C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

[480] in the annals of the human race. Leaving out all the barbarities attending the capture and ocean-transportation; the brutal atrocities the stolen Africans suffered by a system of merciless task-labor under the lash, the maiming and torture of nerve and muscle, with the endless category of physical suffering, still each one of the mighty host of Africano-Americans—an army of thirteen millions, bond and free, living and dead—appears in solemn judgment against his individual oppressor and against the whole nation. The one has perpetrated the murder, and the Government has stood by and consented unto his death, and held the garments of those that slew him.

What are the counts in this terrible indictment?

1. The annihilation of home, whose charities are just as dear to the lower as to the higher classes of beings. Torn from their continental homes and transplanted to a new world, they should at least have had a chance to strike their roots into a stranger soil. But cupidity, accident, or caprice tore the plant up by the roots, and, with comparatively few exceptions, subjected it to a new and trying process of acclimation.

2. The annihilation of marriage. This sacrilegious blow at the first, the holiest, and the dearest of all God's institutions struck the race. It cast the deadliest blight which can fall on man. It made more bastards in America than ever lived elsewhere under heaven.

3. The annihilation of light. This means the impious inauguration of heathenism in the very garden of God. No home, no wife or children he can call his own! Can a higher insult be offered to a man made in the divine image and for whom the Son of man died? Oh, how incomparably blessed in the contrast was the Thracian slave dragged to Rome to make, in the arena, a holiday for the slave-holders of the Eternal City! He left at least a home, wife, children.

I see before me the gladiator lie:
He leans upon his hand; his manly brow
Consents to death, but conquers agony.
... His eyes
Were with his heart, and that was far away:
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize,—
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay.
There were his young barbarians, all at play,—
There was their Dacian mother,—he, their sire,
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday!
All this rush'd with his blood: shall he expire,
And unavenged? Arise! ye Goths, and glut your ire!