inform your countrymen, why customs are made, and will be made, as long as
black men continue to possess their country; the few that can be spared
from this necessary celebration, we sell to the white men; and happy, no
doubt, are such, when they find themselves on the Grigwhee, to be disposed
of to the Europeans. "We shall still drink water," say they to themselves;
"white men will not kill us; and we may even avoid punishment, by serving
our new masters with fidelity."

--_The New York Weekly Magazine_, II, 430, 1792.



FOOTNOTES:


[1] "Othello," the author of these two essays, was identified as a Negro
by Abbé Gregoire in his "De la litterature des Nègres."

[2] The writer refers here to the Convention of 1787 which framed the
Constitution of the United States.

[3] Here the writer has in mind the organization of the English Society
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the support given the cause by
Wilberforce, Pitt, Fox and Burke in England and by Brissot, Clavière and
Montmorin in France.

[4] Rhode Island had failed to ratify the Constitution of the United
States.

[5] During the first forty years of the republic there was much talk about