self and one's countrymen from tyranny, is an act of the sublimest heroism.
I hear Europeans exalted, as the martyrs of public liberty, the saviours of
their country, and the deliverers of mankind--I see other memories honoured
with statues, and their names immortalized in poetry--and yet when a
generous negro is animated by the same passion which ennobled them,--when
he feels the wrongs of his countrymen as deeply, and attempts to avenge
them as boldly--I see him treated by those same Europeans as the most
execrable of mankind, and led out, amidst curses and insults to undergo a
painful, gradual and ignominious death: And thus the same Briton, who
applauds his own ancestors for attempting to throw off the easy yoke,
imposed on them by the Romans, punishes us, as detested parricides, for
seeking to get free from the cruelest of all tyrannies, and yielding to the
irresistible eloquence of an African Galgacus or Boadicea.

Are then the reason and morality, for which Europeans so highly value
themselves, of a nature so variable and fluctuating, as to change with the
complexion of those, to whom they are applied?--Do rights of nature cease
to be such, when a negro is to enjoy them?--Or does patriotism in the heart
of an African, rankle into treason?

A Free Negro
--_American Museum_, V, 77 et seq., 1789.



REMARKABLE SPEECH OF ADAHOONZOU, KING OF DAHOMEY, AN INTERIOR NATION OF
AFRICA, ON HEARING WHAT WAS PASSING IN ENGLAND RESPECTING THE SLAVE TRADE


I admire the reasoning of the white men; but with all their sense, it does