[Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman by Austin Steward]@TWC D-Link book
Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman

CHAPTER XXXVII
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Men of learning and genius, are now found among those with fleecy locks, and good mechanics with dusky complexion.
This marked improvement in the condition and rapid advancement in intelligence among our people, seems to have alarmed the colonizationists, and made them fearful that those very down-trodden slaves, who have for years labored for nought; whose blood and tears have fertilized the Southern soil, may, perchance, become their equals in intelligence, and take vengeance on their oppressors for the wrongs done them; and lest they should do so, they would gladly remove them to some far-off country.
Yet here, in North America, will the colored race remain, and ere long in my opinion, become a great people, equal with the proud Anglo-Saxon in all things.

The African has once been a powerful nation, before Christian Englishmen invaded her coasts with rum, and incited her chiefs to war, by purchasing with gaudy, but worthless trinkets, her conquered captives; and we have every reason to believe, that though her glory as a nation has departed, that her sons will yet be acknowledged free men by the white population of this country.
There have been black generals in the world before Napoleon was born, and there may be again; and to-day, notwithstanding all the prejudice against color, that everywhere exists in this guilty nation, there are men of talent among us, inferior to none on the earth; nor are their numbers few, though rapidly increasing.
Well may the South arouse herself, form societies, replenish its treasury with a tax imposed on the free colored people, to defray the expense of sending manumitted slaves to Liberia! Listen a moment to the cant of the colonizationist.

Hear him talk of the duty he owes to Africa, and how happy, how intelligent, how prosperous everything is in Liberia.

But when that delightful country asks to be taken into fellowship with the United States, and to have her independence recognized--ah, then he lifts his hands in horror and begs to be excused from so close a relation.
This is all cant, in my humble opinion; and when I see men so anxious to send the negro out of their sight, I feel quite certain that they are conscious of having deeply wronged him, and think to remove him, to atone for their guilty consciences.

Would they refuse to acknowledge the independence of Liberia, if their interest in the colored people was genuine, especially when several other nations had done so?
Oh, no.


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