on
the whip; to rebuke what he is pleased to term insolence, he relies
on the whip; to supply the place of wages as an incentive to toil, he
relies on the whip; to bind down the spirit of the slave, to imbrute
and destroy his manhood, he relies on the whip, the chain, the gag,
the thumb-screw, the pillory, the bowie knife the pistol, and the
blood-hound. These are the necessary and unvarying accompaniments of
the system. Wherever slavery is found, these horrid instruments are also
found. Whether on the coast of Africa, among the savage tribes, or in
South Carolina, among the refined and civilized, slavery is the same,
and its accompaniments one and the same. It makes no difference whether
the slaveholder worships the God of the Christians, or is a follower of
Mahomet, he is the minister of the same cruelty, and the author of
the same misery. _Slavery_ is always _slavery;_ always the same foul,
haggard, and damning scourge, whether found in the eastern or in the
western hemisphere.

There is a still deeper shade to be given to this picture. The physical
cruelties are indeed sufficiently harassing and revolting; but they are
as a few grains of sand on the sea shore, or a few drops of water in the
great ocean, compared with the stupendous wrongs which it inflicts upon
the mental, moral, and religious nature of its hapless victims. It is
only when we contemplate the slave as a moral and intellectual being,
that we can adequately comprehend the unparalleled enormity of slavery,
and the intense criminality of the slaveholder. I have said that the
slave was a man. "What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How
infinite in faculties! In form and moving how express and admirable!
In action{339} how like an angel! In apprehension how like a God! The
beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!"

The slave is a man, "the image of God," but "a little lower than the
angels;" possessing a soul, eternal and indestructible; capable of
endless happiness, or immeasurable woe; a creature of hopes and fears,
of affections and passions, of joys and sorrows, and he is endowed with
those mysterious powers by which man soars above the things of time and
sense, and grasps, with undying tenacity, the elevating and sublimely
glorious idea of a God. It is _such_ a being that is smitten and
blasted. The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those
characteristics of its victims which distinguish _men_ from _things_,
and _persons_ fro