“I emancipate and set free my servant, David Rich, and direct my executors to give him _one hundred dollars_. I recommend him, in the strongest manner, to the respect, esteem, and confidence of any community in which he may happen to live. He has been my slave for twenty-four years, during which time he has been trusted to every extent, and in every respect. My confidence in him has been unbounded; his relation to myself and family has always been such as to afford him daily opportunities to deceive and injure us, and yet he has never been detected in a serious fault, nor even in an intentional breach of the decorums of his station. His intelligence is of a high order, his integrity above all suspicion, and his sense of right and propriety always correct and even delicate and refined. I feel that he is justly entitled to carry this certificate from me into the new relations which he now must form. It is due to his long and most faithful services, and to the sincere and steady friendship which I bear him. In the uninterrupted and confidential intercourse of twenty-four years, I have never given, nor had occasion to give him, an unpleasant word. I know no man who has fewer faults or more excellences than he.”[172] The man thus portrayed was an African, whose only school was Slavery. Here again is the standard of this people. Nor is there failure in loftiness of character. With heroism more beautiful than that of Mutius Scævola, a slave in Louisiana, as long ago as 1753, being compelled to be executioner, cut off his right hand with an axe, that he might avoid taking the life of his brother slave.[173] The apologist for Caste will be astonished to know, but it is none the less true, that the capacity of the African in scholarship and science is better attested than that of anybody claiming to be his master. What modern slave-master has taught the Latin like Juan Latino at Seville, in Spain,--written it like Capitein at the Hague, or Williams at Jamaica,--gained academic honors like those accorded to Amo by the University of Wittenberg? What modern slave-master has equalled in science Banneker of Maryland, who, in his admirable letter to Jefferson, avows himself “of the African race, and in that color which is natural to them, of the deepest dye”?[174] These instances are all from the admirable work of the good Bishop Grégoire, “De la Littérature des Nègres.”[175] Recent experience attests the singular aptitude of the African for knowledge, and his delight in its acquisition. Nor is there any doubt of his delight in doing good. The beneficent system of Sunday Schools in New York is traced to an African woman, who first attempted this work, and her school was for all alike, without distinction of color.[176]