be the better and more obedient slaves—­while he on the other hand, doing his very best to enlighten us and teach us a knowledge of the Lord.  And I am sorry that I have it to say, that many of our brethren have joined in with our oppressors, whose dearest objects are only to keep us ignorant and miserable, against this man to stay his hand.  However, they have kept us in so much ignorance that many of us know no better than to fight against ourselves, and by that means strengthen the hands of our natural enemies, to rivet their infernal chains of slavery upon us and our children.  I have several times called the white Americans our natural enemies—­I shall here define my meaning of the phrase.  Shem, Ham, and Japheth, together with their father Noah and wives, I believe were not natural enemies to each other.  When the ark rested after the flood upon Mount Arrarat in Asia, they (eight) were all the people which could be found alive in all the earth—­in fact if scriptures be true (which I believe are) there were no other living men in all the earth, notwithstanding some ignorant creatures hesitate not to tell us, that we, (the blacks) are the seed of Cain, the murderer of his brother Abel.  But where those ignorant and avaricious wretches could have got their information, I am unable to declare.  Did they receive it from the Bible?  I have searched the Bible as well as they, if I am not as well learned as they are, and have never seen a verse which testifies whether we are the seed of Cain or of Abel.—­Yet those men tell us that we are of the seed of Cain and that God put a dark stain upon us, that we might be known as their slaves!!!  Now I ask those avaricious and ignorant wretches, who act more like the seed of Cain, by murdering, the whites or the blacks?  How many vessel loads of human beings have the blacks thrown into the seas?  How many thousand souls have the blacks murdered in cold blood to make them work in wretchedness and ignorance, to support them and their families?[23]—­However, let us be the seed of Cain, Harry, Dick or Tom!!!  God will show the whites what we are yet.  I say, from the beginning, I do not think that we were natural enemies to each other.  But the whites having made us so wretched, by subjecting us to slavery, and having murdered so many millions of us in order to make us work for them, and out of devilishness—­and they taking our wives, whom we love as we do ourselves—­our mothers who bore the pains of death to give us birth—­our fathers & dear little children, and ourselves, and strip and beat us one before the other—­chain, handcuff and drag us about like rattle-snakes—­shoot us down like wild bears, before each other’s faces, to make us submissive to and work to support them and their families.  They (the whites) know well if we are men—­and there is a secret monitor in their hearts which tells them we are—­they know, I say, if we are men, and see them treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our hearts but death