AFRICAN SLAVERY is, at present, the subject of all-absorbing interest
to the American mind; for, our people, almost intoxicated with their
own freedom, seem unsatisfied with those manifold blessings acquired
by the labors of their sires; and while they are conscious of not
excelling them in wisdom, virtue, or valor, they are becoming ideal,
and seem willing to sacrifice the practical, safe rules of republican
action, for mere idealisms, born in the dizzy sphere of their own
over-wrought imaginations. They tremble at the name of Washington,
whose purity and moral power shed lustre upon the name of man, and
they worship him as a god; but while the REAL WASHINGTON commands the
homage of mankind, and stands the intermediate between the race of men
and the Infinite, we find the imaginations of men ignoring reason, and
embarked upon a voyage aerial, amid the clouds. There they revel high
above the mountain tops of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, where
the atmosphere is pure, where the light is clear, and where the
lightnings play; but, alas for human weakness and frailty! they are
there only in imagination, though the splendid illusion is to them a
reality, and the pleasing dream of ideal beauty, which, by the magic
power of transmutation, annihilates or obliterates the reason and
memory, destroys those distinctions of great and little, right and
wrong, weakness and power, which nature has arbitrarily made, and the
experience of mankind recognized as fundamental; upon which all law is
based, and all order and civilization sustained and advanced, for the
security and elevation of nations and of men.