271

BONDAGE AND FREEDOM

267

For the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro
race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping,
using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges,
building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold;
that, while we arc reading, writing, and cyphering, acting as clerks, merchants. and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets,
authors, editors, orators. and teachers; that, while we are engaged in all
manner of enterprises common to other men--digging gold in California,
capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hill-side,
living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands,
wives, and children, and, above all, confessing and worshiping the christian 's God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the
grave--we are called upon to prove that we are men!

Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? that he is the
rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue
the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans ? Is it to be
settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great
difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard
to be understood? How should I look to-day in the presence of Americans,
dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right
to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively?To do so, would be to make myself ridiculous. and to offer an insult
to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven
that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

What! am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of
their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow-men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with
the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them
at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their
flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must
I argue that a system, thus marked with blood and stained with pollution, is
wrong! No; I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength
than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to he argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that
God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is
blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who
can reason on such a proposition! They that can, may; I cannot. The time for
such argument is past.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.