The Pennsylvania Mercury and Universal Advertiser

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MANCHESTER, February 4th, 1788.
IN the second number of a new periodical work called REPOSITORY, under the title Original Article, I find that following "LETTER of a NEGRO" - and whatever may be the colour of the writer's face, the strength of his arguments renders any apology unnecessary for laying it, at this time, before the public. To the cool consideration of the calm philosophers, Vindex and Anglus,* I strongly recommend it; and I hope the other disinterested BRITISH ADVOCATES for SLAVERY, will not deem it unworthy of their perusal.
L.

*Writers under these signatures, who have lately favoured the public with their sentiments in favour of the African slave trade, in the Liverpool and other newspapers; to whom I also recommend the following extract from the petition to the House of Commons of the inhabitants of the town and neighborhood of Sheffield, for effecting the abolition of that traffic.

"Your petitioners, therefore, humbly solicit this honorable house to proceed to a full and thorough investigation of this important subject: and if the most weighty and urgent reasons cannot be opposed to those advanced by your petitioners; and if those who are more immediately concerned in the question, cannot prove the Slave trade from Africa to be agreeable to the dictates of humanity, conformable to just ideas of liberty, and confident with the genuine precepts of religion, that then this honourable house will take such steps as their wisdom may be deemed necessary, for the abolition of that inhuman and disgraceful traffic."

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LETTER of a NEGRO.
I AM one of that unfortunate race of men who are distinguished from the rest of the human species by a black skin and woolly hair: disadvantages of very little moment in themselves, but which prove to us a source of the greatest misery, because there are men who will not be persuaded that it is impossible for a human soul to be lodged within a fable body. The West-Indian planters could not, if they thought us men, so wantonly spill our blood; nor could the natives of this land of liberty, deeming us of the same species with themselves, submit to be instrumental in enslaving us, or think us proper subjects of a sordid commerce. Yet, string as the prejudices against us are, it will not, I hope, on this side the Atlantic, be considered as a crime for a poor African not to confess himself a being of an inferior order to those, who happen to be of a different colour from himself; or be thought very presumptuous in one who is but a negro, to offer some reflections upon the wretched condition of his countrymen, to the happy subjects of this free government. They will not, I trust, think worse of my brethren for being discontented with so hard a lot as that of slavery; nor disown me for their fellow creature, merely because I deeply feel the unmerited sufferings which my countrymen endure.

It is neither the vanity of being an author, nor sudden and capricious gust of humanity which has prompted the present design. It has been long conceived, and long been the principal subject of my thoughts. Even since an indulgent master rewarded my youthful services with freedom, and supplied me at a very early age with the means of acquiring knowledge, I have laboured to understand the true principles in which the liberties of mankind are founded, and to possess myself of the language of this country, in order to plead the cause of those who were once my fellow slaves, and if possible to make my freedom in some degree the instrument of their deliverance.
The first thing which seems necessary, in order to remove those prejudices which are so unjustly entertained against us, is to prove that we are men; a truth which is difficult of proof only, because it is difficult to imagine by what arguments it can be combated. Can it be contended that a difference of colour alone can determine a difference of species? And if not, in what single circumstance are we different from mankind? What variety is there in our organization? What inferiority of art in the fashioning of our bodies? What imperfection in the faculties of our minds? "Hath not a negro eyes? Hath not a negro hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food; hurt with the same weapons; subject to the same diseases; healed by the same means; warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a white man is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you poison us, do not die?" Are we not exposed to all the same wants? Do we not feel all the same sentiments? Are we not capable of all the same exertions - and are we not capable of all the same exertions - and are we not entitled to all the same rights as other men?
Yes - and it is said we are men, it is true; but we are men addicted to more and worse vices than those of any other complection, and such is the innate perverseness of our minds, that Nature seems to have marked us out for slavery. Such is the apology perpetually made for our masters, and the justification offered for that universal proscription under which we labour.
But I supplicate our enemies to be, though for the first time, just in their proceedings toward us, and to establish the fact before they attempt to draw any conclusion from it. Nor let them imagine that this can be done by merely asserting that such is our inhuman masters have agreed to give us, and which they have too industriously and too successfully propagated, in order to palliate their own guilt by blackening the helpless victims of it, and to disguise their own cruelty under the semblance of justice. Let the natural depravity of our character be proved - not by appealing to declamatory invectives, and interested representations, but by shewing that a greater proportion of crimes have been committed by the wronged slaves of the plantations, than by the luxurious inhabitants of Europe', who are happily strangers to those aggravated provocations by which our passions are every day irritated and incensed. Shew us that of the multitude of negroes, who have within a few years transported themselves to this country, and who are abandoned to themselves; who are corrupted by example, prompted by penury, and instigated by the memory of their wrongs to the commission of every crime - shew us, I say, (and the demonstration, if it be possible, cannot be difficult) that a greater proportion to these, than of white men, have fallen under the animadversion of justice, and have been sacrificed to your laws. Though avarice slander and insult our misery, and though poets heighten the horror of their fables by representing us as monsters of vice, the fact is, that if treated like other men, and admitted to a participation of their rights, we should differ from them in nothing, perhaps, but in out possessing stronger passions, nicer sensibility, and more enthusiastic virtue.
Before so harsh a decision was pronounced upon our nature, we might have expected, if sad experience had not taught us to expect nothing but injustice from our adversaries, that some pains would have been taken to ascertain what our nature is; and that we should have been considered as we are found in our native woods, and not as we are altered and perverted by an inhuman political institution. But, instead of this, we are examined, not by philosophers, but by interested traders: not as Nature formed us, but as man has depraved us - and from such an enquiry, prosecuted under such circumstances, the perverseness of our dispositions is said to be established. Cruel that you are! you make us slaves; you implant in our mind all the vices which are in some degree inseparable from that condition, and you then impiously impute to Nature and to God the origin of those vices, to which you alone have given birth, and punish in us the crimes of which you are yourselves the authors.
The conditions of slavery is in nothing more deplorable, than in its being so unfavorable to the practice of every virtue. The surest foundations of virtue is the love of our fellow-creatures, and that affection takes its birth in the social relations of men to one another. But to a slave these are all denied. He never pays or receives to grateful duties of a son. He never knows experiences the fond solitude of a father. The tender names of husband, or brother, and of friend, are to him unknown. He has no country to defend and bleed for. He can relieve no sufferings, for he looks round in vain to find a being more wretched than himself. He can indulge no generous sentiment, for he sees himself every hour treated with contempt and ridicule , and distinguished from irrational brutes by nothing but the severity of punishment. Would it be surprising, if a slave, labouring under all these disadvantages ---- oppressed, insulted, scorned, and trampled on, should come at last to despise himself, to believe the calumnies of his oppressors, and to persuade himself that it would be against his nature, to cherish any honorable sentiment, or to attempt any virtuous action? BEFORE YOU BOAST OF YOUR SUPERIORITY OVER US, PLACE SOME OF YOUR OWN COLOUR (IF YOU HAVE THE HEART TO DO IT) in the same situation with us; and see whether they have such innate virtue, and such unconquerable vigour of mind, as to be capable of surmounting minds free from the infection of every vice, even under the oppressive yoke of such a servitude.
But, not satisfied with denying us that indulgence to which the misery of our condition gives us so just a claim, our enemies have laid down other and stricter rules of morality to judge out actions by, than those by which the conduct of all other men is tied. Habits, which in all humans beings except ourselves are thought innocent, in us are deemed criminal - and actions which are even laudable in white men, become enormous crimes in negroes. In proportion to our weakness, the strictness of censure is encreased upon us, and as resources are with-held from us, our duties are multiplied. The terror of punishment is perpetually before our eyes; but we know not how to avert it, what rules to act by, or what guides to follow. We have written laws indeed, composed in a language we do not understand, and never promulgated; but what avail written laws, when the supreme law with us is, the capricious will of our overseers? To obey the dictates of our own hearts, and to yield to the strong propensities of nature, is often to incur severe punishment; and by emulating examples which we find applauded and revered among Europeans; we risk inflaming the wildest wrath of our inhuman tyrants.

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To judge of the truth of these assertions, consult even those milder and subordinate rules for our conduct, the various codes if your West-India laws: those laws which allow us to be men whenever they consider us as victims of their vengeance, but threat us only like a species of living property, as often as we are to be the objects of their protection: those laws by which, it may be truly said, that we are bound to suffer, and be miserable under pain of death. To resent an injury received from a white man, though of the lowest degree of life, and to dare to strike him, though upon the strongest and grossest provocation, is an enormous crime. To attempt an escape from the cruelties exercised over us, by flight, is punished with mutilation, and sometimes with death. To take arms against masters whole cruelty no submission can mitigate, no patience exhaust, and from which no other means of deliverance are left, is the most atrocious of all crimes; and is punished by a gradual death, lengthened out by torments so exquisite, that none but those who have been long familiarized with West-Indian barbarity, can hear the bare recital of them without horror. And yet I learn from writers whom you Europeans hold in the highest esteem, that treason is a crime which cannot be committed by a slave against his master; that a slave his master; that a slave stands in no civil relation towards his master and his slave ate in a state of war, and if the slave take up arms for his deliverance, he acts not only justifiably, but in obedience to a natural duty, the duty of self-preservation. I read in authors whom I find venerated by our oppressors, that to deliver one's self and one's countrymen from tyranny, is an act of the sublimest heroism. I hear Europeans exalted as the martyrs of public liberty, the saviours of their country, and the deliverers of mankind. I see their memories honoured with statues, and their names immortalized in poetry: and yet when a generous negro is animated by the same passion which enabled them; when he feels the wrongs of his countrymen as deeply, and attempts to revenge them as boldly, I see him treated by those same Europeans as the most execrable of mankind, and led out amidst curses and insults to undergo a painful, gradual, and ignominious death: and thus the same Briton who applauds his own ancestors for attempting to throw off the easy yoke imposed on them by the Romans, punishes us as a detested paricides for seeking to get free from the cuellest of all tyrannies, and yielding to the irresistible eloquence of an African Galgacus or Boadicea.

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Are then the reason and the morality for which Europeans so highly value themselves, of a nature so variable and fluctuating, as to change with the complexion of those to whom they are applied? Do the rights of nature cease to be such, when a Negro is to enjoy them? or does patriotism in the heart of an American rankle into treason?
A FREE NEGRO.