aganizing of
their serfs than the original paganism that these had brought from
Africa. There was no legal artifice conceivable which was not resorted
to, to blindfold their souls from the light of letters; and the church,
in not a few cases, was the prime offender.[1]

Then the legislatures of the several states enacted laws and Statutes,
closing the pages of every book printed to the eyes of Negroes; barring
the doors of every school-room against them! And this was the
systematized method of the intellect of the South, to stamp out the
brains of the Negro!

It was done, too, with the knowledge that the Negro had brain power.
There was _then_, no denial that the Negro had intellect. That denial
was an after thought. Besides, legislatures never pass laws forbidding
the education of pigs, dogs, and horses. They pass such laws against the
intellect of _men_.

However, there was then, at the very beginning of the slave trade,
everywhere, in Europe, the glintings forth of talent in great Negro
geniuses,--in Spain, and Portugal, in France and Holland and England;[2]
and Phillis Wheatley and Banneker and Chavis and Peters, were in
evidence on American soil.

It is manifest, therefore, that the objective point in all this
legislation was INTELLECT,--the intellect of the Negro! It was an effort
to becloud and stamp out the intellect of the Negro!

The _first_ phase of this attitude reached over from about 1700 to
1820:--and as the result, almost Egyptian darkness fell upon the mind of
the race, throughout the whole land.

Following came a more infamous policy. It was the denial of
intellectuality in the Negro; the assertion that he was not a human
being, that he did not belong to the human race. This covered the period
from 1820 to 1835, when Gliddon and Nott and others, published their
so-called physiological work, to prove that the Negro was of a different
species from the white man.

A distinguished illustration of this ignoble sentiment can be given. In
the year 1833 or 4 the speaker was an errand boy in the Anti-slavery
office in New York City.

On a certain occasion he heard a conversation between the Secretary and
two eminent lawyers from Boston,--Samuel E. Sewell and David Lee Child.
They had been to Washington on some legal business. While at the Capitol
they happened to dine in the company of the great John C. Calhoun, then
senator from South Carolina. It was a period of great ferment upon the
question of S