Thus, in order to fasten your manacles upon the slave, you fasten other manacles upon his soul.

The ancients maintained Slavery by chains and death: you maintain it by that infinite despotism and monopoly through which human nature itself is degraded.

The painful injustice of this pretension is lost in its meanness.

It is robbery and petty larceny under garb of law.

And even the meanness is lost in the absurdity of its associate pretension, that the African, thus despoiled of all earnings, is saved from poverty, and that for his own good he must work for his master, and not for himself.

Alas, by such fallacy is a whole race pauperized!

Take away these elements, sometimes called “abuses,” and Slavery will cease to exist; for it is these very “abuses” which constitute Slavery.

Take away any one of them, and the abolition of Slavery begins.

In our Law of Slavery what is there to revere? what is there at which the soul does not rise in abhorrence?

But this fivefold combination becomes yet more hateful when its single motive is considered; and here Slavery paints itself finally.

His generous soul glowed with indignation at the thought of man, supremest creature of earth, and first of God’s works, despoiled of manhood and changed to a thing.

How grandly he insists that nobody can consent to be a slave, or can be born a slave!

But what is wrong when done to one man cannot be right when done to many.

If it is wrong thus to degrade a single soul, if it is wrong thus to degrade you, Mr.

President, it cannot be right to degrade a whole race.

And yet this is denied by the barbarous logic of Slavery, which, taking advantage of its own wrong, claims immunity because its usurpation has assumed a front of audacity that cannot be safely attacked.

Unhappily, there is Barbarism elsewhere in the world; but American Slavery, as defined by existing law, stands forth as the greatest organized Barbarism on which the sun now looks.

Such is the plain juridical origin of the American slave code, now vaunted as a badge of Civilization.

But all law, whatever its juridical origin, whether Christian or Mohammedan, Roman or African, may be traced to other and ampler influences in Nature, sometimes of Right and sometimes of Wrong.

Surely the law which stamped the slave-trade as piracy punishable with death had a different inspiration from that other law which secured immunity for the slave-trade throughout an immense territory, and invested its supporters with…

As there is a nobler law above, so there is a meaner law below, and each is felt in human affairs.

Here I might stop, without proceeding in the argument; for on the letter of the law alone must Slavery be condemned.

Where there are slaves, whose office is work, it is held disreputable for a white man to soil his skin or harden his hands with honest toil.

The Slave-Master says, “No! this is true of the slave, of the black man, but not of the white man: he shall not eat his bread in the sweat of his face.” Thus is the brand of degradation stamped upon that daily toil which contributes so…

Let us at all hazards prevent the extension of Slavery and the increase of the Slave Power.