om the affliction of a broken heart, he exclaims, "Manly
spirit bids us to renounce forever these unfeeling brethren." But _no_,
this can not be done, and in the next breath he says, "we must endeavor
to forget our former love for them;" and then comes the wail of anguish
in the loss of his native country, "We might have been a great and a
free people together, but a communication of grandeur and of freedom it
seems is below their dignity. Be it so." He now bends beneath the hand
of fate and cries out, "I acquiesce in our eternal separation," but
persist in denouncing it. This is the very picture of Mr. Paine's own
heart. It is a pitch of enthusiasm and anguish which Mr. Jefferson had
neither circumstance in his life nor capacity in his soul to work
himself up to. It is neither art nor contrivance, it is the recorded
beating of his own heart, the sequel to his previous life.

Take again the passage on human slavery. "He has waged cruel war against
human nature itself." It is well known that Mr. Paine, before he wrote
Common Sense, attracted the eyes of the world to him by denouncing human
slavery in the most impassioned eloquence. This piece he termed "Serious
Thoughts," etc. Herein he hopes when the Declaration is made that "our
first gratitude to the Almighty may be shown by an act of Continental
legislation, which shall put a stop to the importation of negroes,
soften the hard fate of those already here, and in time procure their
freedom." And he says, long afterward, to the French inhabitants of
Louisiana who wished the power to import and enslave Africans, "Dare you
put up a petition to Heaven for such a power without fearing to be
struck from the earth by its justice?" But the person who wrote the
passage on slavery in the original draft of the Declaration could never
have kept a slave in bondage, if any thing can be gathered from the
nobility, the manliness, the justice, and the philanthropy of its
spirit. But Jefferson, while he has left on record his opposition _in
words_ to slavery, has left also on record his acts to contradict both
them and the Declaration. I here draw the veil over Jefferson as a
slaveholder.

While Mr. Jefferson was far above the average mind, yet from his mental
make-up, either in his head, heart, character, or capacity, he could not
be the author of the Declaration of Independence. Neither in the
circumstances of his previous life nor personal history, neither in the
heart nor the head,