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THE DESTINY OF THE RACES OF THIS CONTINENT. 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 MERCANTILE LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 
 
 BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 
 
 ON THE 26th OF JANUARY, 1859. 
 
 BY FRANE: p. BLAIR, JR., 
 
 OF MISSOURI. 
 
 WASHINGTON, D. C. 
 
 BUELL & BLANCHARD, PRINTERS. 
 1859. 
 
ADDEESS OF MR BLAIR. 
 
 Mr. Blair was introduced by John H. Pillsbury, Esq., President of 
 the Association, and said : 
 
 M}-. President and Ladies and Gentlemen : 
 
 The presumption of appearing in this place, so exalted, argues a 
 temerity of which I beg you to believe me incapable, of my own mere 
 motion. I have been pressed into this adventure by good friends, who 
 would not have me forfeit, by failure, here, the little reputation that I 
 have at home. They must, then, rely upon the generous sympathies 
 of this refined audience to disarm criticism in favor of one who hazards 
 himself at their bidding, to gratify you with the novelty of a backwoods- 
 man in the literary character of a lecturer for Boston. I deprecate, in 
 advance, all judgment of my eifort by the standard you are accustomed 
 to apply. Born and bred among the hunters of Kentucky, attaining 
 manhood in Missouri while still the Far West, and finishing my educa- 
 tion as a companion of the Rangers of the Rocky Mountains, I should 
 deserve derision if I came here to make a display of scholarship or elo- 
 quence, here, where a long line of illustrious orators, filling the first half 
 of this century with an eloquent renown, vieing with that conferred by 
 the great masters of the art of oratory upon Athens and Rome, is suc- 
 ceeded by another, which now promises to keep the crown for the Bay 
 State, and its academic city, for centuries to come. The inspiration 
 which thus triumphs through successive generations had its origin in 
 that blood from which has arisen the lofty monument that looks down 
 upon your city, its surrounding hills and villas, and the rolling ocean. 
 That inspiration has lifted up a loftier and more enduring monument 
 in the divine power of epic speech, which has given your city an eleva- 
 tion and illumination which attracts the eye of all our land, and sheds 
 its rays beyond the Atlantic. Here the throes of the Revolution gave 
 birth to the infant Hercules, that in this cradle crushed the Hydras of 
 a vast military power, and by this first labor quickened the heroic spirit 
 now throbbing in the bosoms of the oppressed throughout the world. 
 Here is the forum where Freedom nerved eloquence to exhort to its 
 achievement and secure its conquests forever on this continent. I do 
 
not assert pretensions to the least of the attributes that have Tvorked 
 these miracles, much less to emulate the glory of the gifted men who 
 have employed them all in the service of the country. I come to invoke 
 those who now flourish, to bring the commanding influence they inherit 
 to assist in this conjuncture of the Republic which is to shape the des- 
 tiny of the races of this continent, and sway it, to give a new impulse 
 to the vital principle. Liberty, which its enemies would crush under 
 the shields made to protect it. 
 
 I desire to present to the young merchants of Boston, upon whose 
 invitation I speak, two great practical questions, largely afiecting their 
 own profession, and worthy of their serious consideration. One is the 
 great enterprise which is to pour the commerce of India and the East 
 through the heart of our country by means of a great national highway 
 between the oceans, spreading the people of our own race across the 
 great temperate zone. The other, to create a new empire for their com- 
 merce within the tropics of America, requiring for its maintenance 
 the peculiar organization of the colored races ; and both enterprises con- 
 curring with an irresistible power, by severing their unnatural connec- 
 tion, to exalt the destiny of all the races of this continent. That the 
 races are discriminated by indelible marks of difierence, appears to sug- 
 gest to some persons only the idea of superior and inferior races, and 
 that the one was made to be enslaved by the other. It does not appear 
 to me to follow, even if the superiority of one race is established, that 
 therefore the inferior races are made for its service. On the contrary, 
 it is to me a conclusive argument against blending them in the same 
 community, to deteriorate the superior by admixture or contact with the 
 inferior races, and to create caste, which experience shows is disastrous 
 to all alike. But, with the history of the whole world before us, it is 
 strange that any one should not see that the marked distinctions be- 
 tween the races indicate this adaptability to the various climates of our 
 earth, as plainly and conclusively as the vegetable life of each zone 
 proclaims the climate which produced it. That when we see the white 
 race wither under the tropics, or change the pale face for the darker 
 hues which distinguish the children of the sun, any one should close 
 his eyes to the lesson it teaches, that the races are made for or made 
 by the climate in which they dwell, and, like the flora and fauna of a 
 land, will flourish only in a congenial clime. 
 
 Upon this continent there are regions suited to each of the races that 
 inhabit it — transport them to others unsuited, and they deteriorate. 
 The proud Spaniard, whose courage and vigor gave him the wealth of 
 the American tropics, has already become efiete ; and the negro, brought 
 thither in chains to minister to his pleasure, is now fast rising to be- 
 come the ruling race in those regions, gaining rapidly in number, and 
 threatening to overwhelm all others. It is time that this great nation 
 should accept a truth, which the Almighty has so plainly written on all 
 his works, and adopt a policy in harmony with His will, which neither 
 nations nor individuals can violate with impunity. What the policy of 
 the Government has been touching this great concern, what it shall be 
 in the future in furtherance of the inevitable destiny of the races to re- 
 sume their true zones on this continent, it is my design to consider. 
 
The present epoch is a new starting point in our Government. The 
 impulse given by the movers of the Revolution has come to a pause, and 
 all seems tending to receive a new direction. " Life, liberty, and the 
 pursuit of happiness," were the rights which it was the design of those 
 who framed our institutions gradually to establish for all the races of 
 our continent. Those great men knew that the current of public senti- 
 ment flowed with full volume in that channel which their toil and their 
 patriotism had worked out, not only for the freedom of those whose cour- 
 age had conquered it, but for those even beyond the ocean who sympa- 
 thized with the effort. But their first thought was for the races at home. 
 Emancipation of the African slaves, that had been thrust upon our 
 shores by the cupidity of our British oppressors and their minions here, 
 was speedily accomplished throughout the northern part of the Confed- 
 eracy, under the impulse which first prompted our fathers to assert their 
 own freedom. Abolition of the slave trade, with a view to the same 
 result ultimately in all the States, was the unanimous act of the nation ; 
 and before this was done, to preclude an inducement for its continuance, 
 the ordinance of 1787, excluding Slavery from all its Territories, was 
 voted by the Confederation, before the Constitution existed to add its 
 sanction. That other inferior race among us, the Indian, was recog- 
 nised as having rights which the white man was bound to respect ; that 
 personal liberty, of which their kindred tribes of the south had been 
 deprived by the Spaniards, was recognised as a birthright, in which 
 they were to be protected, as well as that quasi-ownership in the lands 
 they occupied, of which they could not be divested without a compen- 
 sation deemed by themselves an equivalent. The whole scope of the 
 policy of the young Republic then embraced that grand leading idea on 
 which our Declaration of Independence based our individual liberties, 
 that all men are born equal in respect to that humanity which author- 
 izes them to claim justice at the hands of every superior power, as the 
 preservative of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which was 
 inherent in their nature. The Constitution, it is true, permitted that 
 portion of the African race which had been brought under our system 
 of colonial bondage to be retained " as persons held to service ; " but 
 in this very phrase it rejected the adoption of the law creating Slavery, 
 and only recognised existing circumstances growing out of the tyranny 
 it had overthrown, that "persons were held to service" whose obliga- 
 tions it could not dissolve. So far from recognising the rightfulness of 
 Slavery, the opprobrium of the term was rejected to exclude the infer- 
 ence of its adoption as a national institution, and a clause was inserted 
 authorizing Congress to pass that act abolishing the slave trade, and 
 likening the seizure of a man, to bring him to the level of a brute and 
 appropriate his labor, to that of stripping him of his goods at sea and 
 throwing him to the sharks. The crime was stigmatized as piracy. No 
 slave in Africa, or in any other part of the world, can lawfully be made 
 a slave in America. This proves that neither the great charter of our 
 Independence nor that of our Union ever contemplated Slavery as a 
 national institution, or even one to be long perpetuated as local, to make 
 slaves of the home-born race, when prohibited as to the foreign-born. 
 Such was the policy in which our Republic was inaugurated, and 
 
6 
 
 ■v^-hicli it pursued as long as it retained the impulse given b}'^ its founders. 
 Its Tvliole spirit has since been reversed, and its very life corroded by 
 the canker of Slavery entailed upon us. I shall not trace the slow pro- 
 gress of this insidious disease. It is sufficient to say that the Supreme 
 Court — ever prone to assert the power of the few in its own power, and 
 assimilate the Government to its own anti-republican organization — has 
 overthrown the fundamental principles of all our law, and of our religion 
 itself, which recognises every being with a soul, as a inan, and as hav- 
 ing some rights that all men are bound to respect. In this decree the 
 well-established precedents of every department of our Government are 
 annulled, and the public opinion of the great body of this nation, and 
 the construction given of the Constitution by the uninterrupted usage 
 under it, are violated, and the sense and conscience of every civilized 
 people on the earth set at naught and defied. The sublime thought 
 that has filled the bosoms of American patriots, philosophers, and poets, 
 and which the millions have ever uttered with rapture, " This, this is the 
 land of the free," the Supreme Judicature just now proclaims must be 
 surrendered to the doctrine which makes Slavery national, and, in spite 
 of the will of the people, opens up all our territories to become the home 
 of the slave ! It is this decree, reversing the principles of our revolu- 
 tion and the policy of our Government from its foundation, supported 
 by the Executive power and and a sectional oligarchy, which has at last 
 reached, through many minor controversies, the grand issue on which 
 the destiny of the races of this continent depends. To meet it in such 
 way as to avert the portended mischiefs, is now the greatest concern of 
 this country. It is every man's concern, and this must be my apology 
 for offering any suggestions about it. 
 
 In common affairs, men understood Lord Bacon's philosophy long 
 before he applied it to the advancement of the sciences. The prudent 
 and sagacious constantly look on the past portion of life, to learn from 
 its experiments what to pursue and what to avoid. So statesmen, who 
 have the welfare of races committed to their care, should look to their his- 
 tory to guide in the adoption of systems to promote their prosperity. 
 The founders of our Government were wise and good men, and called to 
 their aid in forming our institutions the experience of all enlightened na- 
 tions, especially that of the mother country and that of their own as colo- 
 nies. Without exception, the whole body of sages and patriots embraced 
 the Declaration of Independence as lying at the base of our whole polity, 
 and held that the liberties of mankind were the surest sources of the 
 wealth, power, and happiness, of a community. Slavery — universally 
 pronounced the curse of the country, the blot on its fair fame — was only 
 tolerated for the time, because time was necessary to effect a cure of 
 what was a chronic disease, which hasty and violent remedies would 
 aggravate, and might make mortal. It was soon, however, reduced 
 from its extended boundaries, and all the country that then belonged 
 to the Union, and which its power could reach, was dedicated to Free- 
 dom, in the confident hope that its growth under this invigorating power 
 would, in the course of years, produce a teeming population — the off- 
 spring of free labor — that would, by the overflow of its numbers, 
 made prosperous by industry and economy, by degrees remove the Af- 
 
rican-American race to a more congenial and free home within the 
 tropics. This expectation would have heen realized to some extent by 
 this time, had not a vast acquisition of territory, already stocked "with 
 slaves, been added to the Union. This opened up a way for the dis- 
 persion of the multiplying millions in the South, and prevented the mis- 
 chief from being felt, of retaining such an overshadowing crowd of slaves, 
 to drive out or starve out all the rest of the white race, if even the 
 masters were able to hold their places and the negroes in subjection. 
 
 But the policy which has built the tier of free States from the At- 
 lantic to the Mississippi will still accomplish its grand design, if the 
 patriotism and courage which began this movement remain among us 
 to urge it. If all the territory of this continent now free is maintained 
 in its freedom, the Slave Power, which received its new impulse from 
 the political ambition awakened by extended domain, must rapidly 
 shrink under the pressure of the robust strength of free labor, now 
 strong within the slave States, as a domestic element of opposition to 
 the competition of slaves, and becoming irresistible as a political in- 
 fluence beyond their limits, to crush those aspirations of ambitious men, 
 who found their schemes of subjecting our popular institutions upon the 
 prevalence of the institution of Slavery. I propose therefore to the 
 friends of the great cause of popular rights and free labor on this con- 
 tinent, to resume the conquering march in its behalf, first indicated by 
 Jefferson, defined and established by the ordinance of 1787, by all the 
 States in the Congress of the Confederation, and finally sanctioned in 
 the Constitution. That line of march terminated on the eastern bank 
 of the Mississippi river, because there terminated the territory belong- 
 ing to the Union. The voice of the majority in Congress and the nation, 
 on the acquisition of that region which opened the way to the Pacific, 
 was in favor of its resumption. The effort was defeated by the inter- 
 position of 10,000 slaves in Missouri, and the threat to dissolve the 
 Union, unless permitted to constitute it a slave State. This was the 
 first attempt to defeat the designs of the fathers of the Republic, in 
 dedicating its domain, unpolluted by Slavery, to the white race, and 
 opening the career to Freedom over the great West beyond the Missis- 
 sippi. The desperate struggle for Kansas has resulted more happily. 
 There, intrigue, menace, violence, and bloodshed, were all tried in vain 
 against the constancy of a brave and patient people, upholding a good 
 cause. This triumph over all the bad acts of bad men, abusing govern- 
 ment to their sinister aims, will restore Missouri, even its enemies ad- 
 mit, as a link in the chain of free States, to girdle the middle of the 
 continent from ocean to ocean. It is this grand consummation which is 
 to remove, in removing the cause, all the harassing controversies 
 threatening disruption between the States distinguished now by white 
 and black labor — the one elevating the industrious producer, the other 
 degrading the most useful employment by the opprobrium attached to 
 the slave. 
 
 Let me linger here, and take a survey of that glorious line of progress 
 marked out by the master minds of our early statesmen, and argue from 
 the past what are to be the results of that system through which they 
 hoped to secure a happy destiny for the various races it embraced at its 
 
8 
 
 inauguration. Of all tlie regions adapted to foster the energies, intel- 
 lectual and physical, of a heroic race of freemen, the world has none 
 equal to that which rises from the valley of the Mississippi along the 
 temperate central latitudes of this continent, ascends the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, where Pike's Peak commands its views, and stands as the stand- 
 ard-bearer, beckoning the nation — which descends again, and forms the 
 great basin of the continent, the western rim — the Sierra Nevada — 
 making the border heights, from which it looks down on California and 
 the Pacific ocean. I have trod much of this vast scene — its great plain 
 on the east, with its meandering rivers, spreading out lines of forest 
 shades amid the illimitable prospect — its mountain grandeur on the 
 slopes clothed in luxuriant grass and wild vines, the elevations with 
 lofty woods, the crests combing out at some places with rich minerals, 
 at others crowned with turrets of rock, the highest, with imperishable 
 snow — the parks and valleys between, now the winter homes of the wild 
 tribes and their horses, on which they sweep the plains, in their hunts 
 and wars, at no distant day to become the birth-place of a nobler and 
 a fairer progeny than Circassia can boast, or the Caucasus from which 
 it is the pride of our race to have descended. 
 
 It is remarkable that the blessings which Providence has prepared 
 on this continent for civilization seem to emerge all of a sudden to the 
 view, as the condition of society has reached the point to make appro- 
 priation possible. The gold long glistened in the sand and quartz of 
 California, under the eyes of the eager, gold-hunting Spaniard, unseen. 
 It was reserved to feed the mighty commerce to spring up, when the 
 energies of the Anglo-Saxon race on the North American continent had 
 tamed its Atlantic wildernesses ; when its inventive genius had found 
 the means to leap through space by the steamboat on the sea, and the 
 railroad car by land ; to annihilate it as an obstruction to thought, by 
 conveying it on the lightning over continents and oceans. The same 
 moment seems first to have revealed the immeasurable treasures of the 
 great plains and the mountains of the interior, which one colossal nation is 
 to bestride, with one foot on each great ocean, sending with its com- 
 merce over both the blessings of liberty and civilization. 
 
 It is said that when the Puritan Pilgrims first reached this shore, 
 they sent out pioneers to ascertain how far westward the land was sus- 
 ceptible of cultivation. They returned with the good tidings that the 
 selvage of the continent, for at least twenty miles back, was habitable 
 by an agricultural people. This was the utmost aspiration of a people 
 who, for religion and liberty, gave what to them was the world, to seat 
 themselves on its mere margin. Their prows now plow the waves of 
 every ocean, and their children, having redeemed California from the 
 atrophy of Spanish rule, are now pressing up the Sacramento, to meet 
 in the great basin their brethren of Kansas, who, ascending with their 
 settlements the broad streams on which they have conquered and estab- 
 lished free homes, are already gathering gold at their fountain heads, in 
 Pike's Peak and its southern ranges. Here, then, we see rapidly real- 
 izing Benton's prediction, that " the line of great States which now 
 ' stretch half way across our continent in the same latitudes — Pennsyl- 
 •^ vania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri — may be matched by an 
 
' equal number of States, equally great, betAveen Missouri and Califor- 
 ' nia." Kansas has thrown off her slave fetters, and is now ready to 
 take her place as a free State in the Union. Benton's second State, 
 West Kansas, or the State of San Luis, is filling up with people around 
 Pike's Peak, and in the rich valley from which it takes its name. Fre- 
 mont, Beale, Heap, Gilpin, McClanahan, and Leroux, all familiar with 
 this region, speak with enthusiasm of the fertility of its soil and salubri- 
 ty of its climate. The San Luis Valley, drained by the Rio del Norte, 
 lies between the 38th and 39th parallels of latitude ; it is at once the 
 largest and most beautiful of all the mountain parks. The snowy bat- 
 tlements of the Sierra San Juan form its western wall, and it is here, 
 according to Col. Gilpin, where the Sierra Mimbres rises to the alti- 
 tude of perpetual snow, and assumes for two hundred miles the local 
 name of the Sierra San Juan, " that the dislocation of nature by vol- 
 canic forces, and the consequent metalliferous developments, attain their 
 highest culmination." And let me say here, in regard to this gallant 
 officer and hardy pioneer, that the language I have quoted from one of his 
 recent speeches is no prophecy after the fact. Years ago, before the 
 discovery of gold in California or at Pike's Peak, in his tent, and with- 
 in sight of the great Sierra San Juan, he uttered the same prediction, 
 since verified in a manner so extraordinary. 
 
 The third State marked out by Benton is the Mountain State : " A 
 section of the Rocky Mountains, from the 37th to the 41st parallel 
 of latitude, nearly three hundred miles north and south, and going 
 down to the base on either side, making two hundred miles or more 
 in breadth, covering an area of 60,000 square miles, while all the 
 Swiss Cantons have not 20,000." This Mountain State will make 
 one of an unbroken chain of States from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 
 No other section of the Rocky Mountains is capable of an extent of 
 cultivation to embody a community to constitute a State ; but here a 
 Republic will grow up, thrice as potent as all the Swiss Cantons. Its 
 three immense parks — the South, the Middle, and the North Park — 
 two of them thirty miles, the third sixty miles in diameter, contain an 
 area of land fit for cultivation greater than all Switzerland, while in- 
 numerable valleys, divided by rich, sloping hills, covered to the sum- 
 mit with pasturage, open the way from the parks through a multitude 
 of streams — northward by the Platte to the Missouri, eastward by the 
 Arkansas to the Mississippi, southward by the Rio Grande del Norte 
 to the Gulf of Mexico, and southwestwardly by the Colorado to the 
 Gulf of California. Here we find four immense rivers of our continent 
 lifting their heads aloft together in the midst of the richest mountain 
 scene in the world, interlocking with their arms and embracing the re- 
 gion of their birth. 
 
 This healthy, luxuriant land, thus separated into coves or parks, is 
 distinguished, as Kentucky was when first appropriated by its civilized 
 settlers, as a sort of preserve for the game that fed surrounding nations. 
 In Fremont's journal of his exploration in 1843-'4, it is thus described. 
 He approached by the head stream of the Platte. " The valley nar- 
 ' rowed (he says) as we ascended, and presently degenerated into a gorge, 
 ' through which the river passed, as through a gate. We entered, and 
 
10 
 
 found onrselves in the new park, a beautiful circular valley of tliirty 
 ' miles diameter, walled in all around with snowy mountains, rich with 
 ' water and with grass, fringed with pine on the mountain sides below the 
 ' snow line, and a Paradise for all grazing animals. The Indian name for 
 ' it signifies ' Cow Lodge,' of which our own may be considered a trans- 
 ' lation, the enclosure, the grass, the water, and the herds of buifalo roam- 
 ' ing over it, naturally presenting the idea of a park." The resemblance 
 recommended to Fremont the English translation of the Indian name. 
 The Indians had never seen an enclosed park, but they knew that it was 
 peculiarly the lodge of the game, because the Indian tribes dare not 
 lodge there. It was, like Kentucky, the hunting and fighting ground 
 of the Indians, but the home of none ; when they came to hunt, they 
 came, too, with all their strength, to fight. Fremont had proof of this 
 in passing from the New Park on the east of the Rocky Mountains to 
 the Old Park to the west of the chain. The journal goes on, after 
 passing the narrow divide between the parks : " We found ourselves 
 on the western waters ; we halted at noon on the edge of another 
 mountain valley called the Old Park, in which is formed Grand river, 
 one of the principal branches of the Colorado of California. We were 
 now moving with some caution, as, from the trail, we found the Ara- 
 pahoe village had moved this way. As we were coming out of their 
 enemies' country, and as this was war ground, we were desirous to 
 avoid them." While thus guarding himself against an attack from 
 the Arapahoes, a band of Utahs was discovered coming from the west 
 of the mountains to hunt ; and in the collision which took place between 
 these two hostile villages, he was enabled to draw off without molesta- 
 tion from either. His notice of the encounter between these marching, 
 war-making, and hunting villages, at once shows their estimate of the 
 country for which they contended, and the habits which will determine 
 their destiny. It is apparent that this Mountain State, which attracts 
 the warlike tribes from the great valleys beyond the Rocky Mountains 
 and the plains on this side, like Kentucky, which brought the Indians 
 from beyond the Ohio on the north and the Cumberland on the 
 south, to contend for the prey it afforded, is to be the grandest of all 
 the States in the belt, but it must have a band of pioneers that can 
 employ the axe and the rifle with equal success. 
 
 A fourth State will embrace the whole valley of the Colorado, down 
 to its head of navigation by steam, in latitude 36° 6'. Its width, from 
 the base of the Rocky Mountains to the eastern base of the Wahsatch 
 Range, is 150 miles ; its length, upward of 300. The Colorado, which 
 passes for several degrees of latitude below the heail of navigation 
 through a desert, yet opens to this Valley State the whole northwestern 
 section of Mexico, with the Gulf of California. A central railroad will 
 strike, in the midst of this State, the old Spanish trail from New Mex- 
 ico to Los Angeles, in California, which bends up in a loop to 38° of 
 latitude in the Colorado Valley, and descends to 34°, to avoid the im- 
 passable desert along the lower latitudes. A short branch of railroad 
 from the central will unite the navigable waters of the Mississippi Avith 
 those of the California Gulf by 1,000 miles of rail, and open up the 
 •western flank of Mexico to the control of our interior States. This 
 
11 
 
 Valley State has already the nucleus upon whicli to build its strength 
 in the settlements at Las Vegas de Santa Clara, of several thousand 
 white men. The Sierra de la Plata, or Silver Mountains, border the 
 valley of the Great Colorado ; the Cerro di Sal (Salt Mountain) is 
 situated among the western spurs of the Sierra de la Plata ; and here, 
 also, are found mountains of iron, rivalling those of Missouri. 
 
 The Territory of Utah, in the Great Basin, including Carson's Val- 
 ley, makes the last of the magnificent belt of States which are to bring 
 the seaports of the Atlantic into weekly communication with the com- 
 merce of the Pacific by railroad, and hourly intelligence by telegraph. 
 In this Territory, it is computed there exists already a white popula- 
 tion of 60,000 souls. There are a multitude of thriving towns, extend- 
 ing from Parowan and Cedar City to the City of the Salt Lake. Ag- 
 riculture flourishes, coal mines are opened, iron works are established, 
 mechanic arts are plied, and busy trade is pushing industry ahead to 
 every point of the compass. Before five years shall have elapsed, 
 Bentoii's prediction, received a few years ago with such incredulity, will 
 1)0 accomplished. Kansas on the east, Utah on the west, have already 
 sufficient numbers to become States. The next season will not come 
 and go without witnessing a larger population in the State of San Luis, 
 or Colona, as some prefer to call it, attracted by the treasures lately 
 revealed under the shadow of Pike's Peak, than is now possessed by 
 Utah and Kansas together. The Mountain State and the upper valley 
 of the great Colorado will soon be filled with a teeming and busy peo- 
 ple ; their attractions surpass all the others, and in their gorges will be 
 sought and found the golden quartz whose washings have impregnated 
 the sands of the plains below. 
 
 This belt of States, now in rapid growth, will have decisive influence 
 on the destiny of our grand Republic, and all the dependencies of this 
 continent. When their political, agricultural, manufacturing, and 
 commercial interests, are blended by the all-pervading power of elec- 
 tricity and steam, a bond of union becomes consolidated, strong in pro- 
 portion to the magnitude of the system within the reach of its attrac- 
 tion. All Mexico will be subject absolutely to the influence it may 
 exert, whether for its prosperity or ruin. That base line which can 
 bring the whole force of the Union to bear upon its most exposed part 
 in an instant, must necessarily control its destiny. That this power 
 will be exerted for its protection, and to promote its welfare, will be the 
 natural result of the closer and more commanding affinities which must 
 grow up out of our commercial interests in that country, and which, 
 requiring a stable, just, and free Government, to create the prosperity 
 necessary to advance them, will concentrate an irresistible power on 
 our Government to secure it. 
 
 The most important of all political questions with the friends of our 
 Union now arises, as to the means of developing this cordon of central 
 States at the earliest day. Prudent statesmen of this time avail them- 
 selves of the advantage of consulting that policy which those who built 
 up the highest prosperity in our older States adopted under similar cir- 
 cumstances, and always incline to apply it to the new, if it have suc- 
 cessful experiment for its sanction. A line of free States, with a 
 
12 
 
 magnificent national road — like the great Aorta in our system, scatter- 
 ing the currents of life throughout the body — was the means applied by 
 the founders of the grandeur of the Republic to fill up the uncultivated 
 regions between the seaboard and the great West with a race of our 
 own blood. I propose the same process for our greater West, not 
 merely for the advantage of the people who are to fill the new-born 
 States with civilization and improvement, and all the blessings that 
 attend Freedom wherever it goes, but for the resulting benefits it will 
 confer also on our seaboard States on both the great oceans. The 
 discoveries of late years render the creation of means to transport a 
 population across the continent an easy effort, compared with that which 
 paved the way for the emigration that has in a life-time filled up the 
 territory between the Alleghany and Mississippi, and an equal dis- 
 tance beyond. The new power that is said to have bridged the Atlan- 
 tic adds half a million annually to the free laborers seeking homes 
 among us ; and the teeming West now adds its multitudes to those of 
 their enterprising kindred from the older States, in peopling the lands 
 beyond the Mississippi. Railroads and steamboats bear them to its 
 confines. The dense and matted forest, so formidable to the settlers 
 east of the Mississippi, do not retard the march of those who are press- 
 ing beyond to the shores of the Pacific, but a land inviting the plow, 
 and already clothed with meadow, as if the Almighty had prepared here 
 a new land of promise, to repay the trials of those who had passed the 
 wilderness — a land lifted up into the pure air, above the malaria, from 
 which disease is banished, and whose dry atmosphere ripens the already 
 planted meadow, and converts the grass into hay, as it stands upon the 
 ground, to fatten and sustain countless myriads of buffaloes throughout 
 the winter, instead of rotting, like the rank grass in the humid climates 
 of the delta of the Mississippi, and on this side, and infecting the air 
 with disease and death ; and when to these rare recommendations is 
 added that temptation which none can resist, that shining metal which 
 commands the world, awaits here the coming of our race to found an 
 empire, the greatest on the earth and amidst its grandest scenes. 
 
 This column of new States, which are to be pushed to the Pacific, 
 may with truth be said to accomplish what Columbus in his rapture 
 supposed he had attained when the vast Western Continent rose upon 
 his vision. He looked to the shore as that of the " far Cathay; " he 
 thought he had reached the East Indian Empire by sailing to the west. 
 A railroad across the continent, now that the steamboat plows both 
 oceans, will bring China nearer to Europe than America was in the 
 days of Columbus, and both Europe and Asia may meet in their pro- 
 ducts in the heart of our continent, in less time than our own products 
 could formerly be conveyed to its centre from its two sea- shores. It is 
 now perceived that the steam-car is superseding water carriage to a 
 great extent, by its rapidity und security in conveying traffic as well as 
 travellers. Hoav much of the Oriental commerce of Europe, that 
 now rolls on for a good part of a year, circling the hemispheres, will 
 be content to continue this lagging delay, rather than to reach fruition 
 in a few months by a quick transit across our continent 1 The nations, 
 awakened by the electric spark of modern discovery, find the Old World 
 
13 
 
 delay between tliought and consummation too slow, and now, after cen- 
 turies of consideration, Europe is resolved suddenly to make a short 
 cut to India by the Isthmus of Suez. America may outstrip Europe 
 in this race for the riches of the Eastern continent and the islands of 
 the Eastern seas. A flight to and across the Pacific, on the wings of 
 steam, will attain the prize soonest. 
 
 The suggestion of the impossibility of this achievement is worthy of 
 those sages who, after seeing the steamboat stem our rapid and crooked 
 rivers, and ply along the ocean around its shores, where it is most dan- 
 gerous, held back for years its adventure across the Atlantic by the 
 din of impossibility ! So now the impossibility of making a railroad 
 over the smooth plains and long sloping mountains, over which the 
 wagons of the emigrant, loaded with women and children, have been 
 moving over buffalo roads, for which nothing has been done by science 
 and art, is urged to bar the application of those facilities which have 
 climbed the steeps of the Alleghanies with winding grades, and bored 
 through their inaccessible heights with tunnels. Col. Fremont's last 
 scientific survey of the route from the Missouri to the Pacific, in which 
 he traversed all its mountain passes, divided into sections, giving the 
 grade of each with exact measurement, proves conclusively its practi- 
 cability. His measurements, taken with perfect instruments, in the 
 hands of an expert, disclose to us that, for the first 250 miles on the 
 Kansas river, the track ascends two and three-fourths feet to the mile. 
 At an elevation of 1,350 feet above the sea, the route left the Kansas 
 to cross the prairie uplands between it and the Arkansas. It reached 
 the Arkansas at the distance of 150 miles, the elevation being 2,676 
 feet above the sea, and the rise being nine feet to the mile for the whole 
 distance, and, in crossing the uplands, varying from twent}^ to fortj' feet. 
 Up the Kansas to the mouth of the Huerfano, the distance is 230 miles — 
 the ascent, seven feet to the mile for the first 140 miles, and thence, 
 to the mouth of the Huerfano, ten feet to the mile. This point is 
 4,375 feet above the sea. At the head of the Huerfano, in the Wet 
 Mountains, it is 9,000. From the mouth of the river to one of its 
 springs at the foot of Utah Pass, in the Wet Mountains, the distance is 
 124 miles, the average grade being thirty-six feet to the mile. From 
 the Utah Pass to that of the Cochetope is little over 100 miles. Fol- 
 lowing the mountain foot around to the head of the San Luis Valley, at 
 an elevation of 7,600 feet, makes the approach to the Cochetope Pass, 
 in the main Rocky Mountain range, through the Sahwatch River Val- 
 ley. From the San Luis Valley to the Cochetope Pass, at an elevation 
 of 9,820 feet, the distance is 40 miles, and the average grade fifty-five 
 feet. At the Utah Pass, a tunnel of 1,000 yards through the crest of 
 the ridge is required ; and at the Cochetope Pass, when the crest is 
 attained by a grade of fifty-five feet to the mile, a tunnel of 2,000 yards 
 will be required, which would carry the line to a corresponding eleva- 
 tion on the western side of the mountain, 350 feet below the summit. 
 
 Here is the development of all the difficulties which a railroad would 
 have to surmount in the passage of the Rocky Mountains, the whole 
 way between the 38th and 39th parallels of latitude, wooded and 
 watered with the exception of the short prairie line between the Kansas 
 
14 
 
 and Arkansas rivers, and from end to end, the soil rich in grasses and 
 capable of settlement. Fremont has taken pains, not only to measure 
 the route and present every difficulty, but, in his forthcoming publica- 
 tion, he will exhibit to the eye of the reader every feature of the defiles 
 taken by daguerreotype, so that an engineer in his closet may see the 
 impediments in the same daylight in which Fremont saw them. He will 
 give his measurements and the whole aspect of the mountain country, 
 to test the verity of the statement of his letter to me, and which I read 
 in the House of Representatives, with his pledge to make it good, that 
 " the line is direct, and the inclination easy ; the heavier grades 
 ' together and continuous, none heavy enough to make the snow an 
 ' impediment upon the rails ; that there are but two great obstructions, 
 ' easily overcome by moderate tunnelling, and lesser grades than are 
 ' now in use in England, over which is passing the largest traffic in the 
 ' world." Compare this with the grades over the Alleghany Moun- 
 tains, penetrated and passed over by so many railroads bearing im- 
 mense trains of burden as well as passenger cars. The railroad from 
 Philadelphia to Pittsburgh passes with a grade of ninety-one feet to the 
 mile for eleven miles, and with 800 feet of tunnel. The Baltimore and 
 Ohio railroad ascends the Alleghany from Piedmont to Altamont on a 
 grade of more than one hundred feet to the mile for 17 miles, and 
 through several tunnels at other places in the mountains, making a dis- 
 tance underground of more than a mile ; and on the railroad from Bos- 
 ton to Troy, to get rid of a circuit and heavy grade, the Hoosac tun- 
 nel, four and a half miles in length, is in progress. 
 
 The Sierra Nevada, which is the only obstacle beyond the Great 
 Basin, has been found practicable. Mr. J. Lewis, an engineer of great 
 eminence, who surveyed the route for a road from Charleston to Cin- 
 cinnati, and recently from San Francisco to San Jose, gives information 
 that Sherman Day has made the location of a wagon road from the 
 vicinity of Placerville to Cary's Mill, in Carson Valley, crossing the 
 Sierra at Johnson's Pass. No part of this road has an ascent over five 
 degrees. The engineer traces it at every step up the South Fork of the 
 American river to Slippery Ford, which is only four miles from Lake 
 Valley ; and a tunnel of four miles from this point, he positively as- 
 serts, is the only serious difficulty in the construction of the railroad. 
 He states that two hundred feet rise in the length of the tunnel of four 
 miles (fifty feet to the mile) attains the Lake Valley, and that the 
 descent from the Lake Valley is so entirely within the limits of railroad 
 gradients that he entertains no doubt of a practicable route. 
 
 Here we see, from the reports of practical railroad engineers, and 
 actual travel over the routes, that the Great Basin is accessible from 
 the east through the Cochetope Pass in the Rocky Mountains, and 
 from the west through the Sierra Nevada, by way of Sherman Day's 
 Pass at Lake Valley, and that both of these passes lie between the 38th 
 and 39th parallels of latitude, and thus a direct route through the centre 
 of the domain of the Republic is presented. 
 
 Successful art always pursues nature in the attempt to accomplish 
 similar designs. When we look on the map, and see the central river 
 of the continent running from north to south in the midst of its great 
 
15 
 
 valley, and its thousand tributaries spreading out east and west ; and 
 when we see art, with innumerable contrivances, distributing the pro- 
 ducts of the soil to and from the central channel, the reasoning mind 
 infers that a wise Providence so arranged the grand instrumentalities 
 of nature, that the sagacity and industry of man might apply them ben- 
 eficially, as we see them employed. If, then, we would convert other 
 great agencies of nature to the similar design of making a channel of 
 communication from ocean to ocean — a steam river across the continent 
 to a direct and close connection between the eastern and western waters 
 of the world, with a view to make lateral distribution of the commerce 
 of life through the body of our country — if we would follow nature, the 
 main channel should take its way along the central region, and throw 
 out its branches north and south. The structure of the human frame 
 teaches that safety and utility are combined in giving a central position 
 to the main vital current that animates the system. The great arteries 
 do not lie upon the surface, nor do we 
 
 " Wear our hearts upon tlie sleeve, 
 For daws to peck at." 
 
 While, then, it may be well to have channels along our frontiers, to 
 have commerce with other nations, certainly for national convenience, 
 but indispensably for safety from external aggression, it is wise to have 
 the main commanding one, where all our energies may be concentrated 
 within, so as to be exerted most readily by the national will. 
 
 The effect of such a thoroughfare in filling the interior with populous 
 States is obvious to every man of reflection. Pigeons, that gather in 
 such clouds, and spread on rapid wing over a country fruitful in mast, 
 have not an instinct surer or stronger than that of men for regions that will 
 feed all their appetites and the longings of their hearts. Allured by the 
 gold that runs in veins through all the mountain ranges, by the riches that 
 rise up spontaneously with the grasses that even now cover the uncul- 
 tivated plains with animal life — the means of easy access being supplied, 
 they will flock to farm, to mine, to hunt, and revel in adventure. The 
 attractions of a farmer's life in regions where the land lies open to the 
 plow ; where the air is so wholesome that game hung up in the heat of 
 summer is embalmed and dried ; where the lungs heal in consumptive 
 patients, who now seek the pure, dry, and thin air of these elevated re- 
 gions for a cure, instead of the damp rotting vapors of the tropics — 
 would bring multitudes to cultivate the voids which have hitherto known 
 nothing but barbarism. Thousands would go there from the love of 
 romantic adventure and enterprise, and all that the energy and intelli- 
 gence of our race could draw from the treasures of those primeval re- 
 gions, from their minerals, animals, woods, waters, and various soils, 
 would be poured down toward both seaboards to swell the tide of com- 
 merce ; and this, so far from depopulating the older States washed by 
 the ocean, would impart new life to them. The wants of a vast inte- 
 rior, made up of races accustomed to enjoy all that belongs to the sea — 
 its luxuries from all its continental shores and islands — its commodities 
 and elegances derived from all the arts and manufactures which have 
 grown to perfection in the older States — would create a demand on their 
 industry and skill which would attract to them, from all parts of Eu- 
 
16 
 
 rope, the labor necessary to make adequate supply, and give an impulse 
 to native genius and enterprise never felt before. What a spring this 
 would impart to commerce, to ship-building, to coal-mining, and to the 
 iron foundry, Avhich creates the framework, the bone and sinew of every 
 potent structure that belongs to commerce, manufactures, the mechanic 
 arts, and agriculture. 
 
 The influence of this grand movement, emerging in a line of free 
 States with almost marvellous birth, between Missouri and California, 
 upon the destiny of the races upon this continent, is the aspect that in- 
 vites the deepest consideration. The immediate result will be to repress 
 far to the north and south the wild beasts, and the wild tribes of men 
 who pursue them. Settlements of husbandmen will soon fill up the 
 middle region, watered by the Arkansas, the Kansas, the Platte, and 
 their tributaries, and the empty spaces now marked on the map as the 
 hunting grounds of the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Utahs, and Sioux, and 
 the reservations of the Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokecs^ will be- 
 come the abode of civilized communities. The wild Indians will pur- 
 sue the buifalo into the sections, north and south, least adapted to cul- 
 tivation, and, as the game gradually diminishes, the tribes supported by 
 it will destroy each other for the remnants. This has been the fate of 
 all the hunting tribes of this continent, as agriculture intruded into the 
 domain on which they preyed. There is some reason to hope that the 
 vast extent of the Western plains peculiarly adapted to pastoral life 
 may have the effect to convert portions of the savage hunting tribes into 
 useful accessories of our race, as the occupants of tlie soil, each sub- 
 serving the interest of the other. The Indians connected with Spanish 
 settlements south of our territories become herdsmen, and obtain thus 
 a more comfortable and much less precarious subsistence from the do- 
 mesticated flocks and herds they protect, than formerly from those they 
 pursued for indiscriminate destruction. The Northern tribes of our 
 country are so addicted to wandering, by nature so incapable of steady 
 habits of labor, that those that survive the destruction of the game must 
 become a nomadic people, and live on a share of the herds they tend for 
 the settlers, or in sections remote from agricultural improvement be- 
 come, like the nomadic tribes of Asia, masters of herds, and roam from 
 wilderness to wilderness for subsistence. As for the tribes that now 
 have homes on the frontiers of the Western States, the late sales of 
 their reservations in Kansas, with their consent, and on account of the 
 Indian proprietors, point to the destiny of all similarly situated. 
 
 The Indian cultivation is nothing, except in the tribes where the 
 chiefs and a few head men have appropriated to themselves the Govern- 
 ment annuities designed for their people, and, purchasing slaves with the 
 wealth thus acquired, have made them work portions of the richest soil, 
 and by the products doled out to the poor of the tribe have reduced them 
 all to vassalage. The attempt of Ridge, Boudinot, and others of the 
 Cherokees, to assert the rights of the mass of the people, was met by 
 assassination on the part of those who had monopolized the money and 
 power of the nation. The suggestion of Mr. Buchanan, in his message 
 to Congress, that this Indian usurpation should be adopted as a State 
 in the Union, coincided in principle with his recommendation of the 
 
17 
 
 Lecompton usurpation for adoption as a State Government in virtue of 
 the Slavery clause in the Constitution it presented. The latter had a 
 redeeming proviso connected with it, to which the Indian State pro- 
 posed for fellowship with the other States cannot pretend. After 
 seven years of endurance, the people of Kansas could have changed 
 their Constitution, and partially enfranchised the State. The Indian 
 State, which must come for admission if the President's innovation 
 succeed, is constituted of the red and black races exclusively ; and 
 the political power is vested in the chiefs of the former, in virtue of the 
 influence derived from their ownership of the latter ; so that the caste 
 with which rests the authority will, for its own sake, perpetuate Slavery. 
 It is not probable that the white race, which constitutes the sovereign- 
 ties which comprise the United States, will bear an amalgamation in 
 Congress by the admission of red or black representatives, (for they mix 
 in the Indian Government,) any more than they would admit such rep- 
 resentatives in the State Governments, or approve such motley inter- 
 mixture in domestic life. The novelty of introducing Cherokees, Sacs 
 and Foxes, Pottawatomies, and Kickapoos, into our Senate and House 
 of Representatives, (and of the other tribes ; for if one comes, why not 
 all 1) can have been proposed by the President only as a " sop for Cer- 
 berus," that triple-headed monster, which he fancies will guard the 
 gates of the Charleston Convention through which our Pluto must go to 
 renew his reign. No one more misconceived the genius and temper of 
 the people to whom Mr. Buchanan tenders this offering than he. They 
 are proud of an oligarchy of their own best blood, but to share it with 
 an Indian, although he brought the honors of Slavery in his train, they 
 would spurn. 
 
 Hybrid races carry degradation alike into government as into commu- 
 nities. Indeed, they cannot perpetuate themselves. The Moors and 
 Spaniards, although subsisting together in the same peninsula for eight 
 centuries, and intermingling in every relation, have propagated no com- 
 mon stock. The celebrated African explorer. Dr. Livingstone, as re- 
 markable for his observation as for his truth and liberal feeling, states 
 that in the old settlement of Angola, where the Portuguese, the first col- 
 onizers of Africa, amalgamated universally with the natives, the hybrid 
 race does not survive but a few generations in its own line. Such fam- 
 ilies run out, unless they lapse into the African, and lose their caste 
 entirely by the infusion of negro blood. So in this country, the French 
 who have intermarried freely with the Indians leave a posterity called 
 half-breeds, because they do not survive an intermixture of their caste 
 beyond two or three generations. Curious observers have assured me 
 that the same fact is true of the mulatto caste ; where the line is con- 
 fined to this color for a few generations, it fails. The attempt, then, to 
 hybridize our Government — which, I trust, is to survive a thousand cen- 
 turies — must prove a failure in the end, even should Mr. Buchanan's 
 scheme of amalgamation have a beginning ; but that it will not have. The 
 semi-civilized tribes on our Western frontier will sell out their lands, 
 and subside at length among their kindred races of Mexico, where it is 
 to be hoped, under the protection and countenance of our Government. 
 they will in the course of time become a refined and polished nation. 
 2 
 
18 
 
 and revive -witli their growing prosperity some of the elegant tastes that 
 distinguished them as a people in the days of Montezuma, superadded 
 to the manly energy of mind and body which Liberty invariably confers. 
 This, I confidently believe, will be the consequence of filling up the 
 great West with these pale-faces that have already wrought such mir- 
 acles since their appearance at Plymouth and Jamestown. 
 
 But they have another most noble achievement before them — most 
 noble — because it requires that lofty magnanimity which can triumph 
 over the strongest, high aspiring, and boldest impulses of a gallant na- 
 ture, pressing forward in a wrong direction, and daring to encountei 
 obstacles irremovable because planted by nature in the heart — in the 
 heart of those who assail as well as those who defend. Justice and 
 conscience form an insuperable bar to the propagation of Slavery, and 
 the wrong inherent in the institution undermines it. If the deliverance 
 is timely, and the work of the superior race, it shows that it is progres- 
 sive, and looking to higher destinies for the master and the slave. If 
 delayed until engrafted on the political institutions and grounded in 
 the habits of a people, it fastens a decadence upon both, and the rise 
 of the inferior classes, in combination, brings deliverance and ruin to- 
 gether. The Roman Republic sunk under servile and civil wars, in 
 which the slaves and gladiators were associated with the legions. The 
 decline and fall of the Roman Empire was the result of the universal 
 corruption which universal Slavery entailed. In modern Europe, the 
 progress of the superior class was marked by the extinction of villenage 
 and the enfranchisement of the serfs. The growth of civilization in 
 Russia, and the marked fact that her millions of serfs could not defend 
 her own soil from a few thousand embattled Britons and Frenchmen, 
 has hastened emancipation across the north of all Europe and Asia. 
 The words of the Emperor to his nobility in Moscow, who hesitated in 
 this great work, are full of profound admonition. I utter them here, 
 not as prophetic, but evincing that sound sense which I know will con- 
 trol in the solution of Slavery in our land : 
 
 " Gentlemen, I am always happy at being able to address thanks to 
 ' the nobility ; but it is not in my nature to speak against my con- 
 ' science. I always speak the truth, and, to my great regret, I this 
 ' day cannot thank you. You may remember two years ago, in this 
 ^ hall, I spoke to you of the necessity of proceeding sooner or later to 
 ' the reform of those laws which regulate servitude — a reform that must 
 ' come from above, that it may not come from below. My words have 
 ' been ill-understood. Since then, this reform has been the object of 
 ' my constant solicitude ; and having invoked the Divine blessing on my 
 ' undertaking, I have commenced the work. * * * i have fixed 
 ' for you the bases of the reform, and I shall never swerve from them. 
 ' ' Reform must come from above, that it may not come from below.' " 
 
 A more potent voice than even that of the Autocrat has proclaimed 
 this as the law of the world ; and Turkey, all-conquering once, stands 
 a sad spectacle, exhibiting, in her own decay, how the wrong inflicted 
 on inferior races avenges itself by the vices with which it afflicts the 
 "wrong- doer. 
 
 Slavery in our country has taken its worst form, and will be followed 
 
19 
 
 by the worst results, if not speedily removed. The contrast between 
 the races destroys the sympathies of kindred which would soften servi- 
 tude. It has obtained the highest judicial sanction for the idea that 
 the negro is a being so alien to our nature as to have no rights which 
 we are bound to respect as appertaining to man ; that he is not inclu- 
 ded as such in the great declaration of the rights of humanity ; and the 
 inference is, that he has no soul. Our Supreme Court has decided that 
 the negro has nothing of that "Divinity that stirs within us," which 
 can save him here or hereafter. This monstrous doctrine, interpolated 
 into our Constitution, is a last resort to render Slavery compatible with 
 the principles of our free government. This shocking decision will 
 awaken a feeling in every heart not dead to all the sentiments of hu- 
 manity, that cannot but arouse public opinion everywhere to revolt. 
 To what grade must the population of the slaveholding States be re- 
 duced, if that class which performs the labor and creates the wealth of 
 the State is stripped of the attributes of man, and ceases to have any 
 rights 1 Will not such degradation attach in time to all who are con- 
 strained to labor in the service of another, no matter of what class, or how 
 compelled ? If, then, a state of things is produced in the slaveholding 
 States which subjects the white laborer to the same absolute depend- 
 ence on the employer as the black, the fate of one becomes the fate of 
 the other, and neither will have rights which those holding all power in 
 the State are bound to respect. A leading press in Virginia has al- 
 ready announced this doctrine, and a late debate in the Legislature of 
 Georgia evinced that this squinting toward despotism was understood 
 to be the aim of those striving to reduce all who labor to the condition 
 of Slavery, by opening the slave trade to fill all the channels of industry 
 with such as would work for slave wages, or, in other words, for bare 
 subsistence. The proposal tending to open the slave trade by legisla- 
 tive action was defeated, after strenuous debate, by the argument that 
 the slaves now increased faster than the whites ; and that if an addition- 
 al influx of Africans, by opening the slave trade, were permitted, the 
 wages of free labor would be so reduced as to destroy its existence. 
 This admitted argument admits, also, that as the slaves multiply more 
 rapidly than the whites, time will produce the same result without im- 
 portation. Already, in South Carolina, the slaves are nearly two to 
 one of the whites ; and to this complexion all must come at last, in those 
 States that foster the slave institution. 
 
 It is evident, from the showing of the census, that free and slave 
 labor cannot subsist together through a long tract of time. Virginia 
 presents the most favorable aspect for the continuation of both, for it 
 is a State that exports the black laborer, and has a climate peculiarly 
 inviting to the immigration of free labor ; yet the whole number of 
 free whites engaged in agriculture in 1850 was 97,454, while her slaves 
 amounted to 472,528 — near half a million — now, doubtless, more. 
 And what has been the result of a half century's experiment of black 
 and white labor together upon the latter and upon the State's prosperi- 
 ty'? A comparison with a free-labor State will show. Virginia, with 
 the advantages of soil, climate, extent, and more than double the pop- 
 ulation of New York in 1800, has now fallen far behind her rival. In 
 
20 
 
 1850, the population of New York more than doubled that of Virginia, 
 and the census of her real and personal property was triple. This half 
 century's experiment, then, solves the problem as to what must be the 
 result of free and slave labor on the destiny of States. The energetic 
 white generations of Virginia abandon the State to escape from the 
 blighting presence of Slavery. The immigration of free labor, and the 
 capital it would bring with it, shuns the State, from the same impulse; 
 and now, unless reaction occurs to arrest this fatal tendency, is not the 
 once leading State of the Union doomed to perpetual inferiority by sub- 
 stituting the black race for its own fair and noble progeny ? Had Vir- 
 ginia, like New York, gradually abolished Slavery, and thus opened its 
 gates to free immigration, and retained her own children, who were 
 driven out and disfranchised lest their votes would unsettle the divine 
 institution of Slavery, (as it is now called,) who can doubt but that its 
 greater white basis at the start would still have kept ahead of that of 
 the Northern State 1 If this be so, then for half a million of slaves 
 Virginia has exchanged more .than two millions of citizens animated 
 with her own blood, gallant spirit, and lofty intellect. The vaunted 
 opinion of the Supreme Court, which converts slaves into brutes, makes 
 no amends for this loss. With her two millions of free men, Virginia 
 has lost $600,000,000 of real and personal property, the difference be- 
 tween the assessed value of hers and that in New York ; counted as 
 chattels, and not men, slaves make no compensation to Virginia for the 
 loss of her free-born children — the priceless jewels of a great Common- 
 wealth. 
 
 Neither the heroic nor the Christian spirit, native to the Southern 
 bosom, can, in silent thought, brook the sad sophistry of the bench, nor 
 the false glosses of sectional conventions, disguising the fatal influence 
 of black bondage. They see and feel the ruin around them in the 
 poverty and despair of their unemployed countrymen and in the wasted 
 face of the country. They know that mischief must fall on their pos- 
 terity, when the land is surcharged with hosts of slaves wielding the 
 physical energy of the country, and an oppressed white race, which may 
 at some time turn the hatred now nurtured against the instruments 
 which deprive them of their bread, to those whose opulence and power ia 
 founded on the subjection of both subordinate classes. The growing 
 evil is marked by the far-seeing forecaste of the oligarchy, not only on 
 the census tables, but in the atmosphere that sighs around them. But 
 they meet it in the spirit of daring men — political ambition whispers, 
 and as from the beginning, its inaudible breathing swells the bosom of 
 the proud and aspiring with the thought — "Evil, be thou my good." 
 This malady of the South is now to be cured, the chevaliers think, by 
 the sword. Its first movement was by combination and diplomacy to 
 make Presidents, prostitute aspirants at the North, break compacts, 
 seize Kansas, make a black line across the continent, and spread the 
 contagion of Slavery over all the south of the continent and its islands, 
 and make an Occidental Empire, in imitation of the Oriental Empires of 
 Timour and Mohammed. Success seemed to answer to the first well- 
 directed push, but Kansas at last proved a stumbling-block, and now 
 schemes of direct and immediate aggression, under Executive auspices, 
 
21 
 
 with arms, are meditated. The shades of Cortez and Pizarro visit in 
 dreams the couches of numberless military chieftains with the spoils of 
 Mexico, South America, and Cuba, in their hands; and Satrapies, with 
 crowds of vassals held of some victorious conqueror, rise in visions to 
 put our plain confederated Republic of free citizens to shame. 
 
 But this age, unhappily for all military meteors, is utilitarian. The 
 sober minds of our countrymen see no advantage in ravaging Mexico or 
 Cuba; nor do they think Slavery such a blessing that they should incur 
 the disgrace of buccaneering to bring a free people under the yoke. It 
 is against the genius of our Republic, born of Freedom and Toleration, 
 to provoke by flagrant wrong, and especially by a wrong having a still 
 greater one for its purpose, the establishment of Slavery in a neighbor- 
 ing Republic, which fought bravely and successfully to abolish it. This 
 scheme for alleviating our plague, by visiting it upon another people, is 
 not just, nor will it succeed. 
 
 There is another remedy, deriving its force from the nature of our 
 Constitution. It is, indeed, its healing principle, curing wounds other- 
 wise irremediable. It is Freedom. It is the deliverance of two incon- 
 gruous races from an unnatural connection, and setting both free. That 
 sable race, bred in the pestilence of Africa, is a blot on the fair pros- 
 pect of our country. The institution which grows up out of its servi- 
 tude is a poisonous excrescence, which sucks the vitality out of those to 
 whom it clings. It is an institution which, in making the aliment of 
 the whole society in which it exists depend on the growth of Slavery, 
 makes this at last the lot of all who are not the masters. 
 
 Deliverance therefore from a people who cannot assimilate with our 
 people, the subjects of an institution utterly abhorrent to our free in- 
 stitutions, is the natural and easy mode of restoring symmetry to our 
 political systems, and equality among the people and States of the 
 Union. 
 
 How happily might the genius and generous enthusiasm of the lead- 
 ing spirits of the South, accomplish this grand result, if the patriotism 
 which lies at the bottom of their hearts could hold in check their heady 
 ambition 1 Even the soaring flight which would carry the flag of this 
 'country over all the surrounding islands of the Gulf and nations of our 
 continent, might prove fortunate, if in the fullness of our strength we 
 carried along with it the wisdom, justice, freedom, and love of liberty, 
 that first unfurled it. But no ! buccaneering abroad — threats, violence, 
 and sinister intrigue, at home — are the auspices under which these vast 
 designs are inaugurated. 
 
 " for a Falconer's voice 
 To lure these tassel gentles back again, 
 But bondage is hoarse, and may not speak aloud." 
 
 If there is no commanding voice to bring these high-flyers back again 
 to the just, wise, and peaceful policy that once characterized our Gov- 
 ernment, if the two races of the impoverished whites and enslaved 
 blacks, with mutual hate, subject each other to a common oppression, 
 and " dare not speak aloud," the first heavy calamity that comes from 
 either the perverted ambition that would usurp power over the weaker 
 nations around us, or the weaker class among us, will awaken a new 
 
22 
 
 sense of patriotism. The counsels of Washington, Jefferson, Macon, 
 and Gaston, of Lowndes, the elder Gadsden of the Revolution, Craw- 
 ford, and all the lights of the South, that led the way to homogeneous 
 institutions to make our Union perpetual, will again prevail, and Mr. 
 Calhoun's sectionalism will abate its presumption. The patriotism of 
 the South will then scan the cause of the growth of the North, and will 
 gradually open the way to that prime element of its prosperity — Free 
 Labor. The reform will be gradual, as all mighty movements, to be 
 safe, must be slow. Whenever a region is acquired within our tropics 
 to make a permanent home for our American freedmen, emancipation 
 will take place rapidly all along the line of slave States bordering on 
 the free. Our slaves might even be allowed to make compositions with 
 their masters, and work out their own freedom, in the rich countries of 
 the tropics, where the labor of a man adapted to the climate is worth 
 four times as much as in Virginia or Kentucky. And, whether this be 
 done or not, I am satisfied that if such a refuge is provided for the 
 blacks, and the argument that emancipation will place them on an 
 equality, within the States, with the laboring white man, is thus taken 
 out of the mouths of the supporters of the institution, the same class of 
 men, whose prejudices, aroused by the fact that they have been injured 
 by the competition of slave labor, has been made the means to per- 
 petuate the slavery of the instruments of their ruin, will in turn de- 
 mand that the slave shall be removed — they will vote his emancipation 
 when they know that emancipation includes removal from the State. 
 
 It is only by the joint action of the State and National Governments 
 that emancipation can be effected. President Monroe, an eminently 
 practical statesman, gave this as his opinion in the Virginia Convention 
 in 1829, and when it was suggested that the National Government 
 could not interfere in this delicate matter, he declared that it could do 
 so in aid of the State Governments, and that emancipation was not 
 practicable without such aid. " And," he says, " if we find that this 
 evil (Slavery) has preyed upon the vitals of the Union, and has been 
 prejudicial to all the States where it has existed, and is likewise re- 
 pugnant to their several State Constitutions and Bills of Right, Avhy 
 may we not expect that they will unite with us in accomplishing its 
 removal? " The Indians have been removed from the diiferent States 
 at the expense of the General Government, and new homes provided for 
 them ; and as there are free negroes in every one of the States, and the 
 subject is thus brought home to the people of all, what is to prevent 
 the Federal Government from ofiering to all of that class, who are wil- 
 ling to accept it, a home in a climate congenial to their natures, and 
 throwing around them its protection, as has been done for the Indians 1 
 I do not propose that any man should be constrained to go there, but 
 that we should offer them the inducement to go, precisely as we do 
 with the people of our own race, when we acquire for them regions like 
 California, in which they can better their condition. Without further 
 action on the part of our Government than to secure homesteads to 
 those who are now free, or may hereafter become so, either by the act 
 of the State Government or individuals, and the guaranty of their civil 
 and political rights, (as England has done for her subjects in portions 
 
23 
 
 of Honduras,) emigrants In thousands would soon find their way to 
 freedom — to the rich soil, where the people of their own color prevail, 
 although just emerging from Slavery, over the Spanish and aboriginal 
 race, making the main strength of the country, and holding office both 
 in church and state. Can any doubt that the American-born and 
 American-instructed African, carrying with him the intelligence, the 
 industry, the progressive impulse, acquired by all engaged in the agri- 
 culture of this country, would fail to carry success with them to their 
 new abodes 1 It imparts new energy to a plant, to transplant it in a 
 better and more congenial soil. By the gradual transfer of four mil- 
 lions of our freedmen to the vacant regions of Central and South Amer- 
 ica ; invigorated by a fresh sense of liberty ; with lands of their own be- 
 fore them to improve ; with immense foi'ests of mahogany and all the 
 precious woods of the tropics, the dye stuffs, the medicinal plants, and 
 varieties of fruits, which make up of themselves a rich commerce, 
 growing spontaneously, and to be had simply for the labor of prepara- 
 tion ; with mines of silver and gold shut up simply because of the ex- 
 haustion of the race that opened them — a race unsuited to the climate 
 in which they are found — who can doubt that the transplantation of the 
 negro from our temperate zone to that hot climate, that infuses immense 
 vigor into all the animal life as well as vegetable growth that is native 
 to it, would not only create wealth, but establish a great national power, 
 for the benefit of that under the patronage and protection of which it 
 arose 1 
 
 All the Spanish States of this continent have, in their new organiza- 
 tion, made our Government their exemplar. The relics of despotism 
 inherent in their old forms, and possibly the inveterate habit of that 
 people, will not permit them to settle, and the machinery to move easily 
 and in order. A dependency of our Government, composed of a people 
 addicted to respect it, and accustomed to its forms, aided by a multi- 
 tude of our own race, whose enterprise and interest would induce them 
 to embark their capital and skill in building up a new power to appro- 
 priate the riches of the tropics, would form a Republic to give law to 
 all of their caste within the reach of its influence. I have no doubt 
 that all the nations and islands of the Gulf would fall under the in- 
 fluence and make a league with such a dependency of the United States 
 as I have contemplated, and that the whole would necessarily look to 
 our Union for protection. The contiguity of the United States, and the 
 relations which its commerce and overshadowing power would create, 
 and the very posture of the country, enveloped in the waters poured 
 out from our land and the Gulf stream that washes our shores, must 
 make the people who inhabit it with us, though not of us. It would, 
 in fact, become our India, but under happier auspices ; for, instead of 
 being governed by a great company, to drive the people to despair and 
 insurrection by its exactions, it would have its own Government, which 
 would owe a fealty to ours, as Canada does to England, which is gov- 
 erned by its own representative Assemblies and by a Governor and 
 Cabinet, which, however appointed, recognise conformity to public 
 opinion declared by the representative body to be a duty. The Crown is 
 but a symbol of authority. Its power and that of the British Parlia- 
 
24 
 
 ment is felt only in aiding the improvement of the country and protect- 
 ing it. The tie between them is a triple cord of increased power, hap- 
 piness, and glory, the growth of their union. And I believe such will 
 be the bond to bind to the car of our Union as dependencies the free 
 Republics of African Americans now in embryo in our tropics, and 
 the Indian Republics of Mexico, in which the red race now constitutes 
 seven-eighths of the population. 
 
 It is the true mission of a superior and enlightened race to protect 
 and establish with well-founded institutions the feebler races within the 
 reach of its influence. The general welfare requires this, and renders 
 it the exalted duty of powerful nations. England, France, and Rus- 
 sia, though subject to selfish monarchies, yet feel the impulse of this 
 enlightened age; and we see the Czar giving freedom and personal 
 rights to his sixty millions of serfs, and spreading civilization over all 
 the north of Europe and Asia. England and France hold up besotted 
 Turkey, and endeavor to instil life again by imparting freedom and 
 toleration to the masses. England extends her principles of representa- 
 tive government, in greater or less degree, to her dependencies ; and 
 France, propagating her power in Africa and Asia, carries with it the 
 refinement, intelligence, and skill, which may at some time elevate the 
 people she civilizes in the scale of nations. Shall the mighty State of 
 this hemisphere — the pioneer of the liberal principle of the greatest 
 good to the greatest number — be known to the red and black races 
 struggling into existence, under liberal forms of government, in neigh- 
 boring climes suited to their caste, only as a depredator and enslaver 1 
 They seem to have been committed to our guardianship by the gracious 
 Providence that has conferred so many blessings upon us in the achieve- 
 ment of our own liberties. Shall we abnse the power thus conferred 
 by establishing bondage as the law for all whom we can master 1 
 
 I dare not speak for all the States, but for that in which I live I 
 can assert that there is a strong feeling among the masses to absolve 
 Missouri from the shame of countenancing the slave trade, foreign or 
 domestic, or of increasing the burden upon the Union by emptying the 
 Treasury and creating a national debt to buy islands of slaves, e7i masse, 
 for others' uses, or even of continuing the abuse within its own limits, 
 to foster the pride of a few at the expense of the interests of the many. 
 But there are diflBculties in accomplishing this last point, that the peo- 
 ple of the free States do not seem to estimate ; and yet, when nearly 
 one-half of these States have laws on their statute books prohibiting the 
 immigration of free negroes into them, they should understand why it 
 is that almost every man repels any scheme of emancipation which 
 would let loose a hundred thousand negroes in Missouri, either to prey 
 upon the community as paupers, or to become competitors with the free 
 white laborer for wages. The removal of the manumitted slaves is a 
 sine qva non in every State that looks to deliverance from Slavery. 
 
 The alternatives through which this inexorable condition is to be 
 reached ought to be well considered by every friend of emancipation. 
 Missouri may be delivered by selling the slaves in a Southern market, 
 or by sending them, as the Indians were sent, to freeholds abroad, at 
 the expense of the General Government. The riddance to be obtained 
 
25 
 
 by selling the slaves of Missouri, their owners would recoil from with 
 commendable repugnance. It is a great error to impute to slave-owners 
 generally, but especially to those of the farming States, a want of feel- 
 ing for their slaves. The hearts of Southern men, though slaveholders, 
 are alive to as generous and tender emotions as any on earth, and they 
 feel family ties bind them to the slaves who have been associated in its 
 cares and labors, almost as strongly as the ties of consanguinity. It is 
 the reluctance to subject them to more intense labor under overseers, with- 
 out the family sympathies to make them lenient, that forms an obstruction 
 to Missouri's becoming a free State by the sale of that class of her peo- 
 ple. As freedmen, neither the North nor the South will receive them; 
 and unless a better home is made for them abroad, the process now 
 going forward in Missouri to emancipate the State must consign them 
 to the cotton region. The immense accession to her white population 
 from the East, during the last year and this, has put in motion a mass 
 of another hue toward the South, and more light will pursue this dark 
 retreating body, as it follows the shadow of a cloud passing from our 
 fields. The temptation held out by Missouri — the middle pathway of 
 nations — inviting emigration from all the world, is now too great to be 
 resisted by its comparatively small body of slaves. Here the emigrant 
 from every State in the Union and of Europe may find a kinsman, and 
 men from all the world will find themselves in the midst of its staples. 
 Here are mountains of iron and wildernesses of timber, and the earth 
 teeming with coal and lead and other minerals. Materials to fill the 
 hand of man with machinery, and to furnish that Promethean heat 
 with which he gives life and activity to the world of his creation. Mis- 
 souri — seated at the confluence of her mighty floods, that bring with 
 them all the tribute of the farthest North and West, and make return with 
 the luxuries of the richest tropics of the earth — with one hand ex- 
 tended, she now reaches the seaports of the Atlantic ; she is stretch- 
 ing the other to the Pacific for its golden treasures and the wealth of 
 the Indies. It is madness to suppose that she will long endure the 
 decrepitude of Slavery. And while her slaves and those of the South- 
 ern States within the temperate zone are an encumbrance to them, if 
 set free, and seated within the tropics, they would be worth much to 
 the nation and to the world. The value of a dependency there, made 
 up of our emancipated blacks, may be estimated by the readiness of 
 some of our statesmen to pay $300,000,000 for the island of Cuba, 
 which the law. of gravitation, that attracts feeble countries to their 
 strong neighbors, will bring to us before long without payment, and 
 which, if we should now purchase it, could only be the right of unrestrict- 
 ed trade, and not the land and slaves, which would still belong to their 
 present owners. 
 
 If the trade of Cuba, with its one million laborers, is worth this vast 
 sum, how shall we estimate that of a dependency peopled by our 
 4,000,000 of freed blacks, whose superior intelligence would dominate 
 all the races of the tropics, and bring them under our influence — a re- 
 gion richer than any other tropical country in the world, because lying 
 in the track of the southeast and northeast trade winds, which, passing 
 over an immense expanse of ocean, gather moisture that is precipitated 
 
26 
 
 upon the lofty mountains of the interior, and create the largest rivers 
 on the globe, and make the land bloom with eternal verdnre. For this 
 reason, the tropics of America exceed in fertility all other intertropical 
 regions, in which drouth prevails for one half of the year, and the other 
 half is the season of floods. Instead, therefore, of being an expense to 
 the nation, the foundation of such a colony would be the grandest com- 
 mercial enterprise of the age. The richest tropics in the world, lying 
 adjacent to us, opened up to us by a people speaking our own language, 
 deeply imbued with our ideas of government and religion, leaning upon 
 us for support and guidance, and to whom the climate is innocuous. 
 How different would our India be from that of Great Britain, where, to 
 make a market, she is compelled to coerce a hostile people, speaking a 
 different tongue, having a different religion and government, distant 
 from her thousands of miles, and with a climate destructive to those 
 through whom she maintains her ascendency ! 
 
 Are the young merchants of Boston and of America indifferent to an 
 enterprise which would give to our commerce, without a rival, such an 
 empire as that to which I have pointed 1 — an empire not to be won by 
 cruelty and conquest, but by peaceful and benignant means, by impart- 
 ing to others the inestimable blessing of liberty which we enjoy, and 
 removing from our midst the only cause which threatens the prosperity 
 and stability of our Union.^ Are the merchants of Boston, to whom I 
 now address myself, indifferent to that other grand enterprise which has 
 so often been pointed out to them by the ablest statesmen of our coun- 
 try, and by means of which we shall contend with Europe for the com- 
 merce of Asia and the islands of the East, and from a vantage ground 
 which insures our success 1 I allude, of course, to the highway of na- 
 tions through the heart of our country, connecting the Atlantic and 
 Pacific oceans. Let me say to you, that it is this great highway, giving 
 to our race its seat of empire within the temperate zones of this conti- 
 nent, and commanding the commerce of the East, which is to strengthen 
 them for the civilization and peaceful conquest of the American tropics, 
 through the instrumentality of that race which an inscrutable Provi- 
 dence appears to have placed among us to be fitted for the task. We 
 shall then see the great Gulf Stream, which gathers its mighty volume 
 beneath the tropics, and washes the whole Atlantic front of the conti- 
 nent, bearing upon its bosom to all our cities the tributes of a richer 
 and vaster commerce than that with which India has enriched and built 
 up mighty nations, to perish with its loss. 
 
 It is this connection between the two oceans by railroad which is to 
 make for the Confederacy five great free States beyond the Mississippi. 
 Add to this measure one which shall secrire to every man a homestead 
 in the public domain, inalienable, except by devise, and you shall see 
 free States arise like magic in the great West — free, because, where 
 every man is a landholder, no man can be a slaveholder ; and so well 
 is this understood, that you will find no supporter of the slaveholding 
 oligarchy who can be induced to support a measure by which the public 
 lands will pass easily and rapidly to actual settlers. When by this 
 process the number and the power of the free States are multiplied, and 
 the slave States lose the ability, in combination with that interested 
 
capital elsewhere wliicli always sympathizes with the capital invested in 
 negroes, to command the Presidency and control the Government, Sla- 
 very will cease to be a political question in the nation, and will be re- 
 mitted to the people within the States, divested of all political motives 
 for maintaining it, to be dealt with as an economical question. The re- 
 sult will be emancipation of the slaves, upon the compensation and by 
 the consent of the masters, because it will be for the interest of all. 
 The fact that the slaveholding interest has, by such combination, con- 
 trolled the Government, and commanded its powers and its immense 
 patronage, is of itself a motive for sustaining the institution infinitely 
 greater than the profit it brings to the masters. Take that away by 
 the measures which will create in the least possible time a vast prepon- 
 derance of free States, and Slavery must stand on its own merits, 
 stripped of the strength it possesses— by being, in fact, the Govern- 
 ment of this country, dispensing a patronage of $100,000,000 per an- 
 num, and able to gratify or disappoint the wishes of every man of am- 
 bition in the nation — when the divine institution ceases in fact to be the 
 Government of the United States, it will receive no more honor than 
 the divine right of Kings, in the person of some deposed and fugitive 
 dynasty. How many who swore fealty to Louis Philippe are now 
 ready to take service with the Emperor Napoleon III? Wijl those 
 who bow to the black idol of Slavery, because it confers upon its par- 
 tisans the honors and emoluments of the State and National Govern- 
 ments, refuse to worship at the loftier and purer shrine of Liberty, 
 when the same motives prompt their devotions ? 
 
 I believe that, when Slavery no longer wields the political power^ of 
 this great Government, it will fall of its own weight. Emancipation 
 and the removal of the enfranchised race to the tropics will follow, and 
 the Southern States will fill up with people of our own race ; and the 
 pretext now put forth for monopolizing the soil by slave labor, that the 
 white man cannot work in that climate, will be found to be a sheer fal- 
 lacy. Nowhere do the powers of the white race, mental and physical, 
 attain greater perfection. And are we to be told, in defiance of the 
 decree that " in the sweat of his brow man should live," that the high- 
 est endowments were conferred on him in a rich and genial region, that 
 they might be buried in indolence 1 Fact disproves it, as well as the- 
 ory. Throughout the whole race-horse clime, the white man is stronger 
 in endurance than the African. Our whole country is in the temperate, 
 not the torrid, zone; and we find that, even in the cotton country of 
 Texas, the emigrant Germans produce the best and highest-priced cot- 
 ton, and more of it to the acre, than is grown on slave plantations. 
 When the cloud passes off from Virginia, and its renovation is pre- 
 scribed in the adjoining Carolinas, it will pass, too, from their worn-out 
 lands, and white freeholders will renew them, and make more cotton 
 from their hundred-acre fields than will be obtained frop plantations of 
 a thousand devastated by slave culture. This wonder is already open- 
 ing the eyes of farmers in Maryland and Virginia, who see wheat fields 
 created without a slave making ten-fold to the acre over their poor crops 
 spread over their African wastes. The great mountain plateau that 
 runs through Mexico, and follows the Pacific down into the tropics, 
 
28 
 
 makes the only region where civilization has touched the Indian, and 
 softened his savage nature ; and the only stable Government now ex- 
 isting in these regions is that wielded by Rafael Carrera, the Indian 
 dictator of Guatemala. The negro alone can reclaim the vast level 
 plains and pampas, the tierra caliente of the continent. Shall the races 
 conform to the law of their creation, or shall we attempt to change the 
 order of nature, and bring retribution upon ourselves by striving to 
 subvert with our devices the decrees of Omnipotence 1 
 
 How grandly our nation would loom up in the eyes of the world, if, 
 abandoning the policy which makes it the taskmaster of slaves, it should 
 lay its hands to the work not only of restoring freedom to the race which 
 has so long and so faithfully served us and our fathers, but to recom- 
 pense them for their long servitude, by giving them all homes in regions 
 congenial to their natures, and guarantying to them a free government 
 of their own, in which, without ceasing to be a part of this country, 
 they should still be to themselves, and escape the presence of that 
 social subordination and inferiority inseparable from the contact of dif- 
 ferent races in the same community. The moral power and grandeur 
 of the act would challenge the admiration of the world, and make our 
 later fame surpass the glory of the great struggle which gave us a place 
 among nations. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Containing extracts from letters from Mr. Jejferson, from speeches of Hon. Mr. 
 Trumbull of Illinois and Hon. Preston King of New York, Resolution of Hon. 
 J. R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, Letters of Governor Bissell of Illinois, Robert 
 Wiclcliffe of Kentucky, James 0. Brodhead of Missouri, Hon. Gerrii Smith of 
 New York, Benjamin SilUman of Yale College, Rev. Theodore Parker of Boston, 
 and extracts from the letters of several free colored men of education and intelli- 
 gence, on the subject of the emanciiiation and colonization of the blacks in the 
 tropics of America. 
 
 The colonization of our free blacks in the tropical regions of America was sug- 
 gested by Mr. Jefferson. It is a subject of such magnitude and interest that I shall 
 quote two paragraphs from his letters, to show that he contemplated this plan, and 
 deemed it absolutely essential to the safety of our nation. In a letter addressed to 
 Mr. Sparks, he said : 
 
 " The second object, and the most interesting to us, as coming home to our physi- 
 ' cal and moral characters, to our happiness and safety, is to provide an asylum, to 
 • which we can, by degrees, send the whole of that population (the negroes) from 
 ' among us, and establish them under our patronage and protection, as a separate, 
 ' free, and independent people, in some country and climate friendly to human life 
 ^ and happiness." 
 
 In a letter to Mr. Coles, he said : 
 
 " Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It will come ; 
 ' and whether brought on by the generous energies of our own minds, or by the 
 ' bloody process of St. Domingo, excited and conducted by the power of our present 
 ' enemy, if once stationed permanently within our country, and offering asylum and 
 ' arms to the oppressed, is a leaf of our history not yet turned over." 
 
 I shall also embrace this opportunity to publish a number of letters received after 
 the speech made by me on the 14th January, 1858, in which this topic was broached. 
 Among others, one from Robert Wickliffe, Esq., the most eminent lawyer of Ken- 
 tucky, and one of the largest slaveholders in that State ; one from Gov. Bissell, of 
 Illinois ; a letter from James 0. Brodhead, of Missouri, formerly a State Senator, 
 and now a distinguished lawyer ; an extract from a speech of Senator King, of New 
 York ; and an extract from a speech of Senator Trumbull, of Illinois ; aud a res- 
 olution offered by Senator Doolittle, of Wisconsin. I shall also publish the letters 
 of Gerrit Smith, Theodore Parker, and Benjamin Silliman, and several very inter- 
 esting letters from free colored men of intelligence and education — all showing that 
 the plan struck out by the philosophical mind of Mr. Jefferson, and which I have 
 attempted to bring to public attention, contains the true solution of the Slavery 
 question in this country, and will finally unite all interests for its accomplishment. 
 
 Extract from the Speech of Hon. Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois, delivered at Chicago, 
 
 August 7, 1858. 
 The charge that we want to have anything to do with negroes, is utterly untrue. 
 It is a false clamor, raised to mislead the public mind. Our policy is, to have 
 nothing to do with them ; and I myself am very much inclined to favor the project 
 
30 
 
 suggested by Mr. Blair, of Missouri, at the last session of Congress. He suggested 
 a plan for colonizing our free negroes, who are willing to go, somewhere in Central 
 America, where an arrangement could be made by which their rights may be se- 
 cured to them. The policy now is such as to prevent emancipation ; and although 
 \ we do not want to interfere with the domestic institution of Slavery in the States, 
 ! still we wish to interpose no obstacle to the people of those States in getting rid of 
 their slaves whenever they think fit to do so. 
 
 We know that many of the slave States have passed laws prohibiting the emanci- 
 pation of slaves by their masters, unless they are taken out of the State. The result 
 of this legislation is, that emancipation must cease. There are thousands of free 
 negroes in Virginia, but that policy is now stopped, because it is impracticable, there 
 being no way of disposing of the negro when emancipation is prohibited. Many 
 masters in the South desire to emancipate their slaves, and especially is this the 
 case as they approach death ; for, however they may reason while in health, and 
 thoughtless of that event which levels all alike, they are very apt, in making up their 
 last account and disposing of their property, to think of the wrong and injustice they 
 have done by holding some of their fellow-men in bondage, and they are quite willing 
 to emancipate them. Thousands would be emancipated if there was any place to 
 which they could go. I, for one, am very much disposed to favor the colonization 
 of such free negroes as are willing to go to Central America. I want to have noth- 
 ing to do either with the free negro or the slave negro. We, the Republican party, 
 j are the white man's party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor 
 ' respectable and honorable, which it never can be when negro slave labor is brought 
 into competition with it. 
 
 We wish to settle the Territories with free white men, and we are willing that this 
 negro race should go anywhere that it can to better its condition, wishing them God 
 speed wherever they go. We believe it is better for us that they should not be 
 among us. I believe it will be better for them to go elsewhere. 
 
 A Voice. Where to ? 
 
 Mr. T. I would say, to any Central American State that will make an arrange- 
 ment by which they will be secure in their rights until they arrive at a time when 
 they can protect and take care of themselves. 
 
 Extract Jrom the Speech of Preston King in the Senate on the Oregon Bill, ( Con- 
 gressional Globe, p. 2207, vol. *6'.)47 
 
 The only mode in which we can relieve our country, relieve the blacks and the 
 whites, divide these races, and provide separate homes for them, is by some scheme 
 ichich icill meet the approbation of both — one which the 2Mrties themselves loill exe- 
 cute. I think well of a scheme presented of a colony in South America — or Central 
 America, perhaps, is better — extending to it such aid and protection from this Gov- 
 ernment as would be perfectly legitimate and proper, in the hope that such a meas- 
 ure would be the best means of accomplishing a result so desirable for the benefit 
 of both white and black. I think some such result as this will come, in one way or 
 another, from the collision of interests, from inevitable causes, and from the compe- 
 tition of free and slave labor. 
 
 * * * As I said, the condition of things now is such as requires something of 
 this sort. They are looking to emancipation in Missouri, beyond all question. Their 
 newspapers are discussing it, and I have no doubt that, in other border States, that 
 idea would be more generally entertained, if a rational easy mode of providing for 
 the black population was ready at hand. Indeed, I remember, when the annexa- 
 tion of Texas was discussed here, and through the country, that one of the strongest 
 arguments used in favor of annexation, through all that part of the country where I 
 reside, was, that bringing Texas into the Union as a more extreme Southern State 
 would draw off the black population from all the border slave States, and that they 
 would become free States. * * * I speak of this to bring the subject to the 
 attention of the Senate, and to avoid my wish and disposition, in any practicable 
 mode, to aid in providing such a place for the free blacks of the country. 
 
 yj^^Jt^lA:, 1858. Senate of the United States, [Congressional Globe, vol. 1^^.3034.) 
 Mr. Doolittle, of Wisconsin, submitted the following resolution, which lies over 
 under the rule : 
 
 " Whereas the numerous disabilities to which free persons of color, of African 
 
31 
 
 descent, are subjected in many of the free States, have made It desirable on the 
 part of large numbers of them to seek elsewhere a more favorable field for their 
 labor and enterprise ; and whereas the same class of persons is regarded with still 
 greater disfavor in the slaveholding States, from considerations deemed so controlling 
 that further emancipation in many of them has been prohibited by law, unless the 
 persons emancipated shall be at the same time removed beyond the jurisdiction of 
 the State; and in some of them the graver question is seriously entertained, whether 
 persons of African descent, who are now free, shall not be again reduced to slavery 
 if they continue to remain within their jurisdiction; and whereas, in Yucatan and 
 Central and South America, there are vast regions, almost uninhabited, of the most 
 beautiful and productive countries in the world, in a climate well adapted to the 
 constitution of the African race, to develop its greatest power and highest activity: 
 therefore, 
 
 '' Resolved, That the Committee on Foreign Relations inquire into the expediency 
 of acquiring by treaty, in Yucatan, Central or South America, the rights and privi- 
 leges of settlement and of citizenship for the benefit of such persons of color, of Afri- 
 can descent, as may voluntarily desire to emigrate from the United States, and form 
 themselves into a colony or colonies, under the laws of the State or States to which 
 they emigrate ; the United States, in consideration of the commercial advantages of 
 free trade with such colony or colonies, making and securing the necessary and 
 proper engagements to maintain them in the enjoyment of the rights and privileges 
 acquired by such treaty or treaties." 
 
 Letter from Governor Bissell of Illinois. — [Extract.) 
 
 Springfield, Illinois, Januai-y 27, 1858. 
 I have been greatly interested in the perusal of your speech. * * * You 
 have undoubtedly struck the right chord, and I pray God that you and I may live to 
 see the day when your views will be carried into practice. I deem your plan per- 
 fectly feasible ; and although some difficulties we may expect to find in reducing it 
 to practice, yet they are not insurmountable. But I only designed at this moment 
 to thank you for the speech, and to express my hearty approbation of its doctrine. 
 
 Ever yours, WILLIAM H. BISSELL. 
 
 To Hon. F. P. Blair. 
 
 I desire to call especial attention io the letter of Mr. Wickliffe ; he was a cotempo- 
 rary of Jefferson, and one of his most earnest and able supporters ; age has not di- 
 minished the vigor of an intellect which, for half a centuiy, placed him at the head of 
 the bar of Kentucky, with the strongest men in the Union for his competitors. Mr. 
 Wickliffe is one of the wealthiest men and largest slaveholders of his State. 
 
 Letter from li. Wickliffe, Esq. 
 
 Lexington, Kt., March 13, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : My ill health has prevented me from acknowledging before the favor you 
 have done me in sending me your speech, delivered in the House of Representatives 
 on the 14th of January, upon the subject of colonizing free blacks from the United 
 States in Central America. In early life I thought much on the subject of which 
 your speech treats, and my thoughts went even farther. I have believed that the 
 Government of the United States ought not only to acquire sufficient territory to 
 create a State large enough for colonizing the free blacks, but that an office should 
 be created to remove them to their country, and a fund provided to purchase all 
 slaves whose masters were willing to sell. The establishment of the Colonization 
 Society, however, and the extensive bodies of sugar and cotton lands acquired by 
 the General Government, destroyed all hopes I ever entertained of achieving my 
 object in my time. I am glad, however, you have brought the subject before Con- 
 gress and the world, and hope that something may be done that will not only do im- 
 mediate credit to the country, by adopting some mode to bring perpetual Slavery to 
 a terminating point, as well as leaving no longer food to the disputants about the 
 question of power between the South and the North. 
 
 I thank you, sir, for this mark of your attention, and believe me to be ever yours, 
 respectfully, R. WICKLIFFE. 
 
 To F. P. Blair, Jun. 
 
32 
 
 Extract of a Letter from Hon. James 0. Brodhead, 
 
 BOWLINGREEN, PiKE Co., Mo., Jail. 23, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : You will permit one who has taken a more than ordinary degree of 
 personal interest in your movements for some years past, to congratulate you upon 
 the crowning effort of your life, in the delivery of your speech on the Central Amer- 
 ican question. 
 
 There is a tone of enlarged patriotism about the proposition embraced in your 
 resolution, which has been in vain looked for in the vapid and ephemeral efforts of 
 party hacks for the last ten years, in Congress or out of it. Besides, the idea is a 
 practical one, if not practicable, and, at the same time, it is national, divested of all 
 sectionalism. It takes out of the mouth of the slaveholder the words which are 
 always first on his lips when a Northern man says anything about the negro, " that 
 is none of your business." In reply, the Northern man can say, it is our business, 
 for we have free negroes as well as you ; it is for our interest, as well as yours, to get 
 rid of a degraded race, aliens to us in political and social relations ; and thus it is 
 that a fatal blow is given to Southern fanaticism, at a point where it cannot be par- 
 ried. Many a Southern man has refused to look into the question, and sheltered 
 himself behind that declaration, " It is none of your business." 
 
 Iietter from Gerrit Smith. 
 
 Peterboro, April 7, 1858. 
 Dear Sir : You were so good as to send me a copy of your speech of January 
 14th. Never until to-day did I give it an attentive reading. I am now prepared to 
 thank you for it very heartily, and to confess that it has enlightened and gratified 
 me. * * * 
 
 Greatly should I rejoice in your proposed outlet for our free colored people. That 
 outlet once provided, and vast numbers of this people would hasteh to avail them- 
 selves of it. I would have the immigration entirely voluntary, and so would 
 you. * * * 
 
 Yours, &c., GERRIT SMITH. 
 
 F. P. Blair, Jun. 
 
 Letter f-om Gerrit Stnith. 
 
 Peterboro, Aj^ril 24, 1858. 
 Dear Sir ; * * * I agree fully with you, that the mass of the whites in the 
 slave States would be in favor of emancipation, could an outlet for the emancipated 
 be afforded. Such an outlet there would be, were there a well-protected lilaek State 
 in Mexico or Central America for our blacks to go to. The further it were from us, 
 'and the more different its soil and climate from ours, the less probability would there 
 be of a desii'e on either part to have that State become a member of our Union. 
 
 Among all feasible things, there is nothing that, in my judgment, would so much 
 promote a peaceful aljolition of Slavery as your son's plan. Let him be careful that 
 no part of it be couched in words that would offend the blacks, or invade their self- 
 respect. The plan, to succeed, must be such as will in every way please them, and 
 increase, rather than waste, their too little self-respect. 
 
 Yery truly yours, GERRIT SMITH. 
 
 To F. P. Blair, Sen. 
 
 Peterboro, April 13, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : It is with very great pleasure I received your letter. The copies of 
 your son's admirable speech, which you say you sent me, I have not yet received. 
 
 I am decidedly in favor of inviting our free colored people to colonize in Central 
 America. Africa is too^far off. The idea of returning to her all her children upon 
 the continent and islands of America, is absurd. They will at no very distant day 
 congregate in our western equatorial regions, say within fifteen or twenty degrees of 
 the equator. 
 
 But I will consent to no form of compulsion to promote this colonization. Let 
 the world be all before the black as well as the white man. Let them be entirely 
 free to stay where they are, or go where they please ; and wherever they may be, let 
 them not be denied a single right of their manhood. 
 
 Yours, GERRIT SMITH. 
 
 F. P. Blair, Esq. 
 
33 
 
 Letter from B. Silliman. 
 
 New Haven, Conn., , 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : Although late, I beg you to accept my thanks for your very able, 
 instructive, and interesting speech ot January 14th, 1858, of which I received a copy 
 franked by your name. I perused that speech with great attention. It was patriotic, 
 far-seeing, and benevolent, as regards that already powerful body which must one 
 day become a dangerous element of our population. 
 
 It is most unwise — and especially for those States in which this population ia 
 condensed, and in which it is daily increasing with alarming rapidity, it is infatua- 
 tion — to ignore present evil and future danger. 
 
 Having been somewhat acquainted with Missouri, and especially with the beauti- 
 ful city of St. Louis, which is so honorably represented by yourself, I rejoice in the 
 auspicious prospect now opening, that Slavery will eventually retire from its borders. 
 
 Yours, respectfully and truly, " B. SILLIMAN. 
 
 Letter from Rev. Theodore Parker. 
 
 Boston, Jaji. 26, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir: Excuse a stranger for troubling you with a word. I have just read 
 your excellent speech — it is published in the Daily Advertiser of this morning, the 
 most important journal in New England. Allow me to thank you for it with all ray 
 heart. I think there has been no such Anti-Slavery speech in Congress, since Mr. 
 Sumner's, until Mr. Hale spoke last week. It is a good sign, when the member 
 from Missouri can say such things. 
 
 Yours, &c., T. PARKER. 
 
 ' Letter from Alfred V. Thompson, (a hlack man.) 
 
 Cincinnati, Ohio, June 5, 1858. 
 
 Sir : I have read your speech two or three times on the colonizing of colored 
 people in South America, and am much interested in it, and must say I am highly 
 pleased with the plan. I have showed it to several, and they are much pleased with 
 the document, and have worn out the speech, and hope you will send us three copies. 
 
 It is just the plan for us disfranchised Americans. I am naturally of an enter- 
 prising disposition, and have never found any cause to so elate me since I espoused 
 emigration in 1842, when we left for Liberia with the view that we as a people could 
 not attain to any honorable position in this country, nationally speaking. I was 
 much pleased with our condition in Africa, fi-om the fact that I saw no superior oa 
 account of color. (The Government was a Republic something like this. I don't 
 like the British Government, though I prefer it to our condition in this.) Our rea- 
 son for leaving Liberia, after living there for eighteen months, was on account of bad 
 health, and through the advice and persuasion of Dr. J. W. Lugenbeel, our attend- 
 ant family physician, who said if we remained we should certainly die ; therefore, we 
 left for Jamaica. Out of the company of emigrants that left America for Africa, 
 numbering two hundred and twenty-five, at the expiration of eighteen months there 
 was not living more than eighty-five or one hundred. We lost two children in the 
 undertaking; my wife and myself sufi'ered immensely. After we left for Jamaica, we 
 stopped for three months at Sierra Leone, Africa. We lived in Kingston for three years, 
 and in other parts of the island. Lived in Boston, New York, and Philadephia, for 
 two years, having remained out of the United States several years, and having trav- 
 elled considerable at my own expense, I might say I have some experience in emi- 
 gration. But, notwithstanding all this loss of time and deprivation, I have acquired 
 a small property and a nice little business. But, with the proper assistance, I am 
 ■willing to try it again, though my wife says she will never leave the land of her fore- 
 fathers. There is a great demand'on me from the colored population for information 
 in regard to this project, and I hope you will send me the necessary documents to 
 post myself. You mention in your speech several documents that would be of im- 
 mense advantage in defending my position. I wish to know how and by what means 
 the necessary aid and jsrotectiou is to be given, and if in your opinion the Govern- 
 ment will give any assistance. We have had three meetings on this subject, and 
 thought of forming ourselves into a joint stock company, and issue $100 bonds and 
 aid ourselves as much as possible, and to beg from individuals. State Governments, 
 sell bonds, &c., &c. Please inform me where I can obtain a constitution and by- 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 laws of the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society. I learned my trade with Mr, An- 
 drew Johnson, of Tennessee, Ex-Governor, now member of the Senate, who can give 
 any information in regard to me. He will recollect the boy he used to call Alfred, 
 You will do me a great favor to answer this soon. 
 
 I am, with much respect, your most obedient servant, 
 
 ALFRED VANACTER THOMPSON. 
 Letter from J. D. Harris, [a black man.) 
 
 Cleveland, Ohio, Dec. 10, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : Having full faith in the principle of your able speech delivered in 
 Congress Jan. 14, 1858, in which you urge the necessity of acquiring territory out- 
 side of the United States for the settlement of the freed colored people, I take the 
 liberty of addressing you this letter. 
 
 I assure you that the thinking portion of the colored people appreciate your ef- 
 forts in that direction ; for while it is evident that the white and black races cannot 
 exist in this country on terms of equality, it is equally certain the latter will not 
 long be content with anything less. 
 
 Against the Government, its laws, and its customs, they are fast beginning to 
 rebel ; and even while I write, in consequence of a late fugitive slave case, this spirit 
 is spreading to a marvellous extent. 
 
 The Government drives us to Canada, where we are indeed free, but where it is 
 plain we cannot become a very great people. We want more room, where it is not 
 quite so cold — we want to be identified with the ruling power of a nation ; and un- 
 less this be obtained, Canada must be looked to as a strong military post for future 
 use, in the very vitals of America. 
 
 But you will not forgive me for addressing you (if at all) in a tone so pointed, 
 and I therefore cease, humbly beseeching you will bring the subject again before 
 Congress ; and when you have so far progressed as to need an agent among our peo- 
 ple, whether it be to spread such information as will awaken them to their true in- 
 terests, or to carry out some plan or expedition that may be devised, begging to be 
 remembered as one who deeply feels the present embarassing condition of his race, 
 and who is willing to sacrifice his time, his comfort, and his life, in order to create 
 for them a higher and more ennobling position. 
 
 I have the honor to be, &c., J. D. HARRIS. 
 
 Letter from M. 11. Detant/, (a black man.) 
 
 Chatham, C. W., Feb. 24, 1858. 
 
 Sir : I take the liberty of sending you, which I beg you will at your earliest 
 leisure peruse, a paper written and reported by myself to a Convention of colored 
 people at the place indicated, which was then accepted in the form of a report 
 emanating from a committee. 
 
 I beg, sir, that you will give it your earliest attention, and favor me with your 
 opinion thereon, knowing that as an enlightened statesman you will readily account 
 for anything that may be too pointed or tart. 
 
 I have not as yet had the gratification of seeing your speech, but have been 
 strongly requested by Messrs. Holly and Whitfield, of New Haven and Buffalo, to 
 communicate with you on the subject. I was at the time I wrote the report a resi- 
 dent of Pittsburgh, Pa. 
 
 See report on the Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Conti- 
 nent, page 33. 
 
 I have the honor to be, sir, ytur most obedient servant, M. R. DELANY. 
 
 From Rev. James T. Holly, of New Haven, Conn., Rector of St. Luke^s. 
 
 Hon. Sir : As the communication I voluntarily intruded upon your attention In 
 relation to your recent speech in favor of colonizing the free blacks in Central 
 America has been so kindly received by you, I am encouraged to pursue the sub- 
 ject, especially since you have given me the liberty to do so. 
 
 1 have already called your attention to the fact that the subject has actively occu- 
 pied the attention of this class of persons themselves since 1854, when an organiza- 
 tion was formed among them, to promote their own emigration to the West Indies, 
 
35 
 
 Oientral and South America. I now wish to speak of the extent of this organiza- 
 tion, its sympathizers, and the steps that have been taken to attain its end. 
 
 You have doubtless noticed, by the copy of the published proceedings of its or- 
 ganic Convention which I transmitted to you, that delegates from the British Prov- 
 ince of Canada and eleven States of this Union (three of them being slave States) 
 assembled in that Convention. And in the othcial organization of the National 
 Board as a Central Executive Committee, corresponding members among the free 
 colored people of no less than tive slaveholding States were attached to that Board. 
 
 But even the organisation in its extent is but a feeble expression of the growing 
 feelings of discontent at their anomalous condition in this country, now rife among 
 the free blacks, both North and South. Many arc not identified with this move- 
 ment, because they look upon the effort to remove and colonize themselves as 
 wholly impracticable without the helping bund of men of power, influence, and 
 wealth, aniong the whites of this country. And despairing now to obtain this in- 
 fluence in Ikvor of their removal to the intertropical regions of this continent whilst 
 the African coloniKation scheme preoccupied the attention of the American people, 
 they have looked upon this organisation of their own people as a fond Utopia, to be 
 dreamed cif^ but never to be realized. Hence they have been too hopeless of ac- 
 complishing their heart's desire to join pnblicly in this movement hitherto. 
 
 But now\hat your speech in Congress opens a new era in their hopes, and they 
 thereby witness "the dawn of a brighter day ibr the successful accomplishnient of 
 their hopes, I can assure you that thousands can be readily enrolled as emigrants 
 to the intertropical regions of our continent with the slightest eftbrt, I speak now 
 from a familiar and somewhat extended acquaintance and intercourse with them, 
 with especial reference to this subject, during the past five years, by travelling and 
 sojourning among them in the New England, Middle, and Northwestern States and 
 Canada—having at the same time met and conversed with free colored men from 
 almost ev>ery sla\'c State in our Union^ 
 
 I am confident that with proper inducements to be held out before them in re- 
 gard to security for liberty, property, and prospects for well doing, I could muster 
 two hundred emigrant families, or about one thousand free colored persons, annual- 
 ly, for the next five years, of the very best class for colonial settlement and industry, 
 from various parts of the United States and Canada, who will gladly embark for 
 homes in our American tropics. At the end of this period, it would need no espe- 
 cial efforts to promote the emigration, because it would regulate itself thereafter. 
 Five thousand pioneers by this time having already settled themselves in Central 
 America, having commenced to do well in their new homes, would spread the glad 
 tidings among friends and relations remaining behind them in the United States, 
 and the intelligence flying from family to family like an electric spark, a spontane- 
 ous emigration, double that of the first, will follow in the second five years, and this 
 number will !>e trebled or (juadrupled in the succeeding decade. 
 
 The feelings of the free blacks in relation to African colonization are no criterion 
 by which to judge of the success of Anierico.n intertropical emigration. The blacks 
 have the most inveterate prejudice against being separated from the New World, 
 that has been the field of their labors ond sufferings for the past three centuries. It 
 is a little hard even to leave the very spot on which they chanced to be born, for 
 they a-re a very domestic race, and strong in their local attachments. Novertheless, 
 they can and will easily reconcile themselves to the irresistible fate of local separa- 
 tion frofn the whites of this country, when they can locate on the same continent, 
 within a few days sail of the scenes of their nativity, and situated, as they would be, 
 in the grand American thoroughfare between our Atlantic and Pacific States, This 
 constant intercourse they would enjoy with white Americans, by means of travel 
 through the tropics between the two ocean shores of our country, would make 
 the blacks feel as if they had not lost their homes with us ; and, therefore, would 
 render them contented and happy in their lot. This can never be the case in Afri- 
 can coSonisation, since by this scheme they are not only expatriated from their coun- 
 try, but also exiled from our Western World. Hence, I believe, I have data from 
 personal knowledge, which will fully justify the expectation, that with proper efforts, 
 more emigrants of this class will be removed to Central America in ten years than 
 has been removed to Liberia during the forty years efforts of the colonization scheme. 
 As a further insight to you of the depth and extent of this movement among the 
 
36 
 
 free blacks themselves, I send you a copy of the proceedings of a Convention held 
 by the colored people of the United States and Canada as early as 1853, iu which 
 the subject of emigration to the West Indies, Central and South America, was 
 broached. And I also transmit another pamphlet, published early in 1854, contain- 
 ing a newspaper controversy between three of the ablest negro writers in the country, 
 on the subject of this selfsame emigration. This controversy was preliminary to the 
 assembling of their organic Convention in the same year. 
 
 This movement, although almost entirely confined among the blacks, so far, yet 
 it can boast some interested sympathizers among the whites, to whose attention it 
 has been presented, and who only await a more tangible and influential organization, 
 and a more definite knowledge of what is to be done, in order to lend it a helping 
 hand. Among others, I may mention C. W. Elliott, Esq., author of a History of 
 New England, and F. L. Olmsted, Esq., author of a recent work entitled Our Sect/- 
 board Slave States. Numerous others can be easily interested, when the subject hag 
 been put in working shape by those who have the i>ractical ability to do it. Having 
 now spoken of the extent of this movement among the free blacks themselves, ana 
 also referred to a few sympathizers it has already invoked in an unostentatious man- 
 ner among the whites, I now turn to speak of the practical efforts this organization 
 has put forth in pursuance of its objects. 
 
 In one year after its organic Convention, a commissioner was appointed by the 
 National Board or Central Committee of the same, to proceed to Hayti on a mis- 
 sion to Faustin First, for the purpose of making and receiving propositions on the 
 subject of encouraging colored Americans to emigrate to that island, by holding a 
 conference thereon with the Haytien Government- This commissioner went to 
 Port-au-Prince during the summer of 1855 to prosecute hia mission, and returned 
 and reported its results at the biennial session of this Board of Emigration, held in 
 Cleveland, Ohio, August 26, 27, 1856, The commissioner was cordially received by 
 the Haytien Government, and his propositions kindly entertained and considered j 
 but in consequence of the domestic complications arising out of the internal feuds, 
 and the civil war then brewing between Hayti and Dominica, the Government of 
 the Emperor Faustin was not prepared to accede to or advance any propositions 
 on the subject of this emigration, any further than the announcement of the fact thai 
 it would be happy to welcome all such emigrants whenever they might be pleased 
 to come to Hayti. 
 
 The propositions submitted by the commissioner were substantially as follows : 
 
 1. The Haytien Government was desired to offer encouragements to emigrants of 
 color coming to Hayti, to establish themselves in the mountains and valleys of that 
 island, to cultivate with their own bands private homesteads to be donated to them 
 by the Government. 
 
 2. The Haytien Government to guaranty to these emigrants the enjoyment and 
 equal civil and political rights with the natives of the country, and liberty of con- 
 science in religious worship. 
 
 3. None of the emigrants or their children to do military duty until seven yeara 
 after their arrival in Hayti ; ministers of the gospel, physicians, lawyers, and school 
 teachers, to be always exempt from that duty. 
 
 4. The Government to aid in the erection of manufacturing establishments, sugar 
 refineries, grist and saw mills, for such emigrants as might be competent to conduct 
 such works. The advances of the Government in this respect to be reimbursed out 
 of the future profits of these works. 
 
 5. The Government to exempt from duty all materials, tools, furniture, &c., 
 brought or imported by emigrants in the island for the purpose of carrying on their 
 labors. 
 
 6. The emigrants to become Haytien citizens, invested with all the privileges, 
 prerogatives, and immunities of the same, after one year's residence, on taking the 
 oath of allegiance. 
 
 7. The Haytien Government to appoint a commissioner to reside in the United 
 States and co-operate with the National Board or Central Committee of the Emigra- 
 tion Society in the general supervision of the embarkation of the emigrants from 
 the United States. 
 
 8. On condition that the Haytien Government would fulfil the above requirements, 
 th© National Board would guaranty a select emigration of two hundred families or 
 
37 
 
 one thonsand persons per annum for five years, and one thousand families 
 or five thousand persons in addition thereto, if these governmental inducements 
 should be continued two years longer. After seven years duration, the scheme to 
 be abandoned, and left to regulate'itself as a voluntary and spontaneous individual 
 emigration thereafter, 
 
 These propositions were left open for the subsequent consideration and action of 
 the Haytien Government, But as the Government has not since responded any 
 further on this subject, the prospect of a movement in that direction remains in 
 statu qiio. But whilst darkness seems to be still brooding over the one, yet on the 
 other hand new prospects seem to be dawning in the direction of Central America, 
 by the bold and unequivocal position you have been pleased to assume voluntarily, 
 in the Congress of the United States. It is fit that the subject should be agitated 
 there by such an able advocate as you have proved yourself to be, in order that it 
 may go forth with a telling efiect upon the whole country. But opportune agitation 
 in Congress in this manner is all that I believe can be done for years to come, with 
 our Government, on the subject. The practical details of the movement must now 
 be laid and carried out in its incipiency, by a company or an association of private 
 individuals, of influence, character, and standing, throughout the whole country, but 
 who shall at the same time be backed, animated, and cheered, by able supporters 
 and defenders in Congress. This association ought to be formed as early as possi- 
 ble, and when formed, it ought to patronize and encourage the organization that 
 the colored people have effected among themsslves for this purpose. An intelligent 
 and able commissioner ought to be dispatched in behalf of this association, to enter 
 into stipulations with the Central American Government in regard to these conteni- 
 plated emigrants. And this commissioner might be accompanied by some intelli- 
 gent colored man, to be named by their Board or Central Committee, in whom they 
 might repose the utmost confidence, when he brought back a report of the condition, 
 prospects, and advantages, of that country. 
 
 Arrangements thus made for emigration, and a pioneer list of emigrants enrolled, 
 consisting of agricultural laborers, mechanics, teachers, and professional men, then 
 this association, composed of distinguished individuals, will invoke philanthropic 
 contributions of money, mechanics' tools, and agricultural implements, to fit out and 
 facilitate the removal of such of this number of emigrants as might need aid in 
 these respects. 
 
 Thus prepared, the first expedition will sail, consisting of fifty families, or two 
 hundred and fifty persons, and every three months thereafter, for the ensuing five 
 years, let the same number be quietly transported. At the end of this period, I will 
 guaranty the most skeptical and prejudiced will be converted to the scheme, and 
 our Government will at last feel the necessity of making it a national movement, by 
 throwing in some way her protecting ajgis over this rapidly-accumulating portion 
 of her own depleted population, that will then promise to be so advantageous to her 
 in every respect, commercially and politically, in their newly-acquired homes in our 
 highway to the Pacific, * * * 
 
 With this hope, I remain your obedient servant, 
 
 JAMES THEODORE HOLLY, 
 
 New Ha vex, January, 30, 1858. Corresponding Secretary. 
 
 Letter from J. M. Whitfield, Editor of the African- American Repository, [a color' 
 
 ed man.) 
 
 Buffalo, New York, Feb. 1, 1858. 
 
 Dear Sir : Having read a portion of your late speech in Congress in favor of 
 colonizing free blacks in Central or South America, I have taken the liberty of 
 addressing you, feeling, as one of that race, and an advocate of the same policy, a 
 vital interest in its success. 
 
 In August, 1854, a Convention was held at Cleveland of those colored men in fa- 
 vor of emigration to the West India islands. Central and South America. That 
 Convention organized a Board of P]migration, which appointed a commissioner 
 (Rev. J. T. Holly, now rector of St. Luke's church. New Haven) to go to Haytl, and 
 confer with the Haytien Government upon the subject. 
 
 That Government expressed itself ready to offer the most liberal inducements to 
 emigrants, and to grant them every assistance in its power. It was also intended 
 
38 
 
 to send a commissioner to the British islands, New Granada, and the Central 
 American States, but for laclv of pecuniary means were unable to do so. And here, 
 allow me to say, is one of the curses of our condition in this country : we are all so 
 miserably poor that we are unable to help each other, and so scattered that it is 
 impossible to have union of action even where there is perfect unanimity of senti- 
 ment; so that while there are hundreds — yes, thousands — of enterprising and industri- 
 our colored men, ready and anxious to embark immediately in any i'easible move- 
 ment of emigration to either of the places named, the means to commence such a 
 movement properly are not attainable among them. * * * 
 
 The Colonization Society removes to Afi*ica a (gw hundreds yearly, at an expense 
 which, if judiciously applied according to the practical principles developed by Mr, 
 Thayer in his organized system of Kansas emigration, would plant twice as many 
 ihoutiands in Central America, with everything requisite for their rapid progress ; and 
 the true interest of both the white and black races seems to require such a policy. 
 
 The fact is, the Saxon and negro are the only positive races on this continent, 
 and the two are destined to absorb into themselves all the others ; and, like two 
 positive poles, they repel each other ; and if the one is destined to occupy all the 
 temperate regions of this hemisphere, it is equally certain that the other will 
 predominate within the tropics. The Slavery propagandists unwittingly admit 
 the same, when they declare negro labor to be indispensable in those regions. 
 The question which suggests itself to the intelligent mind is, shall things be 
 permitted and encouraged to reach their natural developments, which no combi- 
 nation of circumstances can prevent, (however much it may retard it,) l)y the peace- 
 ful influence of free labor ? or shall the Slavery propagandists be allowed to inter- 
 fere and check for a time the march of civilization, when the ultimate result must 
 be to usher in, through war and anarchy, the very same state of things, which might 
 have been much sooner and easier reached by peaceful and legitimate means, to the 
 great benefit of the whole civilized world ? You have answered the question in a 
 manner which indicates the far-seeing statesman as well as the noble-hearted phi- 
 lanthropist, and I sincerely hope that a majority of Congress may be induced to 
 adopt the same just and liberal policy. 
 
 Respectfully, yours, J. M. WHITFIELD. 
 
 54 W 
 

 
 
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