Thanks to your advocacy efforts on our behalf, we're happy to report that the recently passed Omnibus Spending Bill includes a very small increase in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities! While our work is not over with regards to the upcoming 2018 budget to be passed in the fall, the Omnibus Spending Bill represents an endorsement of the important work that the humanities do for our communities. These funds will continue to support our work of providing free access to authoritative content about Virginia's history and culture.
In an excerpt from his 1847 autobiography,
The Life and Sufferings of Leonard Black a Fugitive from Slavery, Leonard Black attacks the institution of slavery on the basis that it separates family members and robs
humans, who Black argues are made in God's image, of their higher nature.
It is in vain for apologists of slavery to defend it by such arguments as this: They
will tell you that the slaves of the south are better fed and clothed than the
colored people of the north. The fact is not admitted. But, suppose it were a fact.
Is man to be considered as a mere ox, to be bowed up and stall fed? Is he a mere
victuals grinder and clothes horse? Or, has he a higher nature? Has he not a mind
capable of rising higher and higher in all that is expansive, pure and holy? Has he
not within him a spark of pure Divinity, which, when he is surrounded with high and
ennobling influences, is fanned into a light so bright as to lead us to respond to
the glorious truth, Man is indeed made in the image of his God?
Do you talk of selling a man? You might as well talk of selling immortality
or sunshine!
— page 60 —
You might as well talk of your right to monopolise the atmosphere, to determine how
much air a man should breathe, and to retail it out to him by the jaw-full!
Again, it is said the slave has a maintenance guaranteed to him in old age,
and is thus rendered free from those corroding cares in reference to his support
which wear upon the poor free man. Is this provision of so high a consequence that
men voluntarily submit to slavery? Are the masters willing to exchange the advantages
derived from the unrequited labor of the slave for a freedom from this guarantee? The
slaveholders of the south cannot make us believe they are so verdant as thus to have
mistaken their interest. Away, then, with the argument that a God-created MAN be made
a man-created thing!
American fathers, let me ask you, are the advantages of slavery sufficient
to induce you to submit to the terrible wrong of being sepa-
— page 61 —
rated
from your wives and children, and sold to a distant owner? American mothers,
do you desire that your husbands should be torn from the hearth-stone, and sold from
your presence forever? Do you wish your children snatched from your cradles, knocked
off at auction to the highest bidder, to go away from you forever? If not, then let
your apologies for slavery cease.
Reader, I take my leave of you, with the fond hope, that the recuperative
moral energies both of the north and the south will soon herald the dawn of that
glorious day when the sweat and blood of the unfortunate African shall no longer be
struck into coin for the use of the cruel, unrelenting white man.
