“Yet notwithstanding these and other discouraging circumstances among the Romans, their slaves were often their rarest artists.  They excelled too in science, insomuch as to be usually employed as tutors to their master’s children; Epictetus, Terence and Phaedrus, were slaves,—­but they were of the race of whites.  It is not their condition then, but nature, which has produced the distinction."[9]

See this, my brethren!!  Do you believe that this assertion is swallowed by millions of the whites?  Do you know that Mr. Jefferson was one of as great characters as ever lived among the whites?  See his writings for the world, and public labors for the United States of America.  Do you believe that the assertions of such a man, will pass away into oblivion unobserved by this people and the world?  If you do you are much mistaken—­See how the American people treat us—­have we souls in our bodies? are we men who have any spirits at all?  I know that there are many swell-bellied fellows among us whose greatest object is to fill their stomachs.  Such I do not mean—­I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.

But the slaves among the Romans.  Every body who has read history, knows, that as soon as a slave among the Romans obtained his freedom, he could rise to the greatest eminence in the State, and there was no law instituted to hinder a slave from buying his freedom.  Have not the Americans instituted laws to hinder us from obtaining our freedom.  Do any deny this charge?  Read the laws of Virginia, North Carolina, &c.  Further:  have not the Americans instituted laws to prohibit a man of colour from obtaining and holding any office whatever, under the government of the United States of America?  Now, Mr. Jefferson tells us that our condition is not so hard, as the slaves were under the Romans!!!!

It is time for me to bring this article to a close.  But before I close it, I must observe to my brethren that at the close of the first Revolution in this country with Great Britain, there were but thirteen States in the Union, now there are twenty-four, most of which are slave-holding States, and the whites are dragging us around in chains and hand-cuffs to their new States and Territories to work their mines and farms, to enrich them and their children, and millions of them believing firmly that we being a little darker than they, were made by our creator to be an inheritance to them and their children forever—­the same as a parcel of brutes!!