Look again at Josiah Henson, at William Wells Brown, and others, whose biographies will be presently given, in their enslaved and free state; mark the difference, and then ask yourselves another question:—Can these noble specimens of God's handiworks—these enlightened, high-souled christian men, belong to an inferior race? Can we believe this? no, the rather let us agree with the wise and benevolent Dr. Channing, who addresses his countrymen thus:—

“We are holding in bondage one of the best races of the human family. The Negro is among the mildest and gentlest of men. He is singularly susceptible of improvement from abroad. His children, it is said, receive more rapidly than ours the elements of knowledge. How far he can originate improvements, time alone can teach. His nature is affectionate, easily touched; and hence he is more open to religious impressions than the white man. The European races have manifested more courage, enterprise, invention; but in the dispositions which Christianity particularly honours, how inferior are they to the African! When I cast my eyes over our southern region, the land of bowie knives, Lynch law and duels— of chivalry honour, and revenge—and when I consider that Christianity is declared to be a spirit of charity, ‘'which seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and endureth all things,’—can I hesitate in deciding to which of the races in that land Christianity is most adapted and in which its noblest disciples are likely to be reared.”

Elsewhere this eloquent advocate of the oppressed Negro makes the following forcible observations:—“The moral influence of slavery is to destroy the proper consciousness and spirit of a man. The slave, regarded and treated as property, bought and sold like a brute, denied the rights of humanity, unprotected against insult, made a tool, and systematically subdued, that he may be a manageable useful tool, how can he help regarding himself as fallen below his race? How must his spirit be crushed? How can he respect himself? He becomes bowed to servility. This word, borrowed from his condition, expresses the ruin wrought by slavery within him. The idea that he was made for his own virtue and happiness scarcely dawns on his mind. To be an instrument of the physical, material good of another, whose will is his highest law, he is taught to regard as the great purpose of his being. The whips and imprisonment of slavery, and even the horrors of the middle passage from Africa to America, these are not to be named in comparison with this extinction of the proper consciousness of a human being, with the degradation of a man into a brute.

It may be said that the slave is used to his yoke; that his sensibilities are blunted; and that he receives, without a pang or a thought, the treatment which would sting other men to madness. And to what does this apology amount? It virtually declares that slavery has done its perfect work—has quenched the spirit of humanity—that the Man is dead within the Slave. It is not, however, true that this work of abasement is ever so effectually done as to extinguish all feeling. Man is too great a creature to be wholly ruined by Man. When he seems dead he only sleeps. There are occasionally some sullen murmurs in the calm of slavery, showing that life still beats in the soul, that the idea of rights cannot be wholly effaced from the human being. It would be too painful, and it is not needed, to detail the process by which the spirit is broken in slavery. I refer to one only, the selling of slaves. The practice of exposing fellow-creatures for sale, of having markets for men as for cattle, of examining the limbs and muscles of a man and woman as of a brute, of putting human beings under the hammer of an auctioneer, and delivering them, like any other article of merchandise, to the highest bidder, all this is such an insult to our common nature, and so infinitely degrading to the poor victim, that it is hard to conceive of its existence except in a barbarous country. The violation of his own rights to which he is inured from birth, must throw confusion over his ideas of all human rights. He cannot comprehend them; or, if he does, how can he respect them, seeing them, as he does, perpetually trampled on in his own person?”

Other demoralizing, we had almost said demonizing, influences, which the system of slavery calls into play, might be dwelt upon, were they not of too dark and impure a character to admit of more than a passing hint. Any properly constituted and instructed mind must shrink with horror at even a distant contemplation of those violations of virtue and decency, and the best and holiest affections of humanity, which are of daily, hourly occurrence in the slave states of America, if the testimony of a “thousand witnesses” many of them favourable to this accursed system, is to be believed.

We may now quote a few remarks apropos to our subject, by an authority of some weight in this country. In an article in “Chambers' Edinburgh Journal,” on a work published some years since in one of the slave states, the professed object of which was to prove that Negroes are not human beings in the full sense of the term, but a sort of intermediate link between the larger of the ape tribe and the white races of man, it is said in conclusion, “The answer to all these arguments is, we think, not difficult. Supposing the Negroes differ in all the alleged respects from the whites, the difference we would say, is not such as to justify, the whites in making a property of them, and treating them with cruelty. But the Negroes are not, in reality, beyond the pale of humanity, either physically or mentally, Their external conformation is not greatly different from that of whites. Their being the same mentally, is shewn by the fact, that many Negroes have displayed intellectual and moral features equal to those of whites of high endowment. We might instance Carey, Jenkins, Cuffee, Gustavus Vasa, Toussaint, and many others.

If any one Negro has shewn a character identical with that of the white race, the whole family must be the same, though in general inferior. The inferiority is shewn to be not in kind, but in degree; and it would be just as proper for the clever whites to seize and enslave the stupid ones, as for the whites in general to enslave the blacks in general. The blacks, moreover, have shewn a capacity of improvement. They have shewn that, as in many districts of even our island of Great Britain, many parts of mind appear absent only when not brought out or called into exercise, and that by education the dormant faculties can be awakened and called into strength, if not in one generation, at least in the course of several. The tendency slavery is to keep down, at nearly the level of brutes, beings who might be brightened into intellectual and moral beauty.”

Further, in their “Tract on Intelligent Negroes,” the Messrs. Chambers either give utterance, or the sanction of their names, to this sentiment—“Such men as Jenkins and Carey at once close the months of those who, from ignorance or something worse, allege an absolute difference, or specific character, between the two races, and justify the consignment of the black to a fate which only proves the lingering barbarism of the white.”

Yes, we are all stones from one quarry, dark of hue and rugged of form as some may be, while others are white and beautifully polished; coloured and shapen in accordance with the will of the Divine Architect, we shall form eventually one grand and symmetrical whole—a temple that shall redound to the glory of Him who designed and fashioned it. What, then; shall the richly sculptured capital of the slender column, or the embossed key-stone of the stately arch, despise the dark and rugged mass which helps to form the basement? nay, not so; for it performs an important work in the economy of the whole structure, and might by labour and skill have been rendered worthy a place in its more ornamental parts. But dropping the metaphor, truly may we say to the Negro— “Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, thou art,Co-heritor of kindred being thou;From the full tide that warmed one mother's heart,Thy veins and ours received the genial flow.”

It is plain, from the accounts which travellers give us, that the great varieties, or races, into which ethnologists have divided the human family, are not by any means so distinctly marked as they would have us believe. The main distinctions of these races are their geographical boundaries, for they melt, and, as it were, run into each other in almost imperceptible gradations: and but for the mountains, and seas, and rivers, which divide them, there would be really no clear lines of demarcation. The woolly hair, protuberant lips, and other physical characteristics, as they are generally considered, of the Negro race, are not found in all of them, and one or other, sometimes several of these characteristics, are found in other tribes. There are Negroes which the most inveterate hater of a black skin could not but acknowledge to be beautiful—perfect models of grace and elegance; and there are white men, aye, men of the great dominant Anglo-saxon race whose appearance would indicate a very near approach to the lower grade of animals. That the structural anatomy of all races closely approximates, even Dr. Knox admits, for he says—“Strip off the outer garments of Venus, and compare her to a bushwoman, (one of the most degraded of the African tribes,) and the difference would be seen to be very slight.” These distinctions of race then, on which so much stress is laid, are not organic, but merely superficial, and therefore, as we must believe, variable according to climate and circumstances.

Wilson Armistead, whose volume contains a vast amount of information on this head, tells us that “Professor Blumenbach, the great German physiologist, bestowed much labour and research on the question of Negro capacity. He collected a large number of skulls, and also a numerous library of the works of persons of African blood or descent, (which library it is said would bear out the assertion, that there is not a single department of taste or science, in which some Negro has not distinguished himself.) Blumenbach is perhaps, the greatest authority, in favour of the identity of species, and of intellect in the black and white races. It is to him that we are indebted for the most complete body of information on this subject, which he illustrated most successfully by his unrivalled collection of the Craniæ of different nations, from all parts of the globe.

From the results of the observations of Blumenbach and others, it appears then, that there is no characteristic whatever in the organization of the skull or brain of the Negro, which affords a presumption of inferior endowment, either of the intellectual of moral faculties. If it be asserted that the African nations are inferior to the rest of mankind, from historical facts, because they may be thought not to have contributed their share to the advancement of human arts and sciences, the Mandingoes may be instanced as a people evidently susceptible of high mental culture and civilization. They have not, indeed, contributed much towards the advancement of human arts and sciences, but they have evinced themselves willing and able to profit by these advantages, when introduced among them.”And what more could the so- called superior races have done? They have availed themselves of the means and opportunities of improvement offered to them, and become elevated above the dark region of ignorance and superstition, in which the poor Negro yet lies grovelling; let them lend him a helping hand and lift him up to the same height of civilization and knowledge as that on which they now stand, and which he is as capable of occupying and enjoying as themselves.

Who can tell what a bright and glorious future may yet be in store for this now degraded and persecuted race; how high a position they may yet attain in the scale of humanity. In the revolutions of past ages, what nations and races have arisen from a state of barbarism, grown great and flourished for awhile, and then declined; and it may be that we ourselves have reached, and passed, our culminating point of power and earthly glory; and that when we are far down the descent which leads to extinction, or subjugation, the dark-skinned dwellers in that far western continent, may be great, and powerful, and famous; lifting aloft the lamp of christianity—“That light which lighteneth every one that cometh into the world;”cherishing the arts and sciences which can no longer find a place in our deserted schools and halls of learning; and, enriched by that commerce which once crowded our ports with shipping, and filled our marts to overflowing. Who can say what God in His inscrutable wisdom, hath in store for this Negro race. We can scarcely imagine that beneath the depth in which they now lie bound, hand and foot, there is a lower deep still for them; the light of knowledge and civilization, and above all, of christianity, must reach their benighted souls; with knowledge will come power, with power freedom; it is, it must be so ordained. Let us then be fellow-workers with God, whose image we recognise in this black brother of ours, crying out for help amid the embers of his burning kraal, in the desolate karoo, across which he journeys, faint and bleeding; on the wide waters of the intermediate passage, nearly stifled in the hold of the pestiferous slave ship; and in that boasted land of liberty, where the true dignity of man is so much talked about, but so little understood, and where independence would appear to mean a total disregard of all the claims and rights of human brotherhood! Listen, oh, listen, with pity and sympathy, to

We have hope that the question will arise in the minds of some of our readers—What can I do in this matter? how can I forward the work of Negro emancipation? To such we say, watch and seek for opportunities of rendering your aid, and they will certainly come; until they do, let the following forcible words of that gifted woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, be ever before you:—“There is one thing that every individual can do —that they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being, and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily, and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies on this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy? Let, too, the good sentiment embodied in these lines by Pollok, be borne in memory as a stimulant for your sympathy and exertion:—

WE need look no farther for a contradiction of the alleged inferiority of the Negro race, than the subject of this sketch. Here was a man—a true “image of God cut in ebony”—black, and all black; with no drop of other than African blood flowing in his veins; but one generation removed from the wild and savage state of an unreclaimed son of the forest and the desert; a man, too, who passed the first fifty years of his life in a state of slavery, which, although of a mild form, admitted of but few means and opportunities of mental improvement; and yet, by the mere force of the moral and intellectual powers within him, he achieved a greatness, little, if at all inferior to that of any white-skinned warrior or legislator of his own, or any other age of the world's history. If we were among those who would set up the military hero as the highest type of human excellence, we should probably find sufficient in the career of this Toussaint L'Overture to justify our largest meed of praise and admiration; he might indeed well be called the “Napoleon of the Blacks,” only that his patriotism was purer, his aims more noble and unselfish, his heart far less hard and cruel, and his mind too benevolent and solicitous for the good of his fellow-men, to allow of the fall and appropriate application of such a title. Did we admit that the magnanimous ruler, the framer and administrator of just and wholesome laws, the calmer of unruly passions, the reconciler of conflicting interests, and the reducer of chaotic elements into harmonious and symmetrical order, were entitled to the highest pinnacle of earthly glory and greatness, then might we also claim for this erewhile chief of a black-skinned community a lofty place in the estimation of the world. But it is neither as the warrior nor to the legislator, great as he undoubtedly was in both these capacities, that we look upon Toussaint L'Overture with the greatest admiration. Rather do we prefer to view him in his social and domestic relations—as the attached and devoted servant, the tender and affectionate husband and father, the faithful friend, the strict observer of his promises and engagements, “the man who never told a lie,” and scorned to act meanly or disingenuously even to an enemy. These are the traits in his character, we say, which it best pleases us to contemplate, although they are not those, perhaps, which have contributed most to exalt him in the eyes of the world at large—which have, by the blaze of his achievements, and the loud blast of his renown, been attracted to that beautiful island of St. Domingo, or Hayti, (the land of mountains,) as it was originally, and is now again usually called—that island which has furnished us with so striking an example of Negro capacity, both mental and physical, and shown that the black man is not a whit inferior to his fair-skinned brother, either in the qualities which win for him the esteem and affection of all true hearts, or in those which are generally allowed to constitute real greatness of character.

Let us take a brief survey of the career of this extraordinary man, and see if we can find it that which will establish his right to the lofty position in which, by almost common consent, he has been placed; he having been, as the “Biographie Universelle” states, the model upon which, as Dictator and General, Napoleon formed himself. We shall take up our hero's history at the very earliest period of which a record can be found, in order to show how little he was removed from the barbarous and savage state in which the African tribes unhappily exist. Gaou Guinou, king of one of the most powerful of these tribes, had a second son, who was taken prisoner in war by a hostile people, and sold, as is customary in these cases, to some white traffickers in human merchandise. These civilized (?) and Christian (?) merchants having a cargo of sable brothers and sisters to dispose of, brought them to the shores of St. Domingo, into which island a large annual importation of slaves was then taking place. The African prince was purchased by the Count de Noé, a French proprietor of an extensive plantation situated a few miles inland from Cape Francois. Here the royal slave was kindly treated, and seems altogether to have led as happy a life as one in a state of bondage could well do; he married a maiden of his own colour and country—a fellow-slave on the same plantation —and by her had eight children, of whom Toussaint, born May 17th., 1743, was the eldest. To the parent, as nothing very remarkable is recorded of him, we need make no further allusion; it is to the illustrious son that our attention must now be directed.

Here, in this “Queen of the Antilles,” as Hayti has been poetically called, beneath the balmy sky and amid the luxuriant vegetation of the tropics, the Negro boy seems to have grown up to manhood without experiencing any of those hardships, and privations, and sufferings, to which the slave is most commonly exposed. It appears to have been a point of honour with most of the French proprietors of this island, to treat their Negroes with kindness and consideration, and hence they were held in more regard and affection than the haughty Spaniards, who occupied, by a more ancient tenure of possession, the larger portion of the island, and looked upon these colonists from France with aversion and distrust. Bayon de Libertas, the agent or manager for Toussaint's master, who is called in some histories the Count de Breda, was no exception to this rule, and verily he had his reward; for, although in the sanguinary war of races or colours which by and by deluged the beautiful island, his property was destroyed, yet was his person and family protected, and conveyed beyond the reach of danger, and the means furnished him, out of the wreck of the property, to establish and maintain himself in a land of peace and safety; and it was by Negro hands, obeying the promptings of a warm, generous, and grateful heart, that this was effected.

The weakly lad Toussaint, whose back had not been made to bow beneath the burden, nor lacerated with stripes; whose little strength had not been tasked beyond what it would bear; but who had been allowed to lie about in the sunshine, taking care of the cattle, and performing such light duties as best suited him, had grown up then into a strong and energetic man. Always thoughtful and serious beyond his years, he had early attracted the attention of M. de Libertas, who, as some authorities say, had him taught to read and write; but this is unlikely; for, with all their affability and kindness to their slaves, these French masters still looked upon them as an inferior order of beings, on whom it would be useless, if not dangerous, to bestow mental instruction. The most probable account is that the young Toussaint gained such slight elementary knowledge as he possessed from one Pierre Baptiste, a shrewd and intelligent Negro on his master's estate, whose naturally good abilities had been cultivated and improved by some benevolent missionaries. Be this as it may, certain it is that our hero did, during the season of his by no means heavy bondage, snatch a few sprigs from the tree of knowledge; and so rich was the soil of the mind in which he planted them, that when he cast aside his shackles, came forth from his prison-house, and stood before the world as the champion and director of his lately enslaved, but now free brethren, all were astonished at the abundance and maturity of the fruits there displayed.

The thoughtful and intelligent, though somewhat weakly Negro youth, had, we say, grown up into a sturdy man. Sober, honest, industrious, and religiously disposed, it was soon seen that he was one in whom dependence might be placed; he was first advanced to the office of coachman to M. de Libertas, whose entire confidence he enjoyed; he was then appointed to the responsible post of foreman of the sugar works, and he now thought it well to choose for himself a wife, in which choice he manifested his sense by preferring to mere personal attractions, the qualities which distinguish a good housewife and a faithful bosom friend. Here is a beautiful picture which he once gave of conjugal happiness and of simple earnest piety:—“We went to labour in our fields with hand clasped in hand; we returned in the same manner; scarcely did we feel the fatigues of the day. Heaven bestowed a blessing on our toil; not only we swam in abundance, but we had the pleasure of giving provisions to Blacks who were in want. On the Sunday, and on holidays, my wife, my relatives, and myself went to church. Returning to our cottage, after an agreeable repast, we spent the rest of the day in family intercourse, and we terminated it by a prayer, in which we all joined.”

Surely, amid the toils of state and harassing cares of his after life, even in his hours of greatest triumph,—his scenes of short-lived power and prosperity, this good man must have looked back on such a picture, painted by memory, with a yearning regret, even although he gazed from the broad sunshine of freedom into the dark night of slavery; for that night to him had many beautiful stars, that beamed down in placid loveliness, and shed a mild radiance around his path, such as few behold who dwell there. But it was duty which called him forth; in the first place loyalty to the French King, whom he had never seen, nor was ever likely to see, but whom he had been taught to consider as the rightful claimant of his fealty and allegiance. “True as the dial to the sun,Although it be not shined upon,” was that noble heart of his, even when his better judgment was obscured, and his strong reason fettered, by the doctrine of blind, unquestioning obedience to the powers that be, by means of which, and the iron grasp of tyrranous rule, it is alone possible to keep men in a state of slavery. Loyalty, we say, at first to the King of France, caused Toussaint to assume the upright attitude of a free man, and once in that position, it was not long before the conviction, which his previous reading had frequently suggested, flashed upon his mind, that freedom was as much the right of himself and those of his own colour, as it was of those fair-skinned declaimers about liberty and equality, who, in setting forth their famous declaration, that “All men are born and continue free and equal as to their rights,” did not probably consider that the Negroes who were held in bondage in the various French colonies, were entitled to the benefit of its application. “All men” did not include them, because they were not men, being by nature placed below the lowest in the scale of humanity. Not so, however, thought the Negroes themselves; and when this declaration of the assembled representatives of the French people, uttered amid the bloody throes of a struggle for freedom such as the world never saw before, was proclaimed in St. Domingo, Toussaint felt that it was a grand truth, such as the human mind conceives and utters only when stirred to its most profound depths by those feelings and emotions which approach the nearest to inspiration; and he felt, too, that it was not a truth, but a specious and delusive fallacy, if it did not apply to himself, and his sable brethren, and to every being to whom God had given an immortal soul.

Miss Martineau, in her fine historical romance, “The Hour and the Man,”in which the character of Toussaint is no doubt correctly drawn, gives this revelation of the state of his mind, before the conviction, to which we have alluded, came like a ray of morning, and flashed light into its inmost recesses. This was soon after the breaking out of the Negro insurrection, which, commencing in a plantation contiguous to that belonging to Toussaint's master, had spread like wildfire through the colony, and involved the whole property of the French planters in one wide scene of ruin and devastation, amid which many of the owners and their families perished. In this insurrection Toussaint had refused to join, because he saw nothing great or worthy in the motives which prompted the rising of the slaves. He assisted his kind master to escape, and to save as much of the property as could be borne off and rendered available for future subsistence, and when he had made every possible effort to mitigate the evils attendant on the state of anarchy and lawless violence into which the French settlements in St. Domingo were plunged, and found that he could not stay the tide of revolution, he withdrew, with such of the Negroes as chose to accompany him, to the Spanish part of the island, and placed himself and his followers under the command of the Spanish general, who sided with the French royalists, and consequently, as Toussaint then considered, had a claim to his service and assistance.

Alluding to the sons of our hero, who, with all the ardour of youth, were commencing their course of military discipline, Miss Martineau says, “The strong and busy years on which they were entering had been all spent by him in acquiring one habit of mind, to which his temperament and training alike conduced—a habit of endurance. It was at this time that he acquired the power of reading enough to seek for books; and the books that he had got hold of were Epictetus, and some fragments of Fenelon. With all the force of youth, he had been by turns the stoic and the quietist; and while busied in submitting himself to the pressure of the present, he had turned from the past, and scarcely dreamed of the future. If his imagination glanced back to the court of the royal grandfather, held under the palm shades, or pursuing the lion-hunt among the jungles of Africa, he had hastily withdrawn his mind's eye from scenes which might create impatience o