It was, as I have said, an address to the owners of slaves, and its object purported to be to awaken their minds to the cruelty, injustice, and wickedness of slavery. This was sought to be effected, in the first place, by numerous cuts, representing all the cruelties and indignities that negro slaves had suffered, or could suffer, either in reality, or in the imaginations of the philanthropists. Some of these were horrible, many shocking, and all disgusting; and some of them, I think, were copied out of Fox's Book of Martyrs, though of that I am not certain. The moral turpitude and illegality of the institution were shown, or attempted to be shown, now by arguments that were handled like daggers and broad-axes, and now by savage denunciations of the enslaver and oppressor, who were proved to be murderers, blasphemers, tyrants, devils, and I know not what beside. The vengeance of Heaven was invoked upon their heads, coupled with predictions of the retribution that would sooner or later fall upon them, these being borne out by monitory allusions to the servile wars of Rome, Syria, Egypt, Sicily, St. Domingo, &c. &c. It was threatened that Heaven would repeat the plagues of Egypt in America, to punish the task-masters of the Ethiopian, as it had punished those of the Israelite, and that, in addition, the horrors of Hayti would be enacted a second time, and within our own borders. It was contended that the negro was, in organic and mental structure, the white man's equal, if not his superior, and that there was a peculiar injustice in subjecting to bondage _his_ race, which had been (or so the writer averred), in the earlier days of the world, the sole possessors of knowledge and civilization; and there were many triumphant references to Hannibal, Queen Sheba, Cleopatra, and the Pharaohs, all of whom were proved to have been woolly-headed, and as bright in spirit as they were black in visage. In short, the book was full of strange things, and, among others, of insurrection and murder; though it is but charitable to suppose that the writer did not know it. There was scarce a word in it that did not contribute to increase the evil spirit which its first paragraph had excited among my companions. It taught them to look on themselves as the victims of avarice, the play-things of cruelty, the foot-balls of oppression, the most injured people in the world: and the original greatness of their race, which was an idea they received with uncommon pleasure, and its reviving grandeur in the liberated Hayti, convinced them they possessed the power to redress their wrongs, and raise themselves into a mighty nation.