Anti Slavery Bugle

"The Nigger's Grave."

In an article we copied last week, showing the pro-slavery condition of southern Illinois, reference was made to a fugitive slave who was killed in an attempt to take him, and whose resting place was contemptuously marked by an inscription—"The Nigger's Grave." When we read it, the following eloquent passage from one of George Thompson's lectures, occurred to us as a most appropriate commentary.

"Not only has the negro been denied the enjoyment of civil rights—not only has he been doomed to 'hew wood and draw water' for the white man; but the benefits of religion have been denied—his teachers have been persecuted and banished—the house in which he worshipped his God, and in which he was taught to lift his eyes in hope and confidence to one common Father—that house has been razed to its foundation; thus particularly, even in the present day, has his right to hope for immortality been denied, and he has been consigned to ignorance and vice, to the labor and treatment of a brute on earth, and the destiny of a brute hereafter. Yet his pale oppressor has proudly claimed immortality for himself, and has contemplated that immortality without dread of the judgment awaiting him for his ruthless conduct towards his sable victim. But (and I thank Heaven) a title to immortality is not the exclusive prerogative of the white man; they must both die the same death—both mingle with the same earth—both be resolved into the same element—both be judged at the same tribunal—by the same rule—both admitted to the same heaven, or banished to the same hell.

Yes! let the oppressor die! let men bear his corse to the tomb decked with the trappings of an earthly splendor! let them write his epitaph on marble, and celebrate virtues which he never had, and let them say, high on his escutcheon, Resurgam, Resurgam, Resurgam, I shall rise again; and I will visit the grave of the lowly negro, the enslaved, insulted, degraded and lacerated negro, and I will write upon the sod that covers his remains, Resurgam, Resurgam, Resurgam, I shall rise again."