You have heard the question stated by the gentleman that who has preceded me and I will now advance a few argument or two in favor of the Negro

 

First I will notice the deprivation of personal Liberty and the crualties that follow. For Centuries the curse of slavery has hung like a gloomy pall over a large portion of the African continent. It is a common experience in native life for a band of slave hunters to suddenly descend upon a peaceful and unsuspecting village, fire the huts and crops, shoot and kill all who offer the slightest resistance / and carry off men women and children in chains to the sea cost slave markets where they are publicly sold.

 

Few of us realize that such incidents are of freequent occurance. Even now, in many parts of Central Africa, as a rule, these encounters generaly result in the sucess of the envaders who are better armed than their victims, and who have, as allies, native tribes whome they have trained to the blood thirsty trade of man hunting. Many travelers, including Livingston Stanly Speke and Grant have written heart-rending descriptions of this terrible trafic in humane flesh. Thousands are slain in defence of their humble homes. Thousands die on their long march to the slave markets, and hundreds of thousands perish in sudden agony or prolonged torture at the hands of heartless masters. I want to call your attention now Hon Judges, to the long march to the slave markets. All that are captured men women and children are hurried off to some slave market. Then commences for them a series of unspeakable miseries. The slaves are on foot. the men who appear the strongest and whose escape is to be feared have their hands and sometimes their feet tied in such a manner that moveing becomes a torture to them and on their necks are placed yokes which attach several of them togather. They march all day at night where they stop to rest a few handfulls of food is distributed among them. Next morning they must start again. But after the first day or two the fatigue, the sufferings, have weakened a great many. the women and the aged are the first to hault then in order to strike terror into the miserable mass of humane beings their conductors armed with a woden bar to economize powder approach those who appear to be the most exhausted and / deal them a terrible blow on the nape of the neck. the unfortunate victims utter a cry and fall to the ground in the convulsions of death. The terrified troop immediately resumes its march. Terror has given even the weakest new strength. Each time some one brakes down the same horrible scene is repeated. At night on arriving at their haulting place after the first days of such a life a not less frightfull scene awaits them the traffickers in humane flesh have acquired by experience a knowledge of how much their victims can endure A glance shows them / those who will soon sink from weariness. Then to economize the scanty food they pass behind these wretched beings and fell them with a single blow. In this diabolical fashion very often 2500 humane beings representing 118 ruined villages were thus driven to market and to despair and death. Travelers have estimated that reconing the wide spread butchery in the villages and the deaths on the way 1000 slaves are thus secured at an average sacrafice 6500 lives

 

Contrast if you please this horrible picture with the condition of the Indians of one Western reservation. No bands of / slave hunters disturb their peace they know nothing of the crual march to the sea nothing of the separation of husbands and wives parents and children on the contrary all within the power of the United States government is being done to advance these savages in civilization in many instances their temporal needs are supplied by daily rations of food and often of clothing. If such wholesale slaughter was practiced among the Indians as we have just mentioned in regard to the Negro's they would long before this time have become an become an extinct race Were the Indian so crualy treated as the Negro is and has been there are many in the U.S. / today who would rise up for them as did those for the Negro in our late war Who will doubt that there are men in this country today that are just as patriotic and have just as much sympathy for suffering humanity and have as keen a sense of justice as when the question of slavery was settled by the bloody war. The idea of a humane being possessing body and soul being sold to the highest bidder becoming the chattle property of a humane being like himself /

 

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Then they will tell you that this continent belong to the Indian by right of possession and that they were driven from them in a most crual manner out to the far west. do you forget that this and far more is the fate of the Negro? Does any one deny that Africa is originaly the home of the Negro and his by right of possession and that he has as much claim upon his humble hut and surrounding fields as any Indian ever had to American soil.

 

And further it was never intended by the great Author and ruler of the universe that a race of savages should inhabit and controll this great / country which with its vast area has ample accomodation for white and Indian. Did not that same being after leading the children of Isreal through the wilderness to the promised land drive out from before them the heathen nations in possession and give it to the Isrealites for a habitation forever.

 

And do you not see the leadings of that same being in driving out tribes that were not industrious that made no advancement in properly cultivating the land being like that one who hid his talent in a napkin. /

 

They had been living here we know not how long before the discovery of America by the white man and had made no advancement whatever in the arts of civilation civilization on the contrary they were continualy at war with one another and so crual and relentless were these wars that the persecutions of the white man was mercy compared with the horible butcheries practiced by them on one another. And historians tell us that they were becoming fewer in numbers year by year and in all probability would now be an extinct race.

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