the one hand, and the spirit of charity on the other. But negro slavery in America had features of its own too strongly marked to admit of general observations. Arguments have been advanced in mitigation, stories have been published to prove the greatness of the actual suffering. The judgment which I shall ask you to accept, for our present purpose, shall be founded neither on the existence of great abuses nor of kind and Christian masters, but on the provisions of the servile law. The most suggestive enactment I could adduce to illustrate the idea of personality in the negro, is, that if the life of a slave was taken by the law, his owner received his value in money from the State treasury. No slave could make a valid contract; therefore he could not contract a legal marriage, even with the consent of the master. All the safeguards of virtue, all penalties on the breach of the marriage law, or of those laws which are anterior to all human legislation, were held inapplicable to the negro family. I am sure that the voice of nature and of humanity constantly mitigated the law of the land, but it is certain that the Southern jurisprudence denied that the negro is bound by the same moral code as ourselves, and that this belief was shared by the leaders of secession.
In a great speech at the beginning of the movement, Mr. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, spoke these words: "The corner stone of our new government rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. Our new government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Here, then, was a society adopting inequality, not as the natural product of property, descent and merit, but as its very foundation,—a society, therefore, more aristocratically constituted than those of feudal times. The Southern slave-owner was in contradiction to the two principles which animated the Democracy of the Northern States. He denied the absolute essential
