In those days our Declaration of Independence was held
sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the
bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered at
and construed and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could rise
from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of
earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him, ambition
follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day fast joining the
cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person,
and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have
closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were,
bolted in with a lock of hundred keys, which can never be unlocked
without the concurrence of every key--the keys in the hands of a hundred
different men, and they scattered to hundred different and distant
places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions
of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his
escape more complete than it is.
It is grossly incorrect to say or assume that the public estimate of the
negro is more favorable now than it was at the origin of the government.
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