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But to show that this "bearing witness against the heinous crime of man-stealing" was in reality something of a joke, let us read the following:

"The practice of selling the natives of North America into foreign bondage, continued for nearly two centuries; and even the sternest morality pronounced the sentence of slavery and exile on the captives whom the field of battle spared. The excellent Winthrop enumerates Indians among his behests. The articles of the early New England confederacy class persons among the spoils of war. A scanty remnant of the Pequod tribe in Connecticut, the captives treacherously made by Waldron in New Hampshire, the harmless fragments of the tribe of Annawan, the orphan offspring of King Philip himself, were all doomed to the same hard destiny of perpetual bondage. The clans of Virginia and Carolina, for more than a hundred years, were hardly safe against the kidnappers. The universal public mind was long and deeply vitiated."

But how does it happen that while the clans of Virginia and Carolina were comparatively safe against the kidnappers-these "profligate and luxurious populations" as they are uniformly termed by these apologetic scriveners-that the saints of the northern plantations of Sam had been recognizing Indian, as well as Negro slavery for nearly two centuries? It is time this question were looked into, and in our next we shall endeavor, as the impartial legendary of Sam, to ascertain if the "mild and saintly Winthrop," as he is elsewhere named, was the only one of the "elect" who even enumerated Indians among his bequests.

CHAPTER IX.

Slavery White, Black, Red and Yellow-Impudence of the clamor about Slavery, raised by those with whom it originated-Slavery old as time→→→ Historical, of the different forms of Slavery.

WE promised to take up the subject of slavery, white, black, red and yellow, in our last chapter of these antiquities of Sam-we accordingly invoke these "white spirits and black, blue spirits and gray," and here they are upon the block in form. "What! what! what!" as George III used

to say.

at

Well, Sam, who is much the most powerful despot of the two, and a very long way from being "a royal idiot that, says that this whole subject of Slavery is a mere mess of twattle; that those sleek-haired, round-headed would-besons of his, who are making such a fuss about it, are but sniveling cubs at the best-and that he does not intend they shall continue to worry his curly-haired children of the South about this slavery business, without his understanding why.

He exclaims with a far-reverberating jeer-Whoo-oop! fiddle-faddle, what are you making all this wide-mouthed hullabaloo about, you noisy boobies?

You are the very scamps who commenced the slave trade, and who are first responsible for all its villainies-are you not? You have trafficked in black flesh, in yellow flesh, in red flesh, and worst of all, in white flesh-your own flesh. and blood!

You put up a "poor mouth" about slavery, whining saintly-like, about the rights of man! You, who have been from the beginning the most ruthless, the most unscrupulous traffickers in "God's image," the least magnanimous, the most mercenary, the most savage of all kidnappers,—you,

who could write an apologetic letter to the chiefs of Congo, for stealing their people, to curse a New World with the damning incubus of slavery, and then send a man-thief in a slave-ship to be the translator of your pious and penitent epistle!

You impudent fellows, you deserve to be spanked all round! and, if I, Sam, should chance to bring down my heavy hand upon you, you will be resolved into cherry-bums (cherubims) that is, you shall have nothing left to sit down upon, henceforth and forever!

Sam thrusts the keen blade of wit into the bladder of slavery, when he says in the spirit of learned intelligence: Slavery and the slave-trade are older than the records of human society; they are found to have existed wherever the savage hunter began to assume the habits of pastoral or agricultural life, and, with the exception of Australasia, they have extended to every portion of the globe; they pervaded every portion and every nation of civilized antiquity. The earliest glimpses of Egyptian history exhibit pictures of bondage; the oldest monuments of human labor on the Egyptian soil are evidently the results of slave labor. The founder of the Jewish nation was a slaveholder and a purchaser of slaves. Every patriarch was lord in his own household.

The Hebrews, when they burst the bands of their thraldom, carried with them beyond the desert, the institution of slavery. The light that broke from Sinai scattered the corrupting illusions of polytheism; but slavery planted itself even in the promised land, on the banks of Siloa, near the oracles of God. The Hebrew father might doom his daughter to bondage; the wife and children, and posterity of the emancipated slave remained the property of the master and his heirs; and if a slave, though mortally wounded by his master, did but languish of his wounds for a day, the owner escaped with impunity, for the slave was his master's money. It is even probable that, at a later period, a man's family might be sold for the payment of debts.

The countries that bordered on Palestine were familiar with domestic servitude; and, like Babylon, Tyre also, the oldest and most famous commercial city of Phenicia, was a

market "for the persons of men." The Scythians of the desert had already established slavery throughout the plains and forests of the unknown north.

Old as are the traditions of Greece, the existence of slavery is older. The wrath of Achilles grew out of a quarrel for a slave; the Grecian dames had crowds of servile attendants; the heroes before Troy made excursions into the neighboring villages and towns to enslave the inhabitants. Greek pirates, roving like the Corsairs of Barbary, in quest of men, laid the foundation of Greek commerce; each commercial town was a slave-mart, and every cottage near the sea-side was in danger from the kidnapper. Greeks enslaved each other. The language of Homer was the mother-tongue of the Helots; the Grecian city that made war on its neighbor city exulted in its capture as a source of profit; the hero of Macedon sold men of his own kindred and language into hopeless slavery. The idea of universal free labor had not been generated. Aristotle had written that all mankind are brothers; yet the thought of equal enfranchisement never presented itself to his sagacious understanding. In every Grecian Republic slavery was an indispensable element.

Though slavery may have been an indispensable element in every republic of Greece, Sam does not consider it indispensable that it should lard the machinery of every repubÎic which constitutes a portion of his confederacy.

After his primitive settlements at Providence and Boston had made their fortunes out of the original importations, it seemed to be most respectable that they should retire from the slave-trade-ignore it-and, hugging their dollars, turn about and denounce the South, who has been their chief purchasers, and who alone could make it pay.

This was very nice, indeed, and so particularly conscientious, when we remember that the maritime adventurers of those days, joining the principles of bigots with the bold designs of pirates and heroes, esteemed the wealth of the countries which they might discover, as their rightful plunder, and the inhabitants, if Christians, as their subjects; if

For the collocation of the above facts, the author is indebted to the historian, Bancroft.

infidels, as their slaves. Even Indians of Hispaniola were imported into Spain. Cargoes of the natives of the North were early and repeatedly kidnapped.

The coasts of America, like the coasts of Africa, were visited by ships in search of laborers, and there was hardly a convenient harbor on the whole Atlantic frontier of the United States, which was not entered by slavers. The native Indians themselves, were ever ready to resist the treacherous merchants; the freemen of the wilderness, unlike the Africans, among whom slavery had existed from immemorial time, would never abet the foreign merchant, or become his factors in the nefarious traffic. Fraud and force remained, therefore, the means by which, near Newfoundland or Florida, on the shores of the Atlantic, or among the Indians of the Mississippi valley, Cortereal and Vasquez de Ayllon, Porcallo and Soto, with private adventurers, whose names and whose crimes may be left unrecorded, transported the natives of North America into slavery in Europe and the Spanish West Indies.

The glory of Columbus himself, did not escape the stain; enslaving five hundred native Americans, he sent them to Spain, that they might be publicly sold at Seville.*

It seems that to Sir John Hawkins, a precursory peer of that distinguished lady-philanthropist, the Countess of Sutherland, belongs "the odious distinction of having first interested England in the slave-trade." Pious Old England, who is now so horrified by the enormities of the traffic, did also, it seems, her chivalric devoir in planting the curse upon a New World.

What wonder that she should be so dramatically and disinterestedly moved now, about exorcising the curse which she has entailed upon the juvenile Sam, along with that of annihilation upon the Hindoos, opium upon the Chinese, imposts upon Australia, cockneyism upon Canada, and friendship upon France, not to speak of the taxation, and so forth, of '76?

But just hear what this godly Old England did, and you will find that the puritanical children of Sam have been the fit collaborateurs of that most reverend and holy dame, who

"Bancroft, page 159, Vol. 1.

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