st days that I am able to cheer
you in the pursuit, and exhort you to be steadfast and immovable in
it. So shall you not fail, whatever may betide, to reap a rich
reward in the blessing of him that is ready to perish, upon your
soul."

In August, 1838, Mr. Adams addressed a letter to the inhabitants of
his district, in which, after stating what had been done on the same
subject by the Legislature of Massachusetts and other states, he
proceeded to recapitulate the wrongs which had been done to the
colored races of Africa on this continent, "which have indeed been of
long standing, but which in these latter days have been aggravated
beyond all measure. To repair the injustice of our fathers to these
races had been, from the day of the Declaration of Independence, the
conscience of the good and the counsel of the wise rulers of the land.
Washington, by his own example in the testamentary disposal of his
property,--Jefferson, by the unhesitating convictions of his own mind,
by unanswerable argument and eloquent persuasion, addressed almost
incessantly, throughout a long life, to the reason and feelings of his
countrymen,--had done homage to the self-evident principles which the
nation, at her birth, had been the first to proclaim. Emancipation,
universal emancipation, was the lesson they had urged on their
contemporaries, and held forth as transcendent and irremissible duties
to their children of the present age. Instead of which, what have we
seen? Communities of slaveholding braggarts, setting at defiance the
laws of nature and nature's God, restoring slavery where it had been
extinguished, and vainly dreaming to make it eternal; forming, in the
sacred name of liberty, constitutions of government interdicting to the
legislative authority itself that most blessed of human powers, the
power of giving liberty to the slave! Governors of states urging upon
their Legislatures to make the exercise of the freedom of speech to
propagate the right of the slave to freedom felony, without benefit of
clergy! Ministers of the gospel, like the priest in the parable of the
Good Samaritan, coming and looking at the bleeding victim of the
highway robber, and passing on the other side; or, baser still,
perverting the pages of the sacred volume to turn into a code of
slavery the very word of God! Philosophers, like the Sophists of
ancient Greece, pulverized by the sober sense of Socrates, elaborating
theories of _moral slave