The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of
the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one
part, and degrading submission on the other. Our children see this and
learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the
germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is
learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive
either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the
intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a
sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not
sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the
lineaments of his wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller
slaves, gives a loose rein to the worst of passions and thus nursed,
educated and daily exercised in tyranny, can not but be stamped by it
with odious peculiarities.
The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals
undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execrations should the
statesman be loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to
trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and
these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part and the amor
patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world,
it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live
and labor for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his
nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the
evanishment of the human race or entail his own miserable condition on
the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the
people, their industry is also destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man
will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so
true that, of the proprietors of slaves, a very small proportion are
ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure,
when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of
the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are
not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever:
that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of
the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events:
that it may become probable by supernatural interference!
The Almighty has no attributes which can take side with us in such
a contest. But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this
subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of
history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force
their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible,
since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is
abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition
mollifying, the way, I hope, preparing, under the auspices of heaven,
for a total emancipation; and that this is disposed, in the order of
events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their
extirpation.
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