From The National Era.

  Chambers' Journal thinks it finds, in the "learned black blacksmith," Harrison W. Ellis, a living character and an actual history that parallels and justifies Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom. We see little or nothing of correspondence between these respective instances of historic and fictitious renown. Uncle Tom is a slave, of unmixed African blood, who learned, "somehow or other," to read the Bible, received its teachings in perfect simplicity of heart, without compromise or accommodation, put the practicability of its precepts to the proof of experience, illustrated its divine morality in his life, and died in the strength and for the sake of its truth. The Rev. H. W. Ellis was also a slave, of pure African blood, (his grandfather was an imported Mandingo.) of good repute for piety, very patient and persistent in spirit and purpose under such disabilities as his condition imposed, but without any strong marks of the religious enthusiast or moral hero in his history. He is a prodigy of learning; but we see none of the points which make Uncle Tom a problem or pattern, according as thinkers have more or less faith in his possibility. For our own part, he is a very real personage to us; and, moreover, not nearly so uncommon as he seems to be regarded. Fiction seldom presents such characters, but they are frequent, and even familiar, in experience, if we had but the insight to discern them. They abound among women and slaves. Thousands of such lives are passing unrecognised, and their deaths are unhappily lost to the use of which they are capable, because the observers will not and cannot know them. We do not think it too much to say that every family affords an example, at least once I a century; for Christianity is not an impracticable thing.—When all the early deaths which we witness are accounted for, and our own agency in them is understood, Uncle Tom will not be as singular as he is new to our stupidity of head and heart. It is in the family, where love and the sense of duty hold so strong a rule, that the patience and faith of the saints is most manifest. The slave, where he has the moral and physical temperament of Uncle Tom, is, in effect of the family, and has his whole life governed by its sentiment. If he had been presented as the devotee of a doctrine, the public missionary of a faith, and had voluntarily dedicated his life and at last sacrificed it for the world, receiving his death at the hand of strangers, he would have been that truly wonderful and rarest of men, a Christian martyr. We do not write him down commonplace, but it is sad to know that he is regarded as so wonderful and so worthy that his possibility is generally doubted. The sympathy which his story awakens would be still more serviceable to humanity if it were applied as widely as is required, to connect the wrongs and mitigate the sufferings of common life. The Book is making the tour of the world. By the time it shall be "known and read of all men," somebody will be found to explain it deeper, it may be, even, than its own author comprehends it. We venture to predict that a different style of heroism will be demanded, before the black race shall be redeemed from chattle slavery in this country. Patient and pious endurance is not the sort of moral that blunts the edge of tyranny; nor is physical resistance, the heroism of blood, an allowable or promising scheme of self-emancipation for our slave. Ellis and Douglass and their like, are more nearly the pattern men after which the caste may be moulded into freemen.

  The story of Mr. Ellis, as it is gathered from authenticated documents by Chambers' Journal, presents such points as these. He was born in Pixtsylvania County, Virginia, and was sold, first into Tennessee, and afterwards into Alabama. At the age of nine years he formed the purpose of learning to read, principally in order that he might be able to peruse the Bible. He had observed that ministers in preaching, always read from the Bible, and spoke of it as being the WORD OF GOD. The Word of God! The idea made a vivid impression upon him—such doubtless as we remember to have felt in our childhood, when we first encountered the amazing declaration, in the Book of Job, that "God answered him out of the whirlwind, and said." It might well arouse a thoughtful boy to such exertion as would open the wonders of such a book to his eyes. The lad had the matter of a great manhood in him. He had the susceptibility of genius, and against such there is no law and no impediment. At twenty-five he was still a slave, and laboring for his master at the trade of a blacksmith. He had read several books principally on religious subjects; something in these readings put him upon the study of the Latin language. He had no regular instruction, but received, it is stated, "some little assistance from one person and another, as casual opportunities afforded it."

  Except for the lack of sufficient leisure, it does not appear that the difficulties in his way were greater than have happened in the lives of many distinguished scholars, whose achievements are recorded in the history of men of letters. He was a slave, indeed; but the thirst of the intellect, like that of the appetites, is but little helped or hindered by ultimate considerations. Genius finds its motives and ends in itself. After acquiring some knowledge of Latin, he undertook the study of Greek, and subsequently of Hebrew. He was all this while a slave, and regularly at work at his anvil. He also read an studied some authors on natural science and moral philosophy, but his reading was chiefly confined to religious books—such as Dwight, Dick, and Boston.

  In 1846, the two Synods of Alabama and Mississippi combined to purchase his freedom, and that of his family, (a wife and two children.) with the view of sending him to Africa, under the care of the American Board of Missions. He was introduced at the Tuscaloosa Presbytery, as a candidate for clerical orders, and was afterwards ordained by the Synod of Alabama. His examination was eminently satisfactory. At this time the notice states that his wife, about his own age, could read; his son, about seventeen, could read and write, and had made some progress in the study of arithmetic, geography, and other branches of school learning. The daughter, eleven years old, had just commenced learning to read.—The opportunities of the children were only such as the casual intervals of their own and their father's labor afforded them. The whole family was purchased by the two Synods, for $2,500; and in March, 1847, they went, with a party of emigrants to the colony of Liberia. In 1848, Mr. Ellis was pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Monrovia. He was then studying the languages of two tribes of the natives, in order to preach to them in their own tongue. He had visited the Mandingo country, in which he was claimed as a countryman. In a letter to an American friend, he describes these people. They are Mohammedans, and some of their priests are intelligent—capable of reading Hebrew, when written in the Arabic character. In 1850, he says, in answer to certain inquiries propounded to him by a gentleman of Alabama: "The children of Liberia are exactly like the white children in America; and, as this part of our community have the best opportunity to equal the corresponding part in America, their equality can be better seen. Remarkable as white children in America are, old persons (slaves) had not the opportunity of seeing much of it where we came from; so that many think our children have more penetrating minds than those in America. This supposition arose out of the above mentioned circumstances; but it is not well founded. The fact is, if there be any difference, it is in this:—Perhaps the Liberia children learn as fast, if not faster, for the first few years; but it may be the young Americans continue their mental improvement the longest. I think—tho' there may be circumstances by which we shall be able, after a while, to account better for the facts just alluded to—I think it most probable that the lambs stop eating because the shepherds get out of corn."

  Mr. Ellis was between thirty and forty years of age, when he was appointed missionary to Africa; and his remarkable attainments in languages, and very clever progress in literature and theology, had all been made before that period, in such leisure as the life of a slave mechanic allowed him.

  Of his examination at the Presbytery, a competent witness says: "I believe I utter the sentiments of the whole Presbytery, and of a large assembly present, when I say, that for precision on the details of religious experience; for sober, rational views of what constitutes a call to the ministry; for sound, consistent, scriptural views of the leading doctrines of the Gospel, few candidates for the office have been known to equal him. He read a sermon of his own composition, correct in language, forcible in style, logical in argument, and abounding in pertinent quotations from the Bible. All this looked strange, incredible, from one who had been all his life a slave, with none but the ordinary privileges of a slave."

  Of his quality as a blacksmith, his money value as a slave, the general treatment experienced from his several masters, and his feelings and opinions about the institution, nothing is given in the notice before us. He is quoted only as saying that he "strove to make himself agreeable and happy in this condition, and compelled all his brethren to submission." What else he counsels, or would counsel if he were absolutely free in his position and office, we have no information. Expatriated as he is, and bound to the service of the pulpit among the heathen of Africa, it is of little consequence what he thinks or says upon the subject of slavery; his life is full enough of instruction to answer for him. He is another and a most unequivocal demonstration of the capacity of the black man for the culture and conditions of high civilization; and a plain proof, moreover, that when a slave comes up to the fashion pattern of a man, he gets too big for his shackles. Skill, as a mechanic, and attainments in scholarship, both tend alike, though in unequal degree, to emancipation. They are available in the assertion of manhood, and the vindication of its rights. Piety, as in the case of Uncle Tom, and apparently in that of the Rev. Ellis, is capable of being prostituted in the service of slavery. Because it acts upon the life mainly as a sentiment, it can be perverted into a sort of spiritual and moral handcuff, and made to answer the master as a restraint upon natural liberty. Ellis, his wife, and two children, were purchased for $2,500. This may have been much below their market value. When every slave in Virginia is really worth $5,000 in available faculties for the world's work and use, they will own themselves, and the system will be at an end by a clear financial necessity. That man is too cheap for a freeman who can be raised for much less than $1,000. The animal can be held in bondage easily enough and while he remains so, neither law nor gospel can emancipate him in fact; but when his educational enhancement will rent, for three or four hundred a year, he is free by the sheer forces of his acquired manhood.

  Beyond all measure, therefore, we re[Illegible] Mr. Ellis as a better case for the freedom of his race than any Uncle Tom that the South can produce, or Mrs. Stowe can imagine.—Her hero is a model [Illegible], and will answer on a safe precedent and example on the plantation. Read his story to a [Illegible] of [Illegible], and every enthusiast among them, that nature made noble and poetical, will be inspired with the spirit of self-sacrifice and submission. They will be fit for slavery, as well as for heaven. Mr. Ellis was not fir for a slave, and could not be kept one.

  Frederick Douglass was also born a slave, and for years entertained the religion of submission; but, happily, he apostatized, and escaped alive. He also, in a most eminent sense, was fitter to be a man than a slave, and it was not in Southern law, Northern prejudice, or sentimental gospel, to crush the soul out of him. Cut Uncle Tom out of the Cabin, and his story might be read to a slave insurrection, instead of the riot set; but a speech or a look from Douglass would have a very different effect. It will be long before the life and adventures of the latter will get as free circulation in the South, as is absolutely accorded to the history of the former.

  Depending upon the Tribune for our information, we are free to declare that, of all the speeches made at the late New York anniversaries, not one approaches that delivered before the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society by Frederick Douglass, in any quality which distinguishes men and thinkers from each other upon the platform.—Such a demonstration for fitness for freedom, and all the offices of civil life and business, is worth much more for the cause of emancipation than all the sacrifices which submission can make to the spirit of masterdom. Let us have more blacksmiths, scholars, orators, philosophers, and natural noblemen of the rase. We have victims enough already, and sympathy for suffering will be most profitably replaced by admiration for evincible magnanimity. It is the real evil of the negro race that they are so fit for slavery as they are, and so often admirable for their patience, contentment, and fidelity. It would be better for them and for the world, if they would more vigorously work out their salvation from bondage here, according to the world's standard of requirement, than content themselves, as they are so prone to do, with providing for a salvation that is to take effect after death. Religion is the highest truth and the supreme influence of human nature. The religion of the Cross, beyond any other, emancipates the life from the control of earth, but it is often only the worship of sorrow; and because it serves so well to die by, men are but too likely to forget that it is really intended to live by.—Douglass has the worthier apprehension of it, and we would not exchange him for a thousand martyrs of the plantation.

E.