White Slavery in the Barbary States

History has been sometimes called a gallery, where, in living forms, are preserved the scenes, the incidents, and the characters of the past. It may also be called the world's great charnel house, where are gathered coffins, dead men's bones, and all the uncleanness of the years that have fled. As we walk among its pictures, radiant with the inspiration of virtue and of freedom, we confess a new impulse to beneficent exertion. As we grope amidst the unsightly shapes that have been left without an epitaph, we may at least derive a fresh aversion to all their living representatives.

In this mighty gallery, amidst a heavenly light, are the images of the benefactors of mankind--the poets who have sung the praise of virtue, the historians who have recorded its achievements, and the good men of all time, who, by word or deed, have striven for the welfare of others. Here are depicted those scenes where the divinity of man has been made manifest in trial and danger. Here also are those grand incidents which attended the establishment of the free institutions of the world; the signing of Magna Charta, with its priceless privileges of freedom, by a reluctant monarch; and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the annunciation of the inalienable rights of man, by the fathers of our republic.

On the other hand, in ignominious confusion, far down in this dark, dreary charnel house is tumbled all that now remains of the tyrants, the persecutors, the selfish men, under whom mankind have groaned. Here also, in festering, loathsome decay, are the monstrous institutions or customs, which the earth, weary of their infamy and injustice, has refused to sustain--the Helotism of Sparta, the Serfdom of Christian Europe, the Ordeal by Battle, and Algerine Slavery.

From this charnel house let me to-night draw forth one of these. It may not be without profit to dwell on the origin, the history, and the character of a custom, which, after being for a long time a byword and a hissing among the nations, has at last been driven from the world. The easy, instinctive, positive reprobation, which it will receive from all, must necessarily direct our judgment of other institutions, yet tolerated in equal defiance of justice and humanity. I propose to consider the subject of White Slavery in Algiers, or perhaps it might be more appropriately called White Slavery in the Barbary States. As Algiers was its chief seat, it seems to have acquired a current name from that place. This I shall not disturb; though I shall speak of White Slavery, or the Slavery of Christians, throughout the Barbary States.

If this subject should fail in interest, it cannot fail in novelty. I am not aware of any previous attempt to combine its scattered materials in a connected essay.

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