Upon my return to prison I found that Aunt Susie’s troubles had been heard of there. The little boy and girl played close by the fence during two days, and then we lost them. They were gone to spend the rest of their lives in chains and slavery, unless the Almighty arm breaks every bond of every oppressor!
I am aware that those who would excuse the slave system, often attempt to give conclusive weight to their arguments by asserting that our forefathers were slaveholders. Let me give some facts to the contrary.
One day, the wife of Samuel Adams returning home from a visit, informed her husband that a dear friend had made her a present of a female slave.
“My dear,” replied Mr. Adams, “she may come; but not as a slave, for a slave cannot live in my house. If she comes, she must be free.”
She came, and took up her free abode with the family of this great champion of American liberty, and there she continued free until her death.
General Kosciusko, by his will, placed in the hands of Mr. Jefferson a sum exceeding twenty thousand dollars, to be laid out in the purchase of young female slaves, who were to be both educated and emancipated. The laws of Virginia prevented the will of Kosciusko from being carried into effect—1820.
A tyrant power had captured nine hundred and twenty Sardinian slaves, of whom General William Eaton thus makes mention:
“Many have died of grief, and others linger out a life less tolerable than death. Alas! remorse seizes my whole soul when I reflect that this is indeed but a copy of the very barbarity which my eyes have seen in my own native country.”
“Dissipation, as well as power,” wrote the immortal John Randolph, “hardens the heart; but avarice deadens it to every feeling but the thirst for riches. Avarice alone could have produced the slave trade. Avarice alone can, as it does, drive the infernal traffic, and the wretched victims, like so many post-horses, are whipped to death in a small coach. Ambition has its incentives in the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war; but where are the trophies of avarice? The handcuffs, the manacles, and the blood-stained cowhide!”