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Margaret Addle’s Address

Spoken by Margaret Addle on her leaving School April 1822. Written for the Occasion by C.C.A.

I appear before you, as regards myself under very interesting circumstances. It is to take my leave of my School Mates and much endeared teachers. In doing this, I feel it difficult to suppress those feelings which such an occasion is calculated to produce on a heart sensible of obligations so numerous as those which I am under to the gentlemen who support, and the teachers who have had the immediate superintendence of, the institution.

The advantages which this school is calculated to afford to the children of color, have on former occasions been presented to your view. I therefore shall be excused from repeating them. I need only to point you to those specimens, and remind you of the exercises this day exhibited before you, to demonstrate a truth which must at no distant period find its way to the hearts of the most incredulous viz. That the African race, (p. 37) though by too many of their fellow men have long been, [and] still are, held in a state, the most degrading to humanity, and nevertheless, endowed by the same almighty power that made us all, with intellectual capacities, not inferior to any of the grater human family.¹

In looking round on my school mates, I observe one among them who excites my most tender solicitudes.
     ---It is my Brother.---
John, this I feel to be an occasion which calls up all those tender emotions which he ever has designed should be felt by brother and sister towards each other.
What shall I say to you?
Oh, if I were called to part with you as some poor girls have, to part with their equally dear kindred, and each of us (like them) to be forcibly conveyed away into wretched slavery (p.38) never to see each other again---but I must forbear--Thank heaven it is not, no is not the case with us; nor have I ever the anxiety which the circumstances of leaving you under the charge of strangers would produce. No, I leave you to receive instruction, advice reproof, and every other salutary means of informing your mind and correcting your morals, from well known, and long tried friends; be obedient, diligent and studious and, when the period shall arrive for you to take your leave of this school. I trust it will be under circumstances no less affecting to you, than the present is to me.