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into a villanage which crushed out our manhood so thoroughly that we had not vigor enough left to redeem ourselves.
Neither France nor Spain, neither the Northern nor the Southern races of Europe have that bright spot on their escutcheon, that they put an end to their own slavery.
Blue-eyed, haughty, contemptuous Anglo-Saxons, it was the black,--the only race in the record of history that ever, after a century of oppression, retained the vigor to write the charter of its emancipation with its own hand in the blood of the dominant race.
Despised, calumniated, slandered San Domingo is the only instance in history where a race, with indestructible love of liberty, after bearing a hundred years of oppression, rose up under their own leader, and with their own hands wrested chains from their own limbs.
Wait, garrulous, ignorant, boasting Saxon, till you have done half as much, before you talk of the cowardice of the black race!
The slaves of our country have not risen, but, as in most other cases, redemption will come from the interference of a wiser, higher, more advanced civilization on its exterior.
It is the almost universal record of history, and ours is a repetition of the same drama.
We have awakened at last the enthusiasm of both classes,--those that act from impulse and those that act from calculation.
It is a libel on the Yankee to think that it includes the whole race, when you say that if you put a dollar on the other side of hell, the Yankee will spring for it at any risk [laughter]; for there is an element even in the Yankee blood which obeys ideas; there is an impulsive, enthusiastic aspiration, something left to us from the old Puritan stock; that which made England what she was two centuries ago; that which is fated to give the closest grapple with the Slave Power to-day.
This is an invasion by outside power.
Civilization in 1600 crept along our shores, now planting her foot, and then retreating; now gaining a foot
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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