The Destiny of the Races of This Continent : An Address Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 26th of January, 1859 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Destiny of the Races of This Continent: An Address Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, Massachusetts, on the 26th of January, 1859

The present epoch is a new starting point in our Government. The impulse given by the movers of the Revolution has come to a pause, and all seems tending to receive a new direction. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, were the rights which it was the design of those who framed our. Institutions gradually to establish for all the races of our continent. T hose great men knew that the current of public senti ment flowed with full volume in that channel which their toil and their patriotism had worked out, not only for the freedom of those whose cour age had conquered. It, but for those even beyond the ocean who sympa thized with the effort. But their first thought was for the races at home. Emancipation of the African slaves, that had been thrust upon our shores by the cupidity of our British oppressors and their minions here, was Speedily accomplished throughout the northern part of the Confed eracy, under the impulse which first prompted our fathers to assert their own freedom. Abolition of the slave trade, with a view to the same result ultimately in all the States, was the unanimous act of the nation; and before this was done, to preclude an inducement'for its continuance, the ordinance of 1787, excluding Slavery from all its Territories, was voted by the Confederation, before the Constitution existed to add its sanction. That other inferior race among us, the Indian, was recog nised as having rights which the white man was bound to respect; that personal liberty, of which their kindred tribes of the south had been deprived by the Spaniards; was recognised as a birthright, in which they were to be protected, as well as that quasi-ownership in the lands. They occupied, of which they could not be divested without a compen sation deemed by themselves an equivalent. The whole s00pe of the. Policy of the young Republic then embraced that grand leading idea on Which our Declaration of Independence based our individual liberties, that all men are born equal in respect to that humanity which author izes them to claim justice at the hands of every superior power, as the preservative of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was inherent in their nature. The Constitution, it is true, permitted that portion of the African race which had been brought under our system of colonial bondage to be retained as persons held to service but in this very phrase it rejected the adoption of the law creating Slavery, and only recognised existing circumstances growing out of the tyranny it had overthrown, that persons were held to service whose obliga tions it could not dissolve. So far from recognising the rightfulness of Slavery, the Opprobrium of the term was rejected to exclude the infer ence of its adoption as a national institution, and a clause was inserted authorizing Congress to pass that act abolishing the slave trade and likening the seizure of a man, to bring him to the level of a brute anal appropriate his labor, to that of stripping him of his goods at sea and throwing him to the sharks. The crime was stigmatized as piracy. No; slave in Africa, or in any other part of the world, can lawfully be, made a slave in America. This proves that neither the great charter of our Independence nor that of our Union ever contemplated Slavery as a national institution, or even one to be long perpetuated as local, to make slaves of the home-born race, when prohibited as to the foreign-born.

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