With the inauguration of republican government in America the angel of
freedom and the demon of slavery wrestled for the mastery. Tallyrand has
beautifully and forcibly said: "The Lily and Thistle may grow together
in harmonious proximity, but liberty and slavery delight in the
separation." The pronounced policy of the best minds at the adoption of
the Federal Constitution was to repress it as an institution inhuman in
its character and fraught with mischief. Foretelling with accuracy of
divine inspiration, Jefferson "trembled for his country" when he
remembered that God was just and that "His justice would not sleep
forever." Patrick Henry said "that a serious view of this subject gives
a gloomy prospect to future times." So Mason and other patriots wrote
and felt, fully impressed that the high, solid ground of right and
justice had been left for the bogs and mire of expediency.

They died, leaving this heritage growing stronger and bolder in its
assumption of power and permeating every artery of society. The cotton
gin was invented and the demand for cotton vaulted into the van of the
commerce of the country. Men, lured by the gains of slavery and
corrupted by its contact, sought by infamous reasoning and vicious
legislation to avert the criticism of men and the judgment of God. In
the words of our immortal Douglass, "To bolster up and make tolerable
what was intolerable; to make human what was inhuman; to make divine
what was infernal." To make this giant wrong acceptable to the moral
sense it was averred and enacted that slavery was right; that God
himself had so predetermined in His wisdom; that the slave could be
branded and sold on the auction block; that the babe could be ruthlessly
taken from its mother and given away; that a family could be scattered
by sale, to meet no more; that to teach a slave to read was punishable
with death to the teacher. But why rehearse this dead past--this
terrible night of suffering and gloom? Why not let its remembrance be
effaced and forgotten in the glorious light of a happier day? I answer,
Why?

All measure of value, all estimates of greatness, of joy or sorrow, of
health or suffering, are relative; we judge by comparison, and if in
recalling these former depths we temper unreasonable criticism of waning
friendships, accelerate effort as we pass the mile-stones of
achievement, and stimulate appreciation of liberty in the younger
generation, the mention will not be fruitle