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But why be told that, even on such proofs, our citizens will be released from their captivity? We have long and sorely experienced the impracticable nature of this boon which, in the imagined relaxation of her deep injustice, she would affect to hold out. Go to the office of the department of state, within sight of where we are assembled, and there see the piles of certificates and documents, of affidavits, records and seals, anxiously drawn out and folded up, to show why Americans should not be held as slaves, and see how they rest, and will forever rest, in hopeless neglect upon the shelves! Some defect in form, some impossibility of filling up all the crevices which British exaction insists upon being closed; the uncertainty, if, after all, they will ever reach their point of destination, the climate or the sea where the hopes of gain or the lust of conquest are impelling, through constant changes, their ships; the probability that the miserable individual, to whom they are intended as the harbinger of liberation from his shackles, may have been translated from the first scene of his incarceration to another, from a seventyfour to a sixtyfour, from a sixtyfour to a frigate, and thus through rapid, if not designed mutations, a practice which is known to exist; these are obvious causes of discouragement, by making the issue at all times doubtful, most frequently hopeless. And this Great Britain cannot but know. She does know it, and, with deliberate mockery, in the composure with which bloated power can scoff at submissive and humble suffering, has she continued to increase and protract our humiliation as well as our suffering, by renewals of the visionary offer.

Again it is said, that our citizens resemble their men, look like them in their persons, speak the same language, that discriminations are difficult or impracticable, and therefore it is they are unavoidably seized. Most insulting excuse! And will they impeach that God who equally made us both, who forms our features, moulds our statures and stamps us with a

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countenance that turns up to his goodness in adoration and love? Impious as well as insulting! The leopard cannot change his spots or the Ethiopian his skin, but we, we, are to put off our bodies and become unlike ourselves as the price of our safety! Why should similarity of face yoke us exclusively with an ignominious burden? Why, because we were once descended from them, should we be made at this day, and forever, to clank chains? Suppose one of their subjects landed upon our shores-let us suppose him a prince of their blood-shall we seize upon him to mend our highways, shall we draft him for our ranks? Shall we subject him in an instant to all the civil burdens of duty, of taxation, of every species of aid and service that grow out of the allegiance of the citizen, until he can send across the ocean for the registers of his family and birth? What has her foul spirit of impressment to answer to this? Why not equally demand on our part, that every one of her factors, who lands upon our soil, should bring a protection in his pocket, or hang one round his neck, as the price of his safety? If this plea of monstrous outrage be, only for one instant, admitted, remember, fellow-citizens. that it becomes as lasting as monstrous. If our children, and our children's children, and their children, continue to speak the same tongue, to hold the same port with their fathers, they also will be liable to this enslavement, and the groaning evil be co-existent with British power, British rapacity, and the maxim, that the British navy must have men! If our men are like theirs, it should form, to any other than a nation callous to justice, dead to the moral sense, and deliberately bent upon plunder, the very reason why they should give up the practice, seeing that it is intrinsically liable to these mistakes, and that the exercise of what they call a right on their part necessarily brings with it the most high-handed wrongs to us.

I am a Roman citizen, I am a Roman citizen! was an exclamation that insured safety, commanded re

spect, or inspired terror, in all parts of the world. And although the mild temper of our government exacts not all these attributes, we may, at least, be suffered to deplore with hearts of agony and shame, that while the inhabitants of every other part of the globe enjoy an immunity from the seizure of their persons, except under the fate of war, or by acknowledged pirates-even the wretched Africans of late-to be an American citizen has, for five and twenty years, been the signal for insult and the passport to captivity. Let it not be replied, that the men, they take from us, are sometimes not of a character or description to attract the concern or interposition of the government. If they were all so, it lessens in nowise the enormity of the outrage. It adds, indeed, a fresh indignity to mention it. The sublime equality of justice recognizes no such distinctions, and a government, founded upon the great basis of equal right, would forget one of its fundamental duties, if in the exercise of its protecting power it admits to a foreign nation the least distinction between what it owes to the lowest and meanest, and the highest and most exalted of its citizens.

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Sometimes it is said that but few of our seamen are in reality seized! Progressive and foul aggravation! to admit the crime to our faces and seek to screen its atrocity under its limited extent. Whence but from a source hardened with long rapine, could such a palliation flow? It is false. The files of that same department, its melancholy memorials, attest that there are thousands of our countrymen at this moment in slavery in their ships. And if there were but one hundred, if there were but fifty, if there were but ten, if there were but one-how dare they insult a sovereign nation with such an answer? Shall I state to you a fact, fellow-citizens, that will be sufficient to rouse not simply your indignation, but your horror, and would that I could speak it at this moment to the whole nation, that every American, who has a heart to be inflamed with honest resentment, might hear; a fact that shows all

the excess of shame that should flush our faces at submission to an outrage so foul. I state to you upon the highest and most unquestionable authority, that two of the nephews of your immortal Washington have been seized, dragged, made slaves of on board of a British ship! Will it be credited? It is nevertheless true. They were kept in slavery more than a year, and as the transactions of your government will show, were restored to liberty only a few months since. How, Americans, can you sit down under such indignities? To which of their princes, which of their nobles, to which of their ministers, or which of their regents, will you allow, in the just pride of men and of freemen, that those who stand in consanguinity to the illustrious founder of your liberties, are second in all their claims to safety and protection? But we must leave the odious subject. It swells, indeed, with ever fruitful expansion, to the indignant view, but while it animates it is loathsome. If the English say it is merely an abuse incident to a right on their part, besides denying forever the foundation of such right where it goes to the presumptuous entry of our own vessels with their armed men, shall we tolerate its exercise for an instant when manifestly attended with such a practical, unceasing, and enormous oppression upon ourselves?

This crime of impressment may justly be considered-posterity will so consider it-as transcending the amount of all the other wrongs we have received. Notwithstanding the millions which the cupidity of Britain has wrested from us, the millions which the cupidity of France has wrested from us, including her wicked burnings of our ships; adding also the wrongs from Spain and Denmark; the sum of all should be estimated below this enormity. Ships and merchandize belong to individuals, and may be valued; may

*They were the sons of the late Fielding Lewis, of Virginia, who was immediate nephew to General Washington, for all which see the papers on file in the office of the Secretary of State.

be endured as subjects of negociation. But men are the property of the nation. In every American face a part of our country's sovereignty is written. It is the living emblem; a thousand times more sacred than the nation's flag itself; of its character, its independence and its rights; its quick and most dearly cherished insignium-towards which the nation should ever demand the most scrupulous and inviolable immunity. Man was created in his Maker's own image-" in the image of God created he him." When he is made a slave, where shall there be reimbursement? No, fellow-citizens, under the assistance and protection of the Most High, the evil must be stopped. His own image must not be enslaved. It was deservedly the first enumerated of our grievances in the late solemn message from the first magistrate of our land; on the eighteenth of June of this memorable year we appealed to the sword and to heaven against it, and we shall be wanting to ourselves, to our posterity; we shall never stand erect in our sovereignty as a nation if we return it to the scabbard until such an infamy and curse are removed. The blessings of peace itself become a curse, a foul curse, while such a stain is permitted to rest upon our annals. Never, henceforth, must American ships be converted into worse than butchers' shambles for the inspection and seizure of human flesh! We would appeal to the justice and humanity of their own statesmen, claim the interference of their Wilberforces; invoke the spirit of their departed Fox; call upon all among them, who nobly succeeded in their long struggles against the African slave trade, to stand up and retrieve the British name from the equal odium of this offence.

If it be true that injuries, long acquiesced in, lose the power of exciting sensibility, it may be remarked, in conclusion of this hateful subject, how forcibly verified it is in the instance of robbing us of our citizens. When it happens that some of them are surrendered up, on examination and allowance of the proofs, it is

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