But, if the state of Pennsylvania is to be applauded for her conduct, that of South Carolina can never be too strongly execrated.[7] The legislature of that state, at no very remote period, brought in a bill for prohibiting the use of letters to their slaves, and forbidding them the privilege of being taught to read!—­This was a deliberate attempt to enslave the minds of those unfortunate objects, whose persons they already held in arbitrary subjection:—­Detestable deviation from the becoming rectitude of man.

One more peculiarly distressing circumstance remains to be recounted, before I take my final leave of the subject.—­In the ordinary course of the business of the country, the punishment of relatives frequently happens on the same farm, and in view of each other:—­The father often sees his beloved son—­the son his venerable sire—­the mother her much-loved daughter—­the daughter her affectionate parent—­the husband the wife of his bosom, and she the husband of her affection, cruelly bound up without delicacy or mercy, and punished with all extremity of incensed rage, and all the rigour of unrelenting severity, whilst these unfortunate wretches dare not even interpose in each other’s behalf.  Let us reverse the case and suppose it ours:—­all is silent horror!

Othello
Maryland, May 23, 1788.

—­American Museum, IV, 509-512.

LETTER ON SLAVERY BY A NEGRO

I am one of that unfortunate race of men, who are distinguished from the rest of the human species, by a black skin and wooly hair—­disadvantages of very little moment in themselves, but which prove to us a source of greatest misery, because there are men, who will not be persuaded that it is possible for a human soul to be lodged within a sable body.  The West Indian planters could not, if they thought us men, so wantonly spill our blood; nor could the natives of this land of liberty, deeming us of the same species with themselves, submit to be instrumental in enslaving us, or think us proper subjects of a sordid commerce.  Yet, strong as the prejudices against us are, it will not, I hope on this side of the Atlantic, be considered as a crime, for a poor African not to confess himself a being of an inferior order to those, who happen to be of a different colour from himself; or be thought very presumptuous, in one who is but a negro, to offer to the happy subjects of this free government, some reflections upon the wretched condition of his countrymen.  They will not, I trust, think worse of my brethren, for being discontented with so hard a lot as that of slavery; nor disown me for their fellow-creature, merely because I deeply feel the unmerited sufferings which my countrymen endure.