contempt for slaves. That is very near the feeling--mark my words--they
ought to have. It was stronger in Athens than it has ever been in
Charleston. It is partly, and has always been largely, caused by the
wicked pride of mastership, but it has also been largely inspired by the
perception of those vices and inferiorities which his condition breeds
in the slave. Ignorance, deceit, cowardice, are contemptible; and
therefore men who know better fall into the way of despising those who
are ignorant and cowardly instead of trying to help them become the
reverse of all these things. In nearly every other nation--there are two
exceptions that will readily occur to you--save our own, as soon as the
slave's chains have been broken and the slave's vices eradicated, the
emancipated man has been absorbed among the class of freemen. There was
nothing left to suggest that he had ever been a slave. The people forgot
it. But the black man bears an ineffaceable mark that he belongs to a
race which has been enslaved; and it is, therefore, in ninety-nine cases
out of a hundred unconsciously but instinctively assumed that his is
still the servile character. There is no natural antipathy between the
white and the black races; if there were there could be no mulattoes.
The sole reason of the persistence of this caste feeling is that the
black man bears the mark saying to every one that sees him, "I belong to
a race that has been enslaved:" and unconsciously men assume, "Therefore
your character is still a servile character." The prejudice is deep; it
is almost universal; and so long as there is a God in heaven who led
forth the Hebrews and overthrew the Pharaohs, there will be no safety
for this Nation of ours until the prejudice is obliterated, as
completely as that which once existed and was more intense between the
Anglo-Saxon and the Norman. If, as has been the case in many another
land, there should arise an emergency threatening the existence of our
Nation, and there were one man, and only one, capable of steering us
through the storm into safety--some Lincoln or Washington--and if every