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race, leaving untouched the white race. Perhaps he does not know that, in the worst days of the Polish aristocracy, this same argument was adopted as the excuse for holding white serfs in bondage, precisely as it is now put forward by the Senator, and that even to this day the angry Polish noble addresses his white peasant as the "son of Ham."
It hardly comports with the gravity of this debate to dwell on such an argument, and yet I can not go wrong if, for the sake of a much-injured race, I brush it away. To justify the Senator in his application of this ancient curse, he must maintain at least five different propositions, as essential links in the chain of the Afric-American slave: first, that, by this malediction, Canaan himself was actually changed into a "chattel," whereas he is simply made the "servant" of his brethren; secondly, that not merely Canaan, but all his posterity, to the remotest generation, was so changed, whereas the language has no such extent; thirdly, that the Afric-American actually belongs to the posterity of Canaan — an ethnological assumption absurdly difficult to establish; fourthly, that each of the descendants of Shem and Japheth has a right to hold an Afric-American fellow-man as a "chattel" — a proposition which finds no semblance of support; and fifthly, that every Slave-master is truly descended from Shem or Japheth — a pedigree which no anxiety can establish! This plain analysis, which may fitly excite a smile, shows the five-fold absurdity of an attempt to found this pretension on
"Any successive title, long and dark,
Drawn from the mouldy rolls ef Noah's ark."
From the character of these two arguments for property in man, I am brought again to its denial.
It is natural that Senators who pretend that, by the law of nature, man may hold property in man, should find this pretension in the Constitution. But the pretension is as much without foundation in the Constitution as it is without foundation in nature. It is not too much to say that there is not one sentence, phrase, or word — not a single suggestion, hint, or equivocation, even — out of which any such pretension can be implied; while ereat national acts and important contemporaneous declarations in the Convention which framed the Constitution, in different forms of language, and also controlling rules of interpretation
