272 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



cooks and scullions, may live comfortably enough — be- 

 cause they are still fulfilling their destiny of being serv- 

 ants of servants. But let them undertake to escape from 

 their destiny, and make the attempt to govern themselves, 

 and you will find them, with scarcely an exception, the 

 most unhappy, discontented wretches in existence — dis- 

 turbing the peace of society — filling the prisons — taxing 

 the country for their support — and wherever a com- 

 munity of them are found, becoming one of the greatest 

 nuisances ever inflicted upon a neighborhood. 



As witnesses upon this point, I will summon the island 

 of St. Domingo — the city of Cincinnati, with her negro 

 mobs and abolition riots — and the county of Brown, 

 Ohio, in which some very benevolent individuals once 

 made a colony of liberated slaves, and entailed upon the 

 citizens a band of lazy, worthless, starving, thieving vag- 

 abonds. 



If obedience to the laws of the Bible will confer happi- 

 ness upon man, and disobedience misery, then can we 

 account for the misery of those of the race of Canaan 

 who refuse to fulfill and obey that Scripture that says he 

 shall be a servant of servants to his brother Japheth. 



A greater punishment could not be devised or inflicted 

 upon the southern slave at this day, than to give him that 

 liberty which God in his wisdom and mercy deprived 

 him of. 



Out of the condition of slavery, there is not a people 

 on earth so unhappy, discontented and worthless, as these 

 Canaanites. Free them from control, and how soon does 

 poverty and wretchedness overtake them. While in a 

 state of slavery, even in the State of Mississippi, which 

 is pointed to as the very hotbed of negro oppression, I 

 boldly and truly assert, that you may travel Europe over 

 — yea, you may visit the boasted freemen of America — 

 aye, you may search the world over, before you find a 

 laboring peasantry who are more happy, more contented, 

 as a class of people, or who are better clothed and fed 

 and better provided for in sickness, infirmity and old 



