'Twas monstrous
in him to be sure, but he could not help it. The slave iron had entered
his soul, and the wound which it made rankled in secret there.

Not alone the sad condition of his own children embittered his lot, but
the sad condition of other black men's children as well. He yearned to
help all to better social conditions--to that freedom which is the gift
of God to mankind. He yearned to possess this God-given boon, in its
fullness and entirety, for himself before he passed thence to the grave.
For he possessed it not. He had indeed bought himself, but he soon learned
that the right to himself which he had purchased from his master was not
the freedom of a man, but the freedom accorded by the Slave-Code, to a
black man, a freedom so restrictive in quantity and mean in quality that
no white man, however low, could be made to live contentedly under it for
a day.

In judging this black man, oh! ye critics and philosophers, judge him
not hastily and harshly before you have at least tried to put yourselves
in his place. You may not even then succeed in doing him justice, for
while he had his faults, and was sorely tempted, he was, nevertheless,
in every inch of him, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his
head, a man.

At the period which we have now reached in his history, he was in
possession of a fairly good education--was able to read and write, and
to speak with fluency the French and English languages. He had traveled
extensively over the world in his master's slave vessel, and had thus
obtained a stock of valuable experiences, and a wide range of knowledge
of men and things of which few inhabitants, whether black or white, in
the slave community of Charleston, during the first quarter of the
nineteenth century could truthfully have boasted. Yet in spite of these
undeniable facts, in spite of his unquestioned ability and economic
efficiency as an industrial factor in that city, he was in legal and
actual ownership of precious little of that right to "life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness" which the most ignorant and worthless white
man enjoyed as a birthright. Wherever he moved or wished to move he was
met and surrounded by the most galling and degrading social and civil
conditions and proscriptions. True he held a bill of sale of his person,
had ceased to be the chattel property of an individual, but he still
wore chains, which kept him, and which were intended to keep him and
such as him, sla