One thousand five hundred years ago, Gregory, a Bishop in Asia Minor, preached a sermon in which he rebuked the sin of slaveholding.  Indignantly he asked, “Who can be the possessor of human beings save God?  Those men that you say belong to you, did not God create them free?  Command the brute creation; that is well.  Bend the beasts of the field beneath your yoke.  But are your fellow-men to be bought and sold, like herds of cattle?  Who can pay the value of a being created in the image of God?  The whole world itself bears no proportion to the value of a soul, on which the Most High has set the seal his likeness.  This world will perish, but the soul of man is immortal.  Show me, then, your titles of possession.  Tell me whence you derive this strange claim.  Is not your own nature the same with that of those you call your slaves?  Have they not the same origin with yourselves?  Are they not born to the same immortal destinies?”

Thus spake a good old Bishop, in the early years of Christianity.  Since then, thousands and thousands of noble souls have given their bodies to the gibbet and the stake, to help onward the slow progress of truth and freedom; a great unknown continent has been opened as a new, free starting point for the human race; printing has been invented, and the command, “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them,” has been sent abroad in all the languages of the earth.  And here, in the noon-day light the nineteenth century, in a nation claiming to be the freest and most enlightened on the face of the globe, a portion the population of fifteen States have thus agreed among themselves:  “Other men shall work for us, without wages while we smoke, and drink, and gamble, and race horses, and fight.  We will have their wives and daughters for concubines, and sell their children in the market with horses and pigs.  If they make any objection to this arrangement, we will break them into subjection with the cow-hide and the bucking-paddle.  They shall not be permitted to read or write, because that would be likely to ‘produce dissatisfaction in their minds.’  If they attempt to run away from us, our blood-hounds shall tear the flesh from their bones, and any man who sees them may shoot them down like mad dogs.  If they succeed in getting beyond our frontier, into States where it is the custom to pay men for their work, and to protect their wives and children from outrage, we will compel the people of those States to drive them back into the jaws of our blood-hounds.”

And what do the people of the other eighteen States of that enlightened country answer to this monstrous demand?  What says Massachusetts, with the free blood of the Puritans coursing in her veins, and with the sword uplifted in her right hand, to procure “peaceful repose under liberty”?  Massachusetts answers:  “O yes.  We will be your blood-hounds, and pay our own expenses.  Only prove to our satisfaction that the stranger who has taken refuge among us is one of the men you have agreed among yourselves to whip into working without wages, and we will hunt him back for you.  Only prove to us that this woman, who has run away from your harem, was bought for a concubine, that you might get more drinking-money by the sale of the children she bears you, and our soldiers will hunt her back with alacrity.”