18. For your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue hath muttered perverseness. lix, 3.

Isa.

reckless population, who have no interest in the soil, and care not how much it is impoverished. Public improvements are neglected; and the entire continent does not present a region for which nature has done so much, and art so little."

18. Your hands are defiled with blood. How true to the very letter, this and some of the following verses describe the conduct of many in these United States, the following testimonies will show; they are from scores of the kind which might be adduced.

"The Winchester (Va.) Republican, has an interesting narrative of a case of kidnapping, in which a woman was rescued, though the wretch who sold her to a trader in human flesh escaped. Dealing in slaves has become a large business. Establishments are made at several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places of deposit are strongly built, and well supplied with iron thumb-screws and gags, and ornamented with cow-skins, and other whips, oftentimes BLOODY. But the laws of these States permit the traffic, and it is suffered."— Niles' Weekly Register for 1829.

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To enumerate all the horrid and aggravating instances of men-stealing, which are known to have occurred in the State of Delaware, within the recollection of many of the citizens of that State, would require a volume. In many cases, whole families of free colored people have been attacked in the night, beaten nearly to death with clubs, gagged and bound, and dragged into distant and hopeless slavery, leaving no traces behind, except the BLOOD from their wounds.

"The ingenuity and stratagems employed by kidnappers in effecting their designs, are such as to prove that the most consummate cunning is no evidence of wisdom or moral purity, nor incompatible with the most consummate villany. A monster in human shape was detected in Philadelphia,

19. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; their thoughts are thoughts of iniquity, wasting and destruction are in their paths. The way of peace they know not; and there is no judgment in their goings, they have made them crooked paths; whosoever goeth therein shall not know peace. Isa. lix, 7.

20. Therefore is judgment far from us, neither doth justice overtake us; we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkIsa. lix, 9.

ness.

21. For our transgressions are multiplied before thee, and our sins testify against us;-In transgressing and lying against the LORD, and departing away from our God, speaking oppression and revolt, conceiving and uttering from the heart words of falsehood. Isa. lix, 12.

22. And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off; for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey; and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him, that there was no judgment. Isa. lix, 14.

pursuing the occupation of courting and marrying mulatto women, and selling them as slaves.

"From the best information that I have had opportunities to collect, I am fully convinced that there are at this time, within the jurisdiction of the United States, several thousands of legally free people of color, toiling under the yoke of involuntary servitude, and transmitting the same fate to their posterity."-Portraiture of Dom. Slav. &c. by Dr. J. Torry.

22. Maketh himself a prey. It is so common for men generally to practice iniquity, that he who repents and for

23. Cast ye up, cast ye up, prepare the way, take up the stumbling block out of the way of my people. Isa. lvii, 14.

CHAPTER VIII.

all

God has pronounced the bitterest of woes upon such as are concerned in stealing men,—and upon all such as use the labors of their species without

wages.

1. For among my people are found wicked men ; they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men. Jer. v, 26.

sakes it, becomes a prey, a by-word, and a reproach among his neighbors. The Rev. J. D. Paxton, formerly minister of a congregation at Cumberland, Va. in right of his wife, was a slaveholder. But having with his pious companion become convinced of the sin of enslaving the human species, he repented of his error, and set his slaves free. He very soon after became a prey to the ill-will of those whose sins his conduct reproved, and was accordingly reproached and dismissed from his people.

A writer in the Christian Advocate and Journal, a religious paper published at New York, stated, not long since, that the Rev. Dr. Coke, one of the first bishops of the Methodist Episcopal church, said and preached so much against the sin of slavery, at the South, that it was thirty years before the enslavers, whom it irritated, ceased to reproach the Dr. and the people with whom he was connected, on this account! This was said to show the impolicy of preaching against slavery at the present day!

1. They set a trap; they catch men. The Rev. G. Bourne, who resided some time in Virginia, remarks concerning the "man-catchers" and their "traps" in this country as follows:

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Nothing is more common than for two of these white partners in iniquity, Satan-like, to start upon the prowl, and if they find a free man upon the road, to demand his certificate, (a certain writing which all free colored people at the South must have with them, or be deemed and taken for slaves) tear it in pieces or secrete it, tie him to one of their horses, hurry to some jail, while one whips the citizen along as fast as his horses can travel. There, by an understanding with the jailer, who SHARES in the spoil, all possibility of intercourse with his friends is cut off. At the earliest possible period, the captive is sold to pay the felonious claims of the law, brought through jugglery by this trio of man-stealers; and then transferred to some of their accomplices in iniquity, who fill every part of the Southern States' with fraud, rapine and blood."

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Dr. Torry, before mentioned, describes another kind of trap" by which thousands of poor souls have been "caught" in this land of Christians; he says:-"They have lately, (this was in 1817,) invented a method of attaining their objects through the instrumentality of the laws. Having selected a suitable free colored person, to make a pitch upon, the conjuring kidnapper employs a confederate, to ascertain the distinguishing marks of his body, and then claims and obtains him as a slave, before a magistrate, by describing those marks, and proving the truth of his assertions by his well instructed accomplice."

And here is another; it is given by a member of the Lane Seminary, and it may be relied upon as a correct representation of scores of similar "traps" which are set in many other parts of the nation. He says:—

"A member of this institution, recently visiting among the colored people of Cincinnati, entered a house where was a mother and her little son. The wretched appearance of the house induced the visiter to suppose that the husband of the woman must be a drunkard. He inquired of the boy, who was about two or three years old, where his father was? He replied, Papa stole.' The visiter seemed not to understand, and turning to the mother, said, 'what does he mean?' She then related the following circumstances. About two years ago, one evening her husband was sitting in the house, when two men came in, and professing great friendship, persuaded him, under some pretence, to go on board a steam

2. They are waxen fat, they shine; yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked; they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge. Jer. v, 28.

3. For if ye thoroughly amend your ways, and your doings; if ye thoroughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbor; if ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place; then will I cause you to dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers, forever and ever. Jer. vii. 5.

4. Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people. Oh that I might leave my people, and go from them! for they be all adulterers, an assembly of treacherous men. Jer. ix, 1.

boat, then lying at the dock, and bound down the river. After some hesitation he consented to go. She heard nothing from him after this, for more than a year, but supposed he had been kidnapped. In the spring of 1833, Dr.

of Cincinnati, saw him and recognized him, in a drove of slaves at Natchez, Miss., and in a conversation which he held with him, he learned that the negro had been driven about from place to place, since he was decoyed from home, by the soul-drivers,' had been bought or sold two or three times, and once had been immured within the walls of a jail for safe keeping." And see the 18th note in the preceding chapter, where other kinds of "man-traps" are described, and by which the free and unoffending citizens of this Rcpublic are caught and enslaved.

4. They be all adulterers. And in view of the crimes of this nature, which are fostered, legalized, and perpetuated by the slave system, with what propriety may one adopt the language of this text? Take the following as evidence upon