d of any Carolina Legislature to confiscate
this property, and pot it in the Treasury? We forbear to consider
any thing so full of injustice and wickedness. While we are
battling for our rights, liberties, and institutions, can we expect
the smiles and countenance of the Arbiter of all events, when we
make war on the impotent and unprotected, enslave them against all
justice, and rob them of the property acquired by their own honest
toil and industry, under your former protection and sense of
justice?'[E]

This slight exhibition in the Carolina Legislature presents an epitome
of the whole argument of cultivated brutality on the one hand, and of
humane sense and rationality on the other. What were the protection and
sense of justice here spoken of; and what the sequences flowing from
such protection and justice? The whole question is answered in three
words: Improvement, following encouragement. What was the 'robbery'
proposed by the bill, other than the concomitants of slavery, that have
robbed the colored man from generation to generation, not only of his
toil, but of every practical motive TO BE A MAN? It would be needless,
however, to discuss the question of the colored man's capacity to
improve, were it not for considerations that now make it necessary,
under national calamity, to take it into truthful account. The white
man's cultivation of barbarity under the teachings of slaveholders has
hitherto proved an overmatch for the colored man's claims in the
abstract. Things and conditions are now changed. The slaveholders'
rebellion has softened the obduracy of manufactured prejudice, and
necessity has become allied with humanity. Tho pro-slavery spirit in
politics is now discovered to be little short of a demon--a snake's egg
that hatches treason. The American mind is nearly forced to the
conclusion, that as long as colored women are compelled to breed slaves,
their white mistresses will continue to breed rebels. Slavery, of
course, must yield to the necessity of national security. A remnant may
exist for a while, and linger through modifications of a broken and
hopeless pro-slavery prestige, the duration depending entirely upon the
disposition of slaveholders to become subordinated to law. Perpetuation,
however, has become a word that has no meaning in connection with the
duration of slavery. The word in that sense has become obsolete; and
what shall become of the colored man,