Power divorced from right is devilish; power without the check of responsibility is tyrannical; and I need not go back to the authority of Plato, when I assert that the most complete injustice is that erected into the form of law. But all these things concur in Slavery. It is, then, on the testimony of slave-masters, solemnly, legislatively, judicially attested in the very law itself, that I now arraign this institution as an outrage upon man and his Creator. And herein is the necessity of the Antislavery Enterprise. A wrong so transcendent, so loathsome, so direful, must be encountered, wherever it can be reached; and the battle must be continued without truce or compromise, until the field is entirely won. Freedom and Slavery can hold no divided empire; nor can there be any true repose, until Freedom is everywhere established.
To the necessity of the Antislavery Enterprise there are two, and only two, main objections,—one founded on the alleged distinction of race, and the other on the alleged sanction of Christianity. All other objections are of inferior character, or are directed logically at its practicability. Of these two main objections let me briefly speak.
1. I begin with the alleged distinction of race. This objection assumes two different forms,—one founded on a prophetic malediction in the Old Testament, and the other on professed observations of recent science. Its importance is apparent in the obvious fact, that, unless such distinction be clearly and unmistakably established, every argument by which our own freedom is vindicated, every applause awarded to the successful rebellion of our fathers, every indignant word ever hurled against the enslavement of white fellow-citizens by Algerine corsairs, must plead trumpet-tongued against the deep damnation of Slavery, black as well as white.
It is said that Africans are the posterity of Ham, son of Noah, through Canaan cursed by Noah, to be the servant of his brethren, and that this malediction has fallen upon all his descendants, including the unhappy Africans,—who are accordingly devoted by God, through unending generations, to unending bondage. Such is the favorite argument at the South, and more than once directly addressed to myself. Here, for instance, is a passage from a letter recently received. “You need not persist,” says the writer, “in confounding Japheth’s children with Ham’s, and making both races one, and arguing on their rights as those of man broadly.” And I have been seriously assured, that, until this objection is answered, it will be vain to press my views upon Congress or the country. Listen now to the texts of the Old Testament which are so strangely employed.
“And he [Noah] said, Cursed be Canaan: a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant.”[6]
That is all; and I need only read these words in order to expose the whole—transpicuous humbug. I am tempted to add, that, to justify this objection, it is necessary to maintain at least five different propositions, as essential links in the chain of the African slave: first, that by this malediction Canaan himself was actually changed into a chattel,—whereas he is simply made the servant of his brethren; secondly, that not merely Canaan, but all his posterity, to the remotest generation, was so changed,—whereas the language has no such extent; thirdly, that the African actually belongs to the posterity of Canaan,—an ethnographical assumption absurdly difficult to establish; fourthly, that each descendant of Shem and Japheth has a right to hold an African fellow-man as chattel,—a proposition which finds no semblance of support; and, fifthly, that every slave-master is truly descended from Shem or Japheth,—a pedigree which no anxiety or assurance can prove. This plain analysis, which may fitly excite a smile, shows the fivefold absurdity of an attempt to found this revolting wrong on any
“successive title, long and dark,
Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah’s ark.”[7]