HUMAN EQUALITY.
But the question of emancipation is started and agitated on the ground of human equality. It is the supposed equality of the African with the white race, that is the pretext for emancipation, and the foundation of the assumed right and expediency of emancipation. It has been supposed by some, that the enunciation of human equality in the American Declaration of Independence was intended for all the races of men in the world. Such a supposition is totally unfounded, and unwarrantable in the very nature of things. In the first place, it is not true; and in the next place, the writer of that Declaration meant no such thing, for he held slaves, and knew their inferiority. What a monstrous act of hypocrisy and folly it would have been in the author of that instrument, and his cotemporaries, to declare that all men are created free when they knew millions are born slaves, or when they knew no equality existed, even of right, between the barbarian and the man whose sense of justice and perception of right secured to him the approbation of Heaven and his own conscience, by a recognition of and obedience to the laws of morality, and conformity to the just rules of civilization. They wrote that Declaration for white men,—meaning white men,—because it did not and could not apply to the barbarous and savage nations. They saw the world in chains, and knew the bondage of mankind to be the result of their violation of moral right, and their incapacity for self-government. They estimated rightly when they announced freedom to the white race in these colonies; for, up to this time, the fact of self-government by our people has verified their prophetic annunciation; but the sages who founded this Republic, excluded, by legislation, the African and the Indian from this boon of freedom, and they and their descendants have held the African in the condition of servitude.