We likewise saw with shame the African slaves, who had been sold to you
on public faith, and under the sanction of acts of Parliament, to be
your servants and your guards, employed to cut the throats of their
masters.
You will not, we trust, believe, that, born in a civilized country,
formed to gentle manners, trained in a merciful religion, and living in
enlightened and polished times, where even foreign hostility is softened
from its original sternness, we could have thought of letting loose upon
you, our late beloved brethren, these fierce tribes of savages and
cannibals, in whom the traces of human nature are effaced by ignorance
and barbarity. We rather wished to have joined with you in bringing
gradually that unhappy part of mankind into civility, order, piety, and
virtuous discipline, than to have confirmed their evil habits and
increased their natural ferocity by fleshing them in the slaughter of
you, whom our wiser and better ancestors had sent into the wilderness
with the express view of introducing, along with our holy religion, its
humane and charitable manners. We do not hold that all things are lawful
in war. We should think that every barbarity, in fire, in wasting, in
murders, in tortures, and other cruelties, too horrible and too full of
turpitude for Christian mouths to utter or ears to hear, if done at our
instigation, by those who we know will make war thus, if they make it at
all, to be, to all intents and purposes, as if done by ourselves.
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