barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to
slavery, and governed as subjects with absolute and despotic power, and which they then looked
upon as so far below them in the scale of created being, that intermarriages between white
persons and negroes or mulattoes were regarded as unnatural and immoral, and punished as
crimes, not only in the parties, but in the person who joined them in marriage. And no
distinction in this respect was made between the free negro or mulatto and the slave, but this
stigma, of the deepest degradation, was fixed upon the whole race.

ii. Declaration of Independence
The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive.

It begins by declaring that, "when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for
one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature
and nature's God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they
should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

It then proceeds to say: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among them is
life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if
they were used in a similar instrument at this day, would be so understood. But it is too clear for
dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of
the people who framed and adopted this Declaration; for if the language, as understood in that
day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of
Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they
asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they
would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

Yet the men who framed this Declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements-
high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on
which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and
how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not, in any part of the
civilized world, be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been
excluded from civilized governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They
spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary
language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated
from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of
or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were
supposed to need protection.

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