untrymen the solemn and
emphatic warning that the day was not distant when they _must_ hear
and adopt the general emancipation of their slaves. 'Nothing is
more certainly written,' said he, 'in the book of fate, than that
these people are to be free.' My countrymen! it is written in a
better volume than the book of fate; it is written in the laws of
Nature and of Nature's God.

"We are told, indeed, by the learned doctors of the nullification
school, that color operates as a forfeiture of the rights of human
nature: that a dark skin turns a man into a chattel; that crispy
hair transforms a human being into a four-footed beast. The
master-priest informs you that slavery is consecrated and sanctified
by the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament: that Ham was
the father of Canaan, and all his posterity were doomed, by his own
father, to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to the descendants
of Shem and Japhet: that the native Americans of African descent are
the children of Ham, with the curse of Noah still fastened upon
them; and the native Americans of European descent are children of
Japhet, pure Anglo-Saxon blood, born to command, and to live by the
sweat of another's brow. The master-philosopher teaches you that
slavery is no curse, but a blessing! that
Providence--Providence!--has so ordered it that this country should
be inhabited by two races of men,--one born to wield the scourge,
and the other to bear the record of its stripes upon his back; one
to earn, through a toilsome life, the other's bread, and to feed him
on a bed of roses; that slavery is the guardian and promoter of
wisdom and virtue; that the slave, by laboring for another's
enjoyment, learns disinterestedness and humility; that the master,
nurtured, clothed, and sheltered, by another's toils, learns to be
generous and grateful to the slave, and sometimes to feel for him as
a father for his child; that, released from the necessity of
supplying his own wants, he acquires opportunity of leisure to
improve his mind, to purify his heart, to cultivate his taste; that
he has time on his hands to plunge into the depths of philosophy,
and to soar to the clear empyrean of seraphic morality. The
master-statesman--ay, the statesman in the land of the Declaration
of Independence, in the halls of national legislat