Slavery -- United States; United States -- Politics and government -- 1849-1853
The same gentleman claims Bible authority for slavery. He says, “I
see slavery there tolerated, I had almost said inculcated. I see such
language as this: ‘Both thy bondmen and thy bondmaids shall be of
the heathen that are round about you; of them shall you buy bondmen
and bondmaids; and ye shall take them as an inheritance for your
children after you, to inherit them for a possession,’” &c. Does not
the gentleman know that, by the same authority, the Israelitish slaves
were commanded to despoil their Egyptian masters, and to escape from
bondage? Surely the latter is as good an authority as the former. If
the gentleman’s argument is sound, he is bound to advocate a repeal of
the act of 1793. If the gentleman’s argument is sound, the free states,
instead of surrendering fugitive slaves to their masters, are bound
to give those masters a Red Sea reception and embrace; and the escape
of the children of Israel into Canaan is a direct precedent for the
underground railroad to Canada.
Both the gentleman from Kentucky, [Mr. FRENCH,] yesterday, and the
gentleman from Virginia, to-day, spoke repeatedly, and without the
slightest discrimination, of “a slave and a horse,” “a slave and a
mule,” &c. What should we think, sir, of a teacher for our children, or
even of a tender of our cattle, who did not recognize the difference
between men and mules,--between humanity and horse-flesh? What should
we think, if, on opening a work, claiming to be a scientific treatise
on zoölogy, we should find the author to be ignorant of the difference
between biped and quadruped, or between men and birds, or men and
fishes? Yet such errors would be trifling compared with those which
have been made through all this debate. They would be simple errors
in natural history, perhaps harmless; but these are errors,--fatal
errors,--in humanity and Christian ethics. No, sir; all the legislation
of the slave states proves that they do not treat, and cannot treat,
a human being as an animal. I will show that they are ever trying to
degrade him into an animal, although they can never succeed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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