V. We see, in the light of this story, the debasing, degrading, and withering influence of slavery upon its poor victim. Peter tells the truth, when he says, “no man can hold up his head _like a man_ if he is a slave.” Any person who has been on a southern plantation must confess, that there is a degraded and servile air upon the countenance of all the slaves. A more abject, low, vacant, inhuman look, cannot be seen in the face of a being in the world, than you see when you meet a southern slave. It is not the tame and subdued look of a jaded beast. It is infinitely more painful to behold a slave than such a spectacle. He seems to be a man with the soul of a beast; God’s image does not speak from his dim and lustreless eye, or his lifeless and degraded bearing. You see a human form, but you cannot see the image of his Maker and Father there. The slave loses his self-respect, and all regard for his nature. He is shut out from all the lovely and glorious objects of creation; and a soul which was made to soar upward in an eternal flight towards its Sire, is smothered, and debased, and ruined;—its existence is almost blotted from creation, and when it leaves its abused and lacerated house of mortality, the world does not feel the loss;—the departure is unnoticed, except by a few who loved him in life, and are glad when his pilgrimage is over. The spirit flies, “no marble tells us whither and he is forgotten, and only a few like himself know that he ever existed in a green and beautiful world. But “a soul is a deathless thing,” and that soul shall _speak_ at the last judgment day! It shall tell its tale of blood to an assembled universe, and that universe shall pronounce the doom of its murderer. ☜ In forecasting the proceedings of the last day, I tremble to think I shall be one of its spectators; _not because I shall be tried_, for I humbly trust I shall have an advocate there, whose plea the Judge will accept, and whose robe of complete righteousness shall mantle my naked spirit. But the revelations of that solemn tribunal, which millions of enslaved Africans shall unfold, will make the universe turn pale. And I should feel a desire to withdraw behind the throne, till the sentence had been passed upon all buyers, and sellers, and owners, of the image of the Omnipotent Judge, and executed; did I not wish to behold _all the scenes_ of that great day, and mingle my sympathies with _all the fortunes of that Throne_. For, as I expect to stand among that mighty company, who shall cluster around the Judgment Seat, _I do believe, that God’s Book will contain no page so dark with rebellion and crime, as that which records the story of American Slavery_! And yet I believe that that Book will embrace the history of the whole creation.