“It seems that God had chosen to redeem and save large numbers of the African race by having them transported to this Christian land.  Philanthropists would not be at the cost and trouble of all this.  God has, therefore, used the cupidity of men to accomplish his purposes, and he punishes the wicked agents of his own benevolent schemes.  His curse has for ages rested on the African race, and the laws of nature have, to a great degree, interposed to prevent Christian efforts in their behalf.  God saw fit to change the prison-house, and prison yards and shops of this race from one continent to another, and New England merchantmen, in part, have been allowed to be the conveyers.  In the process of transferring these future subjects of civilization and Christianity, vast misery is endured, as in opening a way by the sword for the execution of his decrees, great slaughter is the inevitable attendant.  I look at the whole subject of slavery in the light of God’s providence.  And I do not see that his providence yet indicates any way for its termination consistent with the interests of the colored people.

“As to the extension of slavery, in this land, if the Most High has any further purposes of mercy for the African race in connection with us, he will not consult you nor me.  He will open districts of our country for them; if my political party refuses to be the instrument in doing this, from benevolent motives, or from any other cause, He will make that party to be defeated, it may be by a party below us in moral principle, as we view it.  This question of slavery, its extension and continuance, is therefore among the great problems of God’s providence.  I shall do all that I properly can to prevent it, and to encourage, and, if called upon, to aid my brethren now in immediate charge of the slaves, to fulfil their solemn trust; but anything like impatience and passion at the existence of slavery, I hold to be a sin against God.  I pity those good men whose minds are so inflamed by the consideration of individual cases of suffering as not to perceive the great and steadfast march of the divine administration.  Politicians and others who get their places, or their bread, by easy appeals to sympathy for individual cases of suffering, are the causes of much misplaced commiseration and of a low, uninstructed view of the great interests involved in slavery.  Yet these very men who, for selfish purposes, stir up the passions of our people, by dwelling on cases of hardship in slavery, are greatly disappointed when Napoleon III., at Villafranca, prematurely terminates a war of unparalleled slaughter.  They would have preferred, for the cause of constitutional liberty and for its possible influence against the Pope, that the fighting had continued a month longer; we hear no pathetic remonstrances from them on the score of the killed and maimed, the widows and orphans and the childless, of homes made desolate, by this additional month of battle.  Such is man, so inconsistent, so blinded by party prejudice, so ready to maintain that which, in a change of persons and places, he will denounce.  He will be wholly blinded by individual acts of suffering to all that is good in a system; and again, the good to be effected by a war will blind him to the hundreds of thousands of dead or mutilated soldiers, with five times that number of bleeding hearts, rifled by the sword of their precious treasures.”