penury, and instigated by the memory of their wrongs to the commission of
crime--shew us, I say (and the demonstration, if it be possible, cannot be
difficult) that a greater proportion of these, than of white men have
fallen under the animadversions of justice, and have been sacrificed to
your laws. Though avarice may slander and insult our misery, and though
poets heighten the horror of their fables, by representing us as monsters
of vice--the fact is, that, if treated like other men, and admitted to a
participation of their rights, we should differ from them in nothing,
perhaps, but in our possessing stronger passions, nicer sensibility, and
more enthusiastic virtue.

Before so harsh a decision was pronounced upon our nature, we might have
expected--if sad experience had not taught us, to expect nothing but
injustice from our adversaries--that some pains would have been taken,
to ascertain, what our nature is; and that we should have been considered,
as we are found in our native woods, and not as we now are--altered and
perverted by an inhuman political institution. But, instead of this, we
are examined, not by philosophers, but by interested traders: not as
nature formed us, but as man has depraved us--and from such an inquiry,
prosecuted under such circumstances, the perverseness of our dispositions
is said to be established. Cruel that you are! you make us slaves; you
implant in our minds all the vices, which are in some degree, inseparable
from that condition; and you then impiously impute to nature, and to God,
the origin of those vices, to which you alone have given birth; and punish
in us the crimes, of which you are yourselves the authors.

The condition of the slave is in nothing more deplorable, than in its being
so unfavorable to the practice of every virtue. The surest foundation of
virtue is love of our fellow creatures; and that affection takes its birth,
in the social relations of men to one another. But to a slave these are