sensibility to physical pain. These sympathies in the bosoms of
the Southern people manifest, in many ways, their sense of the wrong of
slavery, and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the
negro. If they deny this, let me address them a few plain questions. In
1820 you (the South) joined the North, almost unanimously, in declaring
the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment of
death. Why did you do this? If you did not feel that it was wrong, why did
you join in providing that men should be hung for it? The practice was no
more than bringing wild negroes from Africa to such as would buy them.
But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses,
wild buffaloes, or wild bears.

Again, you have among you a sneaking individual of the class of native
tyrants known as the "slavedealer." He watches your necessities, and
crawls up to buy your slave, at a speculating price. If you cannot help
it, you sell to him; but if you can help it, you drive him from your door.
You despise him utterly. You do not recognize him as a friend, or even
as an honest man. Your children must not play with his; they may rollick
freely with the little negroes, but not with the slave-dealer's children.
If you are obliged to deal with him, you try to get through the job
without so much as touching him. It is common with you to join hands
with the men you meet, but with the slave-dealer you avoid the
ceremony--instinctively shrinking from the snaky contact. If he grows rich
and retires from business, you still remember him, and still keep up the
ban of non-intercourse upon him and his family. Now, why is this? You do
not so treat the man who deals in corn, cotton, or tobacco.

And yet again: There are in the United States and Territories, including
the District of Columbia, 433,643 free blacks. At five hundred dollars per
head they are worth over two hundred millions of dollars. How comes this
vast amount of property to be running about without owners? We do not see
free horses or free cattle running at large. How is this? All these free
blacks are the descendants of slaves, or have been slaves themselves; and
they would be slaves now but for something which has operated on their
white owners, inducing them at vast pecuniary sacrifice to liberate them.
What is that something? Is there any mistaking it? In all these cases it
is your sense of justice and human sympathy continually tellin