while trampling on the necks of their vassals, and counting the life of a man as of less value than that of a wild beast, never appealed to God for the sincerity of their belief, that all men were created equal.  It was reserved for American slave-holders to present to the world the hideous anomaly of a code of laws, beginning with the emphatic declaration of the inalienable rights of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and closing with a deliberate and systematic denial of those rights, in respect to a large portion of their countrymen; engrossing on the same parchment the antagonist laws of liberty and tyranny.  The very nature of this unnatural combination has rendered it necessary that American slavery, in law and in practice, should exceed every other in severity and cool atrocity.  The masters of Greece and Rome permitted their slaves to read and write and worship the gods of paganism in peace and security, for there was nothing in the laws, literature, or religion of the age to awaken in the soul of the bondman a just sense of his rights as a man.  But the American slaveholder cannot be thus lenient.  In the excess of his benevolence, as a political propagandist, he has kindled a fire for the oppressed of the old world to gaze at with hope, and for crowned heads and dynasties to tremble at; but a due regard to the safety of his “peculiar institution,” compels him to put out the eyes of his own people, lest they too should see it.  Calling on all the world to shake off the fetters of oppression, and wade through the blood of tyrants to freedom, he has been compelled to smother, in darkness and silence, the minds of his own bondmen, lest they too should hear and obey the summons, by putting the knife to his own throat.—­Proclaiming the truths of Divine Revelation, and sending the Scriptures to the four quarters of the earth, he has found it necessary to maintain heathenism at home by special enactments; and to make the second offence of teaching his slaves the message of salvation punishable with death!

What marvel then that American slavery even on the statute book assumes the right to transform moral beings into brutes:[A] that it legalizes man’s usurpation of Divine authority; the substitution of the will of the master, for the moral government of God:  that it annihilates the rights of conscience; debars from the enjoyment of religious rights and privileges by specific enactments; and enjoins disobedience to the Divine lawgiver:  that it discourages purity and chastity, encourages crime, legalizes concubinage; and, while it places the slave entirely in the hands of his master, provides no real protection for his life or his person.

[Footnote A:  The cardinal principle of slavery, that a slave is not to be ranked among sentient beings, but among things, as an article of property, a chattel personal, obtains as undoubted law, in all the slave states. (Judge Stroud’s Sketch of Slave Laws, p. 22.)]