Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 | Page 5

of a man was but four times the price of an ox.
He sold his own kindred into slavery. English slaves were held in Ireland till the reign of Henry II.
In time, however, the spirit of Christianity, pleading the cause of humanity, stayed slavery's progress, and checked the slave traffic by appeals to conscience.
Alexander III, Pope of Rome in the twelfth century, proclaimed against it, by writing: "Nature having made no slaves, all men have an equal right to liberty."
Efficacious as the Christian religion has been to destroy or mitigate evil, it has failed to render the so-called Christian slaveholder better than the pagan, or to improve the condition of the bondsmen.
It may be observed that when slavery seemed to be firmly planted in the Republic of the United States of America, Egypt, as one of the powers of the earth, had passed away; her slavery, too, was gone--only her Pyramids, Sphinx, and Monoliths have been spared by time and a just judgment. Greece, too, had perished, only her philosophy and letters survive; Israel's people, though the chosen of God, had, as a nation, been bodily carried into oriental Babylonian captivity, and in due time had, in fulfillment of divine judgment, been dispersed through all lands. God in his mighty wrath also thundered on Babylon's iniquity, and it, too, passed away forever, and the prophet gives as a reason for this, that Babylon dealt in "slaves and the souls of men."
Rome, once the mistress of the world, cased as a nation to live; her greatness and her glory, her slave markets and her slaves, all gone together and forever.
Germany, France, Spain, and other slave nations renounced slavery barely in time to escape the general national doom.
Russia, though her mighty Czars possessed absolute power to rule, trembled before the mighty insurrections of peasant-serfs that swept over the bodies of slain nobles and slave-masters from remote regions to the very gates of Moscow. Catherine II., Alexander I., Nicholas I., and Alexander II. listened to the threatened doom, and, to save their empire, put forth decrees to loosen and finally to break the chains of twenty millions of slaves and serfs. Even Moorish slavery in Northern Africa in large part passed away. Mohammedan,( 4) Brahmin, and Buddhist had no sanction for human slavery.
England heard the warning cry just in time to save the kingdom from the impending common destiny of slave nations.
It was not, however, until 1772, that Lord Mansfield, from the Court of the King's Bench of Great Britain, announced that no slave could be held under the English Constitution. This decision was of binding force in her American colonies when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, and the "Liberty Bell" proclaimed "Liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants thereof."
The argument that the institution of slavery was sanctified by age ceased, long since, to be satisfying to those who learned justice and mercy in the light of Christian love, and who could read, not only that human slavery had existed from the earliest times, but that it had existed without right, only by the power of might, not sanctioned by reason and natural justice, and that in its train a myriad of coincident evils, crimes, and immoralities had taken birth and flourished, blasting both master and slave and the land they inhabited, and that God's just and retributive judgment has universally been visited on all nations and peoples continuing to maintain and perpetuate it.
Murder has existed in the world since Cain and Abel met by the altar of God, yet no sane person for that reason justifies it. So slavery has stalked down the long line of centuries, cursing and destroying millions with its damning power, but time has not sanctioned it into a right. The longer it existed the more foul became the blot upon history's pages, and the deeper the damnation upon humanity it wrought.
When all the civilized nations of Europe, as well as the nations and even tribes of Asia, had either abolished slavery and taken steps effectually to do so, it remained for the United States to stand alone upholding it in its direst form.
The nations of the ancient world either shook off slavery in attempts to wash away its bloody stain, or slavery wiped them from the powers of the earth. So of the more modern nations.
Our Republic, boastful of its free institutions, of its constitutional liberty, of its free schools and churches, of its glories in the cause of humanity, its patriotism, resplendent history, inventive genius, wealth, industry, civilization, and Christianity, maintained slavery until it was only saved from its common doom of slave nations by the atoning sacrifice of its best blood and the mercy of an offended God.
More than two centuries (1562) before Lord Mansfield judicially announced freedom to be the universal law