"So that, let me add," said I, "in opposing slavery, I am necessarily confined to the evils and abuses committed in the relationship of master. But, even in doing this, why should I be meddlesome? We have a most offensive air and manner in our behavior towards Southerners, in connection with their duties as masters. It is perfectly disgusting. I may oppose slavery, on the grounds of political economy or for national reasons. But if I mix up with it wrathful opposition to the sin, so called, or the unrighteousness of holding property in man, it has no countenance in the Bible. If I speak of it publicly, as a system fraught with evil, I must discriminate; or they whom I would influence, knowing that I am mistaken, will regard me as an infatuated enemy, who will effect more injury than I can repair. As to Mr. Jefferson's testimony, there are as good and conscientious men at the South in our day as Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Calhoun was as worthy a witness in all respects."
"Now tell us," said Mrs. North, "your sober convictions, apart from this Northern controversy, about that twenty-first chapter of Exodus, where God directs that slaves, in certain cases, shall be slaves forever; and, moreover, in certain cases, that slave husbands may have their wives and children withheld from them, and the husbands leave them forever. How do you reconcile this with the justice and goodness of God?"
I said to her, "To make the case fully appear, before we converse upon it, hear this passage, Leviticus XXV. 44-46:—'Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.' So, in the next verses, 'The children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession: And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever; but over your brethren, the children of Israel, ye shall not rule one over another with rigor.'
"Here, and in all the divine legislation on this subject, a distinction is made between Hebrews who became slaves, and slaves who were foreigners, or of foreign extraction, though resident in Israel. Slaves of Hebrew extraction might go free after six years, and upon the death of the owner; and in every jubilee year they must all return to freedom, and be free from every disability by reason of bondage, except where the ear was bored.
"Not so with the slaves of foreign extraction; nor even with the Hebrew whose ear was bored, provided his wife was given him in slavery, and he had elected to live with her rather than be free. Not even upon the death of the owner could such slaves be manumitted, as was the case ordinarily with regard to Hebrew slaves; but property in these Gentile slaves, and in Hebrew slaves reduced to the same condition, God ordained should be an 'inheritance,' passing down forever from father to child.
"No jubilee trumpet was to cheer their hearts. Think what the jubilee morning must have been to those slaves in hopeless bondage, if bondage were necessarily such as many fancy. Our abolitionists represent the bells and guns of our Fourth of July to be a hideous mockery in the ears of the slaves; and multitudes of our good people ludicrously fancy them as most miserable on that day, by the contrast of their enslaved condition with our boasted Independence. Let us borrow this fancy, and apply it to the Hebrew slave.
"The jubilee trumpets, and all the joyous scenes of the fiftieth year in Israel, caused multitudes of slaves in Israel, we will suppose, to reflect, This Jehovah, God of Israel, has doomed us to hopeless bondage. We are guilty of having been born so many degrees south or north, east or west, of these Hebrews. We, by God's providence, are Gentiles. Our chiefs sold us, and these Hebrews bought us. We were betrayed; we were driven out of our homes; unjust wars were made upon us, to make us captives, that we might be sold. And 'the Lord's people' bought us, by his special edict (Lev. xxv. 44). Our brother-servants, unfortunate Hebrews, get released in the jubilee year, except these poor creatures who were so unfortunate as to be married in slavery, and, not being willing to be divorced, had their ears fastened, with the ignominious 'awl,' to their master's door-post. God could have ordained that they, with their wives and children, and we, with ours, should have release in the fiftieth year. But, no! our bondage is forever, and so is theirs; and our children and their children are to be servants forever. But we hold it to be a self-evident truth that all men are born free and equal, and have an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Slavery is the sum of all villanies. Our master's will is our law; we are subject to his passions; we are chattels; we 'are his money.' This is the language of your God,—the God whom you worship; and not only so, but you circumcise us to worship Him!
"Some benevolent Levite, jealous for the character of his Maker, replies, 'But God did not institute slavery; He found it in existence, and he only legislates about it, and regulates it.'
"A thousand groans are the prelude to the withering answer which the slaves make to this apology for oppression.
"'He broke your bonds, it seems,' they cry, 'in Egypt, and in the Red Sea. Did He "find slavery" on the opposite shore of the Red Sea? Why did he not merely "legislate for it, and regulate it?" No, He enacted it. How dare you apologize for your God with such a miserable pretext? He made the ordinance separating a husband from wife and children, unless the husband would submit to the indignity of having his ear bored and to the doom of perpetual bondage, in case his wife was a Gentile. If he goes away, he must leave his wife and children. Great indulgence have you in multiplying wives; that is winked at "for the hardness of your hearts;" but the poor Hebrew must abandon his wife and family if he chooses freedom! They are his master's "property," "his money," and God gave the servant these children, knowing that they would be the "property" of another, and that he would have no unencumbered right to them; and down through all ages they and their descendants must be servants. And now you tell us, "God did not institute" this! He only "found it!" He "regulated it!" Come, blow up your trumpet, reverend Levite! Go, worship the God of whom you feel half ashamed. Do not ask us to worship and love a Being who is bound by the laws of fate so that he cannot do otherwise, if he would, than make one of us a slave forever, while the man who grinds with me at the same mill, goes with his wife and children, forever free!'"