God have left us brutes, not men, and spared us all the sorrows of struggling humanity.  And whereas it has been argued that the negro is of a race inferior to his master, and that therefore it is justifiable to enslave him, we reply, that the right to freedom is not founded on the equality of the holder to any other human being, else were every white man also lawfully to be enslaved by every other stronger or wiser than himself.  But the right to freedom is founded simply and solely on the moral nature wherewith God has endowed every man and woman of the human race, enabling them, by its use, to attain to that virtue which is the end of their creation.  And whereas others, again, have defended Slavery on the grounds of the supposed Divine sanction to be found for it in the Scriptures, we reply, that we deplore the condition of those whose religion can lend itself to the task of seeking to appeal to God for the permission of an institution which the consciences He has made unequivocally loathe and condemn.  Nor shall we hesitate to stigmatize such an appeal as hypocrisy, until the theologians who make it advance a step farther, and tell us that they are prepared to represent Jesus of Nazareth as one who, in fitting time and place, might have been a purchaser and a master of slaves.  Thus, Madam, do we still condemn and abhor Slavery, as we have ever done, as in itself, and in its own nature, utterly evil and utterly indefensible; and we consider its vast and terrible results of cruelty and immorality to be only the natural fruit of so stupendous a wrong.

“We have not withheld from your nation either the tribute of admiration for the vast sacrifices you have made, or of sympathy for the bereavements and sufferings you have endured.  But the expression of such admiration and sympathy from the truest hearts among us has been almost silenced by the solemn joy wherewith we have beheld your country purging herself, even through seas of blood, for her guilty participation in the crimes of the past, and preparing for herself the stainless future of ’a land wherein dwelleth righteousness.’  We have rejoiced in the midst of sorrow to know that the doom of Slavery was written by a Divine Hand, even from the hour when its upholders dared to believe it possible in the face of Heaven to build up a State upon an injustice.  We have looked with awe-struck consciences to this great revelation of the moral laws which govern the nations of the earth, and show to men who sought for God in the records of distant ages that the Living Lord still rules on high, and is working out even before our eyes the delivery of the captive and the punishment of the oppressor.  The greatest national sin of Christian times has wrought the greatest national overthrow.  The hidden evil of the land, which long smouldered underground, has blazed forth at last like a volcano, bursting in sunder the most solid of human institutions, and pouring the lava-streams of ruin and desolation even to the remotest shores where