this proof, it is nearly certain that the man was not free, and
extremely probable that the whole case is fictitious. For the glorious
writ of habeas corpus, one of the main pillars of your liberty--a
privileged writ which no English judge, for his right hand, would dare
illegally refuse; that writ is one of the great heirlooms we got with
our Anglo-Saxon blood, and is dearer to us than that blood itself.
Here, by act of Parliament, you do sometimes suspend this writ; with
us the tyrant does not breathe who would dare to whisper a wish for
its suspension. Now, if this man was, or believed himself to be free,
what hindered him, from the moment of his arrest to that of his sale,
from demanding and receiving a fair trial? Will it be said he did not
know his rights? But will it be pretended that the one thousand
signers of the memorial, the many abolitionists at Washington of whom
Mr. T. boasts, did not know his rights--in a land where every man
knows and is ready to defend his rights? If they did not, they were
thrice sodden asses, fit only to be tools in gulling mankind into the
belief of a tale that had not feasibility enough to gull a child. Upon
the face of his own proof Mr. Thompson had shown that he had not the
slightest authority for the assertions he had so often made in arguing
this case; by all of which he intended to make men believe that in
America it was not uncommon to sell free men into slavery! Mr.
Breckinridge then resumed the consideration of abolition principles;
the _third of which_ was, that all prejudice against color is sinful,
and that everything which induces us to refuse any social, personal,
religious, civil, or political right to a black man, which is allowed
to a white one, not superior to him in moral or intellectual
qualifications, is a prejudice, and therefore sinful. He believed this
to be a fair statement of their principles on that head. And he would,
in the first place, remark concerning them, that even if they were
true, which he denied, the discussion of them was worse than useless.
It could not advance the cause of emancipation, nor improve the
condition of the free blacks. And whatever the abolitionists might
say, the slaves when freed would follow their own course and
inclinations; nor could the declaration of an abstract principle alter
either their conduct or that of the whites, in any material degree.
If, as Mr. Thompson asserted, prejudice against color was the
national sin of America, the plague-spot of the nation, it had just as
often been asserted by others that the prejudice itself originated at
first out of the relation of slavery. The latter was the disease, the
former a mere symptom. If there were no black slaves on earth there
would no longer be any aversion against that color, which went beyond
the invariable and mutual restraints of nature, or was tolerated by a
proper Christian liberty. They know little of human prejudices who do
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