mple, to say
and sing, "I've heard mistress telling her sweet little son, what Jesus,
the loving, for children has done," making the impression that such a
Christian mother leaves a colored child in her house, without
instruction, to draw the inference, if it will, that Jesus, perhaps,
will love a "poor little slave!" There are no words to depict the
feeling of injustice and cruelty which this conveys to the hearts of our
Christian friends at the South. "Let us go out of the Union!" they cry,
in their blind grief; but where will they go? for while our Northern
people write and publish and sing and teach their children to sing such
things, we can have nothing but mutual hatred, and perhaps exterminating
wars. We must change. If our Northern people would discriminate, and,
while retaining all their natural feelings against oppression and
man-stealing, would admit that "ownership in man" is not necessarily
oppression nor man-stealing, they would do themselves justice and
contribute to the peace of the country. "But O!" they say, "look at the
iniquitous _system_. If separating families, and destroying marriage,
and liberty to chastise at pleasure, and to kill, are not _sin_, what is
sin?" So they impute the _system_, and everything in it, to the people
who live under it. How a system can be a sin, it would puzzle some of
them, who say that all sin consists in action, to explain. And when they
came to look into the system itself, they would find, that if slavery is
to exist, some laws regulating it are, of necessity, self-protective,
and must be coercive. Even in Illinois, it is enacted that a black man
shall not be a witness against a white man. But if the slaves could
swear in court, every one sees that the whites must be at the mercy of
their servants. The testimony of the honest among them is procured,
though indirectly, and it has weight with juries; but it is a wise
provision to exclude them as sworn witnesses. So of other things, which
theoretically are oppressive, but practically right; while many things
in the system which are rigorous are as little used as the equipments in
an arsenal in times of peace.

When you quote John Wesley's words and apply them to the South: "Slavery
is the sum of all villanies," you unconsciously utter a fearful slander.
Whatever may have been true of British slavery, in foreign plantations,
in Wesley's day, the good man never would utter such words about our
Southern people could he see