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wretched slaves, and force them on the West-India planters for whatever price they chose to give. The bondage of man to man has been a native production of some soils. The Occidental curse of slavery was not indigenous, but introduced first by cruelty from that very land which now chooses to forget its responsibility for the exotic it bore hither, and, with a horrid consistency to its early work, gives its sympathy still to slaveholding against liberty, in our struggle for life. Does it wish to have the serpent prevail, and the free manhood, that might threaten its own arbitrariness, poisoned and crushed? Has it a secret hope, that the bloody thorn, so deep in the side of this Republic, will not be plucked out, but torment us to our grave? Would it see us laid out in our shroud? Opposition in such a quarter shows us at least the dreadful strength of the evil with which we are summoned, in a death-hug, to close.

Quietly and justly of this matter may I speak, and will you hear? Human slavery is not the fault alone or peculiarly of this age or country, of the self-willed South or the compromising North. It is the sin of civilization. From Egypt and Greece, Judæa and Rome, to America, it has stretched. The Old World has been full of it. England and France have had their hands deep in it, and cannot lift their fingers into the light of history without showing ruddy stains, which all the waters of the sea cannot wash off. Russia Russia grap

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ples with it now through her immense domain. What

is the nature of the sin? as things, using them as never do this are clean. all of us, even those most loud for liberty and justice, quite clean of it ourselves? Alas! how we respect the persons of men more than their personality, the outward appearance and advantage beyond the soul, wealth rather than worth! Are we aware that this, too, is the sin of slavery? This sin comes to a head in that part of these United States where men, women, and children-little children blameless as those you bear and nurse-are bought and sold, and bred for the buyer and seller; the most holy bonds of relationship broken; so that, as a surgeon from this church in North Carolina lately told me, in his observation, chastity seemed hardly to exist or be known as a virtue toward or among the colored folk; - husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, in ties like your own, —O sacred name of humanity! - parted as so many lots of merchandise, advertised in the newspapers as goods, put up at auction like wares in your commission-stores, sent south in gangs or coffles like so much avoirdupois load in a freight-car, and forced asunder at the owner's death for the necessary legal division of property, - a circumstance, the unavoidableness of which, a noble Virginian woman, who had emancipated her slaves, assured me, sufficed in her mind to condemn the

It is treating our fellow-men our tools. Only they who Are we, brethren and sisters,

whole system; and worse, if worse can be, men delivering over to the barterer, for a consideration, what is part of their own flesh and blood. More than the bleak climate, more than the strange heretic, more than the savage with his glittering tomahawk, did the germination of a system, involving all these things, menace the governmental fabric which the Pilgrims proposed; and it is on the claim imperiously made for its unlimited territorial extension and perpetuation, contrary alike to the heart of our fathers and the scheme of the framers of our Constitution, that the present conflict is waged.

Other accounts, I know, are given of the origin of the strife. One man says it was provoked, not by slavery or any of its pretensions, but purely by antislavery fanaticism; a second says that he can count on his fingers the names of the politicians whose ambition brought it on; and a third, that it arose with the formation of a sectional party at the North. Mr. Calhoun anticipated it with any disturbance of the exact equipoise of Slavery and Freedom, singular things as they are to weigh so nicely together. Many have fondly hoped, that, though vital opposites, these two could lie coiled up closely in one constitution for all time, and not fall out. Desperate efforts, terrible sacrifices, have been made to reconcile them; nor will I brand the patience and labor expended to keep them from deadly grip as all so much iniquity and folly,

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although finally proving so utterly vain. Heaven did
not mean that they should be so united, and for ever
agree. Heaven ordained their mutual claims to be
resolved here, front to front. Does antislavery vex
could not help existing

you? It was born of slavery;
more than any other effect, offspring of a parent,
oxygen of the air, or conscience of man. Explain as
we will the symptoms or proximate cause of our
trouble, it is no accident, but written in the book
above, with a pen furnished to the divine hand by the
institution itself, aiming at unbounded predominance,
before the holding of the Charleston Convention or
firing of the Sumter gun. Why that outbreak? The
hour had come! The impossibility of postponing the
issue which should govern, Slavery or Freedom-
opened this war; and, maintained for Freedom, God's
war and man's war it is, to prevent the laying of
Slavery for the corner-stone it is affirmed to be, but
rotten timber it is, in the edifice of good government.
To settle this question of foundations, - on the long,
indecisive duel of argument, has followed the shock
of arms.

"Now's the day, and now's the hour:

See the front of battle lower!"

The abolition of the slavery which is its cause is not its object, but will be its effect; else we have no sufficient recompense for its pangs. Its direct object is the existence and authority of the nation, whose hour

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has verily come. For that, we have accepted the ordeal by battle to which we were forced. "It is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not," said Caiaphas the highpriest concerning Jesus. He spake not of himself, but prophesied," or spake from God, the evangelist adds. Is it not better that a hundred thousand men should die than that this nation should perish? My friends, I am not fond of blood! Word has repeatedly come to me, that I should not speak as I do on this subject if I had sons; but God, who enables me to speak as I think, forgive me, if the having sons would rob me of my sincerity! Has the gift of sons, or their expiring on the field, hindered some of you from speech as strong, and testimony, before and since their departure, more convincing, than I have ever used? Nay, some of your sons, who have so breathed their last on earth, have I not loved as my own? Are you bereaved of them? I am bereft; we are all bereft. What pillars, had their lives been spared, they would have been of this church! But this church, so domestic, this quiet family of ours, always shrinking from public notice, in the hand of providence, as they are torn away, is held up before the community, bleeding at every pore. Yet, if this nation shall be preserved in part by our contribution, liberty and union won and made perfect, neither you nor I, nor yet the church, will lament our offering, but feel with thanksgiving, that, precious as

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