With Gold, Dug From Peruvian Mountains, They Order Vessels
To The Coasts Of Guinea; By Virtue Of That Gold, Wars, Murders, And
Devastations Are Committed In Some Harmless, Peaceable African
Neighbourhood, Where Dwelt Innocent People, Who Even Knew Not But
That All Men Were Black.
The daughter torn from her weeping mother,
the child from the wretched parents, the wife from the loving
husband; whole families swept away and brought through storms and
tempests to this rich metropolis!
There, arranged like horses at a
fair, they are branded like cattle, and then driven to toil, to
starve, and to languish for a few years on the different plantations
of these citizens. And for whom must they work? For persons they
know not, and who have no other power over them than that of
violence, no other right than what this accursed metal has given
them! Strange order of things! Oh, Nature, where art thou? - Are not
these blacks thy children as well as we? On the other side, nothing
is to be seen but the most diffusive misery and wretchedness,
unrelieved even in thought or wish! Day after day they drudge on
without any prospect of ever reaping for themselves; they are
obliged to devote their lives, their limbs, their will, and every
vital exertion to swell the wealth of masters; who look not upon
them with half the kindness and affection with which they consider
their dogs and horses. Kindness and affection are not the portion of
those who till the earth, who carry the burdens, who convert the
logs into useful boards. This reward, simple and natural as one
would conceive it, would border on humanity; and planters must have
none of it!
If negroes are permitted to become fathers, this fatal indulgence
only tends to increase their misery: the poor companions of their
scanty pleasures are likewise the companions of their labours; and
when at some critical seasons they could wish to see them relieved,
with tears in their eyes they behold them perhaps doubly oppressed,
obliged to bear the burden of nature - a fatal present - as well as
that of unabated tasks. How many have I seen cursing the
irresistible propensity, and regretting, that by having tasted of
those harmless joys, they had become the authors of double misery to
their wives. Like their masters, they are not permitted to partake
of those ineffable sensations with which nature inspires the hearts
of fathers and mothers; they must repel them all, and become callous
and passive. This unnatural state often occasions the most acute,
the most pungent of their afflictions; they have no time, like us,
tenderly to rear their helpless off-spring, to nurse them on their
knees, to enjoy the delight of being parents. Their paternal
fondness is embittered by considering, that if their children live,
they must live to be slaves like themselves; no time is allowed them
to exercise their pious office, the mothers must fasten them on
their backs, and, with this double load, follow their husbands in
the fields, where they too often hear no other sound than that of
the voice or whip of the taskmaster, and the cries of their infants,
broiling in the sun.
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