“Gentlemen,” says the auctioneer, “we’ve got a specimen here that some of your Northern abolitionists would give any price for; but they shan’t have him!—no! we’ve looked out for that. The man that buys him must give bonds never to sell him to go North again!”
“Go it!” shout the crowd, “good!—good!—hurra!” “An impressive idea!” says a senator; “a noble maintaining of principle!” and the man is bid off, and the hammer falls with a last crash on his hearth, and hopes, and manhood, and he lies a bleeding wreck on the altar of Liberty!
Such was the altar in 1776;—such is the altar in 1850!
OUTLINE OF A MAN.
In some of those castle-building day-dreams, in which, like all youth of an imaginative turn, I was wont, in my early days, to indulge, a favorite image of my creation was an Africo-American for the time,—a colored man, who had known by experience the bitterness of slavery, and now by some process free, so endowed with natural powers, and a certain degree of attainments, all the more rare and effective for being acquired under great disadvantages,—as to be a sort of Moses to his oppressed and degraded tribe. He was to be gifted with a noble person, of course, and refinement of manners, and some elegance of thought and expression; by what unprecedented miracle such a paragon was to be graduated through the educational appliances of American slavery, imagination did not trouble herself to inquire. She was painting fancy-pieces, not portraits.
Having thus irresponsibly struck out upon the canvas her central figure, she would not be slow to complete the picture with many a rose-colored vision of brilliant successes and magic triumphs won by her hero, in his great enterprise of the redemption of his people. A burning sense of their wrongs fired his eloquence with an undying, passionate earnestness, and as he alternately reproached the injustice, and appealed to the generosity of his oppressors, all opposition gave way before him; the masses, as one man, demanded the emancipation of his long-degraded, deeply injured race; and millions of regenerated men rose up, upon their broken chains and called him blessed.
Years rolled away, and these poetic fancies faded “into the light of common day.” The cold, stern, pitiless reality remained. The dark incubus of slavery yet rested down upon more than three millions of the victims of democratic despotism. But the triumphant champion of the devoted race had melted away, with the morning mists of my boyish conjuring.