The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade | Page 6

to see them on board their vessels in a state of suffocation and in the
agonies of despair, and who are themselves in the habits of the cruel
use of arbitrary power?
The counterpart of the evil in its third branch is to be seen in the
conduct of those, who, when these miserable people have been landed,
purchase and carry them to their respective homes. And let us see

whether a mass of wickedness is not generated also in the present case.
Can those have nothing to answer for, who separate the faithful ties
which nature and religion have created? Can their feelings be otherwise
than corrupted, who consider their fellow-creatures as brutes, or treat
those as cattle, who may become the temples of the Holy Spirit, and in
whom the Divinity disdains not himself to dwell? Is there no injustice
in forcing men to labour without wages? Is there no breach of duty,
when we are commanded to clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, and
visit the sick and in prison, in exposing them to want, in torturing them
by cruel punishment, and in grinding them down, by hard labour, so as
to shorten their days? Is there no crime in adopting a system, which
keeps down all the noble faculties of their souls, and which positively
debases and corrupts their nature? Is there no crime in perpetuating
these evils among their innocent offspring? And finally, besides all
these crimes, is there not naturally in the familiar sight of the exercise,
but more especially in the exercise itself, of uncontrolled power, that
which vitiates the internal man? In seeing misery stalk daily over the
land, do not all become insensibly hardened? By giving birth to that
misery themselves, do they not become abandoned? In what state of
society are the corrupt appetites so easily, so quickly, and so frequently
indulged, and where else, by means of frequent indulgence, do these
experience such a monstrous growth? Where else is the temper subject
to such frequent irritation, or passion to such little control? Yes--If the
unhappy slave is in an unfortunate situation, so is the tyrant who holds
him. Action and reaction are equal to each other, as well in the moral as
in the natural world. You cannot exercise an improper dominion over a
fellow-creature, but by a wise ordering of Providence you must
necessarily injure yourself.
Having now considered the nature of the evil of the Slave-trade in its
three separate departments of suffering, and in its corresponding
counterparts of guilt, I shall make a few observations on the extent of
it.
On this subject it must strike us, that the misery and the crimes
included in the evil, as it has been found in Africa, were not like
common maladies, which make a short or periodical visit and then are

gone, but that they were continued daily. Nor were they like diseases,
which from local causes attack a village or a town, and by the skill of
the physician, under the blessing of Providence, are removed, but they
affected a whole continent. The trade with all its horrors began at the
river Senegal, and continued, winding with the coast, through its
several geographical divisions to Cape Negro; a distance of more than
three thousand miles. In various lines or paths formed at right angles
from the shore, and passing into the heart of the country, slaves were
procured and brought down. The distance, which many of them
travelled, was immense. Those, who have been in Africa, have assured
us, that they came as far as from the sources of their largest rivers,
which we know to be many hundred miles in-land, and the natives have
told us, in their way of computation, that they came a journey of many
moons.
It must strike us again, that the misery and the crimes, included in the
evil, as it has been shown in the transportation, had no ordinary bounds.
They were not to be seen in the crossing of a river, but of an ocean.
They did not begin in the morning and end at night, but were continued
for many weeks, and sometimes by casualties for a quarter of the year.
They were not limited to the precincts of a solitary ship, but were
spread among many vessels; and these were so constantly passing, that
the ocean itself never ceased to be a witness of their existence.
And it must strike us finally, that the misery and crimes, included in the
evil as it has been found in foreign lands, were not confined within the
shores of a little island. Most of the islands of a continent, and many of
these of considerable population and extent, were filled with them. And
the continent itself, to which these geographically belong,