“That is very far from being true,” said I; “but still, you like Uncle Tom as a character, do you?”

“You astonish me,” said he, “by making a question about it.  He is the most perfect specimen of Christianity that I ever heard of.”

“Among the martyrs,” said I, “have you ever found his superior?”

“No, Sir!” was his energetic answer.

“Now,” said I, “what made Uncle Tom the paragon of perfection?”

“What made him?” said he.

“Yes,” said I, “what made him the model Christian?  You do not reply, and I will tell you.  SLAVERY MADE UNCLE TOM.  Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a savage in Africa, a brutish slave to his fetishes, living in a jungle, perhaps; and had you stumbled upon him he would very likely have roasted you and picked your bones.  A system which makes Uncle Toms out of African savages is not an unmixed evil.”

“But,” said he, “it makes Legrees also.”

“I beg your pardon, Sir,” said I, “it does not make Legrees.  There are as many Legrees at the North as at the South, especially if we include all the very particular ‘friends of the slave.’  Legree would be Legree in Wall Street, or Fifth Avenue; Uncle Tom would not be Uncle Tom in the wilds of Africa.”

“And so,” said he, “it is right to fit out ships, burn villages in Africa, steal the flying people, bestow them in slave-ships, and sell them into hopeless bondage!”

“So you all love to reason,” said I, “or seek to force that conclusion upon us.  No such thing.  If God overrules the evil doings of men, this is no reason for repeating the wrong.  I am insisting that slavery as it exists in the South has been a blessing to the African.  This does not warrant you in perpetrating outrages on those who are still in Africa.

“But the result has been, through the mercy of God as though we had taken millions of degraded savages out of Africa, and had made them contribute greatly to the industrial interests of mankind.

“We have raised them from heathenish ignorance and barbarism to the condition of intelligent beings.  Look at them in their churches and Sabbath-schools.  Slavery has done this.  See the colored population of Charleston, S.C., voluntarily contributing, as they do, on an average, three dollars apiece, annually, for the propagation of the Gospel at home and abroad.  See the meeting-house of the African Church at Richmond, Va., a place selected for public speakers from the North to deliver their addresses in it to the citizens of Richmond, because it is more commodious than any other public building in the city.  Think of the membership of slaves in Christian Churches; of the multitudes of them who have died in the faith and hope of the Gospel.  Slavery has done this.  The question is whether slavery has been, or is, such a curse, on the whole, to the African race, that we must now set free the whole colored population?  Please let us keep to the point.  The reopening of the slave-trade is a question by itself.