American slave was created free and equal with his master, then all that the British writers charged would have been true enough, and American slavery, in comparison with British liberty—or what passed for such in Yorkshire and Birmingham—would have been a wrong, so deep, damning, and fathomless, that no words in our language would be able to express its enormity. How was the poor, ignorant, and helpless laborer, or even his defenders, Fox, Sheridan, and other liberal leaders of the day, to answer this 25argument? They did not attempt it. They admitted that “American slavery” was all that it was charged to be—that it was a wrong and evil immeasurably greater and more atrocious than any of those which the people of France had risen against, or that the masses in England suffered under; but they hoped that the great principle of the American Revolution was strong enough to overcome this wrong, and in the process of time, to “abolish slavery,” and that liberty would become universal among Americans. Indeed, some of those who had been the most devoted believers in the great American doctrine, both in England and France, were so painfully impressed by the seeming wrong done the negro, that they lost their interest, to a great extent, in the real wrongs of the white man, and devoted all their efforts to the former. Societies were formed in London and Paris, funds contributed, books published, tracts distributed, and extensive arrangements entered into, with the sole purpose of relieving the “American slave” from the fancied wrongs that were heaped on him; and their societies, these “Amis des Noirs,” patronized by Robespierre and other leaders of the people, which were formed in almost every town in France and England, popularized the movement, and so identified the imaginary cause of the negro with that of the European masses, that to this day they doubtless seem inseparable. And even in our own times, we have witnessed the sorry spectacle of English laborers contributing of their wretched pittance to glorify some abolition hero or heroine of the “Uncle Tom” pattern, under the deplorable misconception, of course, that these blind tools of the enemies of liberty were faithful defenders of a common cause, when, in truth, they were vastly more dangerous to that cause than the open and avowed friends of despotism. But this very natural mistake of the friends of freedom in Europe, this ignorance and misconception of the negro nature and relations 26to the white man, which led Fox in England, and Robespierre in France, to confound the cause of the oppressed multitudes of their own race with the imaginary interests of negrodom, extended and unfortunate as it was and still is, was surpassed by a still more insidious and more extended influence. Wilberforce, who,
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