Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada WestSteward, Austin
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Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman: Embracing a Correspondence of Several Years, While President of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West
The knowledge I have of the colored men in Canada, their strength and
condition, would cause me to tremble for these United States, should a war
ever ensue between the English and American governments, which I pray may
never occur. These fugitives may be thought to be a class of poor,
thriftless, illiterate creatures, like the Southern slaves, but it is not
so. They are no longer slaves; many of whom have been many years free men,
and a large number were never slaves. They are a hardy, robust class of
men; very many of them, men of superior intellect; and men who feel deeply
the wrongs they have endured. Driven as they have been from their native
land; unprotected by the government under which they were born, and would
gladly have died,--they would in all probability, in case of a rupture,
take up arms in defense of the government which has protected them and the
country of their adoption. England could this day, very readily collect a
regiment of stalwart colored men, who, having felt the oppression of our
laws, would fight with a will not inferior to that which actuated our
revolutionary forefathers.
And what inducement, I ask, have colored men to defend with their lives
the United States in any case; and what is there to incite them to deeds
of bravery?
Wherever men are called upon to take up arms in defense of a country,
there is always a consciousness of approaching wrong and oppression, which
arouses their patriotism and incites to deeds of daring. They look abroad
over fields of their own cultivation; they behold too, churches, schools,
and various institutions, provided by their labor, for generations yet to
come; they see their homes, their cherished hearthstone, about to be
desecrated, and their wives and little ones, with their aged sires,
exposed to the oppression of a ruthless foe. Then, with what cheerful
and thrilling enthusiasm, steps forward the husband, the father, the
brother, and bares his bosom to the sword,--his head to the storm of the
battle-field, in defence of his country's freedom, and the God-given
rights of himself and family! But what sees the oppressed negro? He sees a
proud and haughty nation, whose Congressmen yearly meet to plot his ruin
and perpetuate his bondage! He beholds, it is true, a few Christ-like
champions, who rise up with bleeding hearts to defend his cause; but while
his eye kindles with grateful emotion, he sees the bludgeon of the South--
already reeking in the blood of freemen--raised and ready to fall with
murderous intent upon the head of any one, who, like the illustrious
Sumner, dare open his mouth in defence of Freedom, or speak of the wrongs
of the poor negro, and the sins of the Southern autocrat!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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