dispositions of his children, and to predict the probable future of each of them?  Some times they hit it sometimes they miss it.  Shall it not be conceded to Noah that he could make as probable a conjecture, as to his sons, as your father made as to you, or as you think yourselves competent to make for either of your sons?  Noah made a good hit.  What he said as to the future of his sons, and of their posterity, has turned out, in some respects, as he said it would, but not exactly,—­not so exactly as to authorize our calling his words an inspired prophecy, as we shall presently show.

But, if we set out to establish or to justify slavery upon these words of Noah, on the assumption GOD spake by Noah as to the curse and blessings here recorded, we have a right to expect to find the facts of history to correspond.  If the facts of history do not correspond with these words of Noah, then God did not speak them by Noah as his own.  Let us face this matter.  It is said, by those who interpret the curse of Canaan as divine authority for slavery, that God has hereby ordained that the descendants of Ham shall be slaves.  The descendants of Shem are not, of course, doomed to that curse.  Now, upon the supposition that these are the words of God, and not the denunciations of an irritated father just awaking from his drunkenness, we ought not to find any of Canaan’s descendants out of a condition of slavery, nor any of the descendants of Shem in it.  If we do, then either these are not God’s words, or God’s words have not come true.

But it is a fact that not all of Ham’s entire descendants, nor even of Canaan’s descendants (on whom alone, and not at all on Ham, nor on his three other sons, Noah’s curse fell), are now, nor ever have been, as a whole, in a state of bondage.  The Canaanites were not slaves, but free and powerful tribes, when the Hebrews entered their territory.  The Carthaginians, it is generally admitted, were descended from Canaan.  They certainly were free and powerful when, in frequent wars, they contended, often with success, against the formidable Romans.  If the curse of Noah was intended for all the descendants of Ham, it signally failed in the case of the first military hero mentioned in the Bible, who was the founder of a world-renowned city and empire.  I refer to Nimrod, who was a son of Cush, the oldest son of Ham.  Of this Nimrod the record is, “He began to be a mighty one in the earth:  he was a mighty hunter before the Lord:  and the beginning of his Kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.  Out of that land went forth Asshur and builded Nineveh, and the city Rehoboth, and Calah, and Resen, between Nineveh and Calah; the same is a great city.”  This is Bible authority, informing us that the grandson of Ham (Nimrod, the son of Cush) was a mighty man—­the great man of the world, in his day—­the founder of the Babylonian empire, and the ancestor of the founder of the city of Nineveh, one of the grandest cities of the ancient world.  We are not led to conclude, from these wonderful achievements by the posterity of Cush (who was the progenitor of the Negroes), that this line of Ham’s descendants was so weak in intellect as to be unable to set up and maintain a government.[637]