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Thursday Evening, 9 o'clock.

[MR. BLANCHARD'S EIGHTH SPEECH.]

Gentlemen Moderators, and Gentlemen and Ladies, FellowCitizens:

I am not certain that I shall be able to detain you for thirty minutes. I shall notice a few things which my brother has said, and then if I feel the pain in my head less, I shall proceed.

I should be more happy if my brother would waive the privilege, of seeming to accuse me of unwillingness to meet the question. As regularly as a clock, when he rises, he strikes the hour of the debate, and then tells you what I have not done, and what he fully believes that I will not do. Many of his arguments I have met. Yet, leaving these, he tells you I have "not answered his argument from the golden rule," etc. I have prepared an argument on that subject, which I will deliver at the proper time. He tells you, also, for the third or fourth time, what Dr. Cunningham and Dr. Chalmers have said concerning abolitionism. I have also an argument on the general subject of authorities, these included. It would not be necessary to notice these affirmations of his about myself, but for that they may lead some simple minds to suppose that I am not here, as a Christian man, to meet and reply to every point vital to this debate. He does not appear to be doing much himself, or to have any sentiments which he is anxious to prove, except concerning myself. For this, he told you, very logically and gravely, that I was the most remarkable man for misrepresentation of facts, whom he had ever heard speak." I think my friend is in danger of falling into the sin of scoffing and railing.

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He gave you, however, a reply to what I said upon his lauding those Southern Presbyterians, who, professing to teach slaves, withhold the Bible from them. He says he "does not praise their Bible-withholding, but he praises the oral instruction which they do give!" This is capital.

sentiments on slavery to be his own.

The Rev. James Dun

can wrote and published his book on slavery, in 1824, eight years before the first modern anti-slavery society. He had just left a pastoral charge in Kentucky, some sixty miles below Cincinnati, and crossed to Vevay, Ind., where he published his book, with a soul burning with the wrongs and wretchedness endured by the slaves. His was an original mind, of giant mould. He preached from log cabin to log cabin, in the early western settlements; always poor, yet learned, and studious, and laborious. He saw principles with amazing clearness, and uttered them with corresponding strength. He died on one of these mission-tours, preaching as he went, at a house where he put up for the night, in the borders of Indiana. "Requiescat in pace." I hope my brother will let his ashes rest. If he must have something to find fault with, I will give him some of my pamphlets.

Gentlemen Moderators-I will give a further brief reply on the subject of marriage. My brother, with a pertinacity as strange as it is illogical, insists, that slavery is not destructive of marriage. While he was speaking I could not but ask myself what blinding cause oppressed him? and, in what corner of his mind the source of his error lay? And I confess, I know not how or by what fallacy he is kept from seeing the truth, unless it be that slavery cannot travel up to God, and make his judgments coincide with the determinations of slavery. "God will not punish slaves for 'taking up' without marriage," (he seems to mean,) "and therefore, in God's eye, they are married." But this is monstrous reasoning. Are they married as by slavery? that is the question. If not, (and he knows they are not,) then by denying that slavery destroys marriage will be merciful. His argument gives to slavery the merit of God's mercy. Slavery adjudges slaves unmarried, and incapable of marriage. It holds the slave-pair in separation; ready to be sold apart. He tells us, but they are vain words, that the husband and wife are not separated in slavery, unless the

master chooses to part them. But if I come to own a man and his wife, are they not already separated so far as the nuptial tie bound them, and ready to be sold apart whenever I will to sell them? Suppose I sell the woman, and the purchaser goes to get her; has he anything to do but lead her off? Is there anything to be done to separate her from her husband? Obviously nothing. She ceased, by the theory of slavery, to be her husband's wife, when she became my woman. The property principle is stronger in law and practice than the marriage principle, and prevails over it. And brother Rice is here to maintain, that when I have fairly bought the woman, she is mine. Slave-holding is not sinful. He gives me God's permission to hold her: and they are separated by the naked fact that they are property.

True, God may not punish in hell the slave man and woman, who, being prohibited marriage, take up together, and are true to each other; but no thanks are due to slavery that he does not, for if he followed either its laws or its practice, he would declare the parents unmarried, and illegitimate their children. What candor, or sense, therefore, can there be in declaring that slaves may be and are married, in the open face of the fact that marriage has never existed among slaves from the times of Aristotle down. I read from the learned Dr. Robertson's History of Charles V., p. 13, Note 9:

Of slaves, he says "They were not originally permitted to marry. Male and female slaves were allowed and even encouraged to cohabit together. But this union was not considered as a marriage; it was called contubernium, not nuptiae or matrimonium." And again:

66 All the children of slaves were in the same condition of their parents, and became the property of the master. Slaves were so entirely the property of their masters, that they could sell them at pleasure. While domestic slavery continued, property in a slave was held in the same manner with that which a person had in any other moveable."

So was slavery in Greece: so was it in Rome: so is it today in Kentucky. What was slavery then is slavery now.

And if my friend can now rise up and tell you, against authorities such as Dr. Robertson,—against the authoritative declaration of all the slave-codes ever enacted,—against history itself, and against what you know to be the uniform practice, heretofore and now,-that marriage exists among slaves, and that slavery is free from the sin of marriage-breaking, I feel certain that few will believe him.

I am aware that my friend calculates on the adherence of friends from Kentucky, of whom there are many present. But I trust that here even he will find himself mistaken. There is a force in truth to leave impressions which the mind cannot shake off, and especially in the truth that it is sinful to make merchandize of men. It will follow them to their homes, and live and burn in their consciences, when the prejudices of the hour are, with the circumstances of this debate, passed away:

A money-loving, hardened man, in southern Pennsylvania, told me that when he put his hand to paper to sign a bill of sale for the transfer of a human being, his arm trembled and shook to his shoulder-blade. There is not a power, prin

ciple, or faculty included in the awful circle of humanity but shudders at the motions of this horrid property-power, as the trees of Eden trembled at the movements of Satan in the

fall of man. You may go, Kentuckians, to your homes, but the truths to which you here listen, apart from any power of argument, by their own vital force, will abide with you as an omnipresent blaze, showing you everything about your negro-quarters in a light in which you never beheld them before, and making you one in understanding and heart with the promoters of liberty, and friends of the slave.-For the truth is God's, and God's unseen power is in it.

I met Theodore F. Leftwick, a tobacco merchant, of Liberty, Va., upon a steamboat; told him I was an abolitionist, and, knowing him for a southern man, asked him of his slaves. "Thank God, I have none," was his prompt and warm reply. Though opposed to what he understood to be abolitionism, and pitying me because an abolitionist, he said that he had