Dear reader: understand one thing. The slaves are taught ignorance as we teach our children knowledge. They are kept in darkness, and are borne down under a cruel, cruel oppression! All human rights are denied them as citizens! They are not recognized as men! My old master frequently said, “he did not believe a d----d nigger had any soul!” They are made to undergo everything as a beast. Having a full, perfect, undeniable right to stand out before God as MEN, the cruel, God-defying white man, without semblance of right, with no pretence but might, has prostituted them to the base purpose of his cupidity, and his baser beastly passions, reducing them to mere things, mere chattels, to be bought and sold like hogs and sheep! Born, like the white man, to an individual responsibility to the Father of mercies, the treatment of the white man to the poor African, unmixed with mercy, has curtained his mind to all knowledge, aye, even to the knowledge of the God of heaven and earth, and thus removed from him the accountability! But, where does this terrible accountability rest? Let the hardened slave-tyrant, when he stands quivering before the Almighty bar of retribution, answer this question! Well might Thomas Jefferson remark, when his deep, penetrating mind was reflecting upon the stupendous wrongs of slavery, “I tremble for my country, when I remember that God is just, and that his justice cannot slumber forever?” I appeal, then, to every rational, intelligent mind, if slavery be not an abomination in the sight of the Lord. It has been said that slaves have no intellect. I deny it. God has given them minds capable of cultivation. Uncultivated ground will not bring forth fruit. All the slave requires is cultivation, for he is possessed of all the qualities of the white man. Reader: we have heard of the wisdom of King Solomon, son of David, the grandson of ancient Jesse. The Queen of Basheba has declared that half had never been told her. History informs us that Solomon was as black as black satin, with handsome features and smooth skin. I could refer to many of the colored race whose mental endowments are superior to many of those arrogant white men who abhor a colored man and pretend to be his superior in knowledge. The language of Jesus Christ to his apostles should teach us not to despise the workmanship of God. “He that despiseth you, despiseth me.” Do men, I ask, realize the awful evil of slavery? Are they aware of its terrible calamities? Has it not become so familiar, from its long existence, as almost to reconcile the tender conscience to its infamous enormities? It must be so. There is no other mode of accounting for the fact, that men, good christians in other respects, quietly hold slaves at the south, while their equally guilty brethren of the north assent to it, and participate in its profits.