ragon of perfection?"

"What made him?" said he.

"Yes," said I, "what made him the model Christian? You do not reply, and
I will tell you. SLAVERY MADE UNCLE TOM. Had it not been for slavery, he
would have been a savage in Africa, a brutish slave to his fetishes,
living in a jungle, perhaps; and had you stumbled upon him he would very
likely have roasted you and picked your bones. A system which makes
Uncle Toms out of African savages is not an unmixed evil."

"But," said he, "it makes Legrees also."

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said I, "it does not make Legrees. There are
as many Legrees at the North as at the South, especially if we include
all the very particular 'friends of the slave.' Legree would be Legree
in Wall Street, or Fifth Avenue; Uncle Tom would not be Uncle Tom in the
wilds of Africa."

"And so," said he, "it is right to fit out ships, burn villages in
Africa, steal the flying people, bestow them in slave-ships, and sell
them into hopeless bondage!"

"So you all love to reason," said I, "or seek to force that conclusion
upon us. No such thing. If God overrules the evil doings of men, this is
no reason for repeating the wrong. I am insisting that slavery as it
exists in the South has been a blessing to the African. This does not
warrant you in perpetrating outrages on those who are still in Africa.

"But the result has been, through the mercy of God as though we had
taken millions of degraded savages out of Africa, and had made them
contribute greatly to the industrial interests of mankind.

"We have raised them from heathenish ignorance and barbarism to the
condition of intelligent beings. Look at them in their churches and
Sabbath-schools. Slavery has done this. See the colored population of
Charleston, S.C., voluntarily contributing, as they do, on an average,
three dollars apiece, annually, for the propagation of the Gospel at
home and abroad. See the meeting-house of the African Church at
Richmond, Va., a place selected for public speakers from the North to
deliver their addresses in it to the citizens of Richmond, because it is
more commodious than any other public building in the city. Think of the
membership of slaves in Christian Churches; of the multitudes of them
who have died in the faith and hope of the Gospel. Slavery has done
this. The question is whether slavery has been, or is, such a curse, on
the whole, to the African race, that we must now set free the whole
colored population?