rant to the sheriff of your county to hang a convicted criminal, that warrant does not authorize any man to go out and hang any man in any other county who has been illegally seized. Supposing the Canaanites were really enslaved, with God's permission, for their sins, it does not give Dr. Rice, or his slave-holding friends, a right to enslave any person in the State of Kentucky, be it negro, mulatto, or white woman, the child of German, Irish, or Italian parents. I do not therefore admit, that, if those Hebrew bond-servants were slaves, that it does any thing towards maintaining his argument, that "slave-holding is no sin." This argument depends on the assumption, that God never can permit, for any purpose, punitive or otherwise, that which is wrong in itself. But God certainly permitted the Jews to divorce for hatred; and divorce for hatred is wrong in itself. See Deut. xxiv. 3. "If the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of divorcement, and giveth it in her hand, and sendeth her out of the house," &c., her former husband may not again take her to wife. Thus by the Jewish code, authorized by God, and given by Moses, men were allowed to divorce their wives for hatred, so far as regulating and restricting a vile practice allows it. Does that justify American husbands in turning the mothers of their children out of doors, in every family quarrel, weeping and friendless, because hated?

Admit his inference from Jewish bond-service-(Jewish slavery if he will) to American, and you admit a principle by which every husband who hates his wife may drive her from his door. The teaching of Christ is explicit on the subject of divorce for hatred, showing that it is contrary to the original constitutions of God. When the Pharisees, asked him, "Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause?" His reply was "From the beginning it was not so." "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put assunder." "Moses because of the hardness of your hearts gave you that precept." Mat. xix. Yet in Deut. xxiv, 3, it is said, "And if the latter husband hate her and write a bill

of divorcement and giveth it in her hand and sendeth her out of his house; or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife, her former husband which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife," &c.

We see therefore that divorce for hatred was permitted— and yet the same thing is not permitted now, but expressly forbidden as sinful by Christ himself. So if, in despotic countries, and in ages when as yet the law of force had not given way before the empire of reason, slavery had been permitted; it does not help the argument for American slaveholding.

But again. This text, itself the very sheet anchor of the slave-holding doctrine, is misinterpreted to make it yield those inferences in favor of slavery which they draw from it. It positively does not mean, and can be shown not to mean what they say and suppose it to mean.

My brother told you that my argument on a certain point, proving to much, proved nothing; I grant that if an argument proves too much, it proves nothing. I deny however,` that mine was of that class. But let us apply that logical test to his main argument from Levit. xxv, 45. "Of them shall ye buy bondmen," etc., "and they shall be your possession."

Is not the slave-trade justified here?

Now if their understanding of this text be correct, that those bondmen bought, were slaves; was not the business of buying them from the heathen tribes, the slave trade? And if this verse proves that God permitted slavery, does it not also prove that he permitted the slave trade? This certainly is proving too much; more even than Dr. Rice wishes to prove, that God permitted, nay commanded them to drive a slave trade with heathen nations-a traffic which consigns the trader caught on the African coast to be hung as a pirate? If you take this text in their sense; it is a complete justification of the slave trade; far more clear than it is of slavery. For: "Of them shall ye buy," etc., not them shall ye hold. Certainly his interpretation of this text

proves to much and therefore, by his own quoted canon proves nocting For my brother himself roundly denounces the save made as an "infernal traffic."

Ma Res. I did not denounce the buying of slaves: we are under ligations of humanity often to do that; but the spe culating in them for money-the tearing apart of families, &c.

Ma. BLANCHARD. You hear the brother's explanation, and I desire you should allow it all the force which it de

serves

I now resume the argument-with this remark, that, if you buy a slave only to set him free, your act is not slave-holding; it is an act of redemption. When the United States bought Americans from the Algerines, it was not slave-trading. We bought them to set them free. Now the whole question is simply this: were those bondmen which were bought by the Jews, slaves in the hands of their Hebrew masters or not? If they were not, then there was no slavery among the Jews, and his whole vaunted Bible argument is founded in and drawn from a mistake. But if they were slaves to the Jews, then the text justifies, not only slavery, but the slave trade, the original kidnapping, middle-passage, auction mart, coffle and all. He can no more escape from this than he can from the gripe of death. So truly as that text justifies holding slaves, in Kentucky or Virginia or Tennessee; so truly is it a warrant for the slave trade by which those slaves are procured; for its leading idea and object, is to direct the Jews to buy their bondmen of heathen nations, nations which were to them what Africans are to us. And when Sir John Hawkins, under Elizabeth, commenced the slave trade, it was founded and defended upon this very And, according to Dr. Rice's interpretation, Hawkins was right. They reasoned fairly, from my friend's premises; for if it authorises the holding, it authorises the trading, in slaves. But it does neither-blessed be Godit does neither!

text.

Nor does his argument hold good if it did both. There is not in the text a sprinkling of American slave-holding and

American slave trading. in the persons of their ancestors, and are held by the title by which men hold stolen goods. I remember, when a student, the account given by one who had been in the slave trade. He said he had been a seaman before the mast upon the African coast, in a vessel engaged in this traffic; and that their custom was to take out boxes of muskets, powder, gunflints, and whiskey, and distribute them among the petty kings along the coast; and, at night, they could see the flaming villages, fired by these chiefs, in their savage marauds upon each other's territory, for slaves to freight the vessel in the offing; that they could sometimes hear the shouts of the conflict, and see the naked and affrighted wretches by the light of their flaming dwellings, flying from immediate death, or, what is worse, an eternal slavery in an unknown land. These wretches, captured in this revolting manner, in wars, stimulated and set on by the traders, were the ancestors of our slaves. That is the way, and such the title we have obtained to them. More than this, multitudes are now kidnapped, thus, brought direct to the United States, and "broken in" upon our plantations, being introduced in contempt of the law making it piracy, through Florida, and, at points along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The number thus introduced has been variously estimated, by speakers in Congress, but never lower than 13,000 per annum, besides the multitudes smuggled into Texas from the Island of Cuba, or openly received in some instances, as has been stated, in contempt of law. Thus ALL our slaves were stolen from Africa, directly in their own persons, or in the persons of their ancestors, and doubly stolen when infants at their birth: for human beings are BORN free.

The American slaves were stolen

Now, with these facts kept in view, what does my brother's text say? "From the heathen ye shall steal? No! "From them shall ye BUY bondmen," etc. Thus his own text, with his own interpretation, will not justify American slave-holding; for our slaves were stolen-stolen in their persons or their parents-stolen by the aid of boxes of mus

kets, powder, gunflints, and savage chiefs made drunk and employed as agents to steal them. Now his text has not a word about stealing. And my brother himself, does not go quite so far as to say that it is no sin to steal slaves; he only contends that it is right to hold them after they are stolen. Thus, even his own text with his own interpretation yields no justification to American slavery, without grossly perverting his own meaning of it.

But I now proceed to my brother's entrenchments-to his main grand proposition: Did God permit the Jews to hold slaves? I deny it. I deny it. And if he fails here, his whole argument fails; for it all depends on God's permission to the Jews to hold slaves.

This whole question turns on the status, the civil and social condition of the Hebrew "bondmen" named in his text. Were they slaves or not? I shall not here stop to go into Hebrew criticism with my brother. It is easily shown, taking a common Hebrew Bible and Gesenius's Lexicon, that the phrase, (Lev. xxv, 46.) "they shall be your bondmen forever," does not mean, that each man of them should be a slave during his life; but, "they," i. e., that sort of people, "shall be your bondmen forever"—that is, that sort of people shall always supply your bond-servants. Thus it is in the Hebrew-" Forever of them shall ye serve yourselves." You shall always get that sort of servants from that sort of people.' The Hebrew word, translated "buy," meaning, "get," "obtain," "procure," "buy." I shall not, however, stop, to translate Hebrew, or read commentators; but shall inquire directly, into what state were those servants, thus procured of the heathen, brought, WHEN THEY CAME AMONG THE JEWS?

And, in the first place, they were brought into a country, and among a people, who possessed, like Ohio, a free constitution. They were brought from slave States into what I shall show was a free State: it was as if the people of Ohio were allowed to procure servants from the people of Kentucky, and when thus procured, they were free, after paying