“Have ye chosen, O my people, on whose party ye shall stand,
    Ere the Doom from its worn sandal shakes the dust against our land?”

Are you a Christian?  This is the carrying out of practical Christianity; and there is no other.  Christianity is practical in its very nature and essence.  It is a life, springing out of a soul imbued with its spirit.  Are you a friend of the missionary cause?  This is the greatest missionary enterprize of the day.  Three millions of Christian, law-manufactured heathen are longing for the glad tidings of the Gospel of freedom.  Are you a friend of the Bible?  Come, then, and help us to restore to these millions, whose eyes have been bored out by slavery, their sight, that they may see to read the Bible.  Do you love God whom you have not seen?  Then manifest that love, by restoring to your brother whom you have seen, his rightful inheritance, of which he has been so long and so cruelly deprived.

It is not for a single generation alone, numbering three millions—­sublime as would be that effort—­that we are working.  It is for humanity, the wide world over, not only now, but for all coming time, and all future generations:—­

    “For he who settles Freedom’s principles,
    Writes the death-warrant of all tyranny.”

It is a vast work—­a glorious enterprize—­worthy the unswerving devotion of the entire life-time of the great and the good.

Slaveholding and slaveholders must be rendered disreputable and odious.  They must be stripped of their respectability and Christian reputation.  They must be treated as “men-stealers—­guilty of the highest kind of theft, and sinners of the first rank.”  Their more guilty accomplices in the persons of northern apologists, both in Church and State, must be placed in the same category.  Honest men must be made to look upon their crimes with the same abhorrence and loathing, with which they regard the less guilty robber and assassin, until

    “The common damned shun their society,
    And look upon themselves as fiends less foul.”

When a just estimate is placed upon the crime of slave-holding, the work will have been accomplished, and the glorious day ushered in—­

    “When man nor woman in all our wide domain,
    Shall buy, or sell, or hold, or be a slave.”

J.C.  Hathaway.

—­Farmington, N.Y., 1847.

NARRATIVE.

CHAPTER I.

I was born in Lexington, Ky.  The man who stole me as soon as I was born, recorded the births of all the infants which he claimed to be born his property, in a book which he kept for that purpose.  My mother’s name was Elizabeth.  She had seven children, viz:  Solomon, Leander, Benjamin, Joseph, Millford, Elizabeth, and myself.  No two of us were children of the same father.  My father’s name, as I learned from my mother, was George Higgins.  He was a white man, a relative of my master, and connected with some of the first families in Kentucky.