has it been set up in type, that the color of the negro is the Cain-mark, propagated downward.  Doubtless Cain’s posterity started an opposition to the ark, and rode out the flood with flying streamers!  Why should not a miracle be wrought to point such an argument, and fill out for slaveholders a Divine title-deed, vindicating the ways of God to men?

OBJECTION 1. “Cursed be Canaan, a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”  Gen. i. 25.