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 THE E^D 
 
 IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT. 
 
 ^ BY A 
 
 MERCHANT OF PHILADELPHIA 
 
 PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 KING & BATED, PRINTERS, No. 607 SANSOM STREET. 
 
 1860. 
 
^'\^\ 
 ■t^^ 
 
The ackuowleclged leader of the Eepublican party, made 
 not long ago, at Detroit, a great speech, in which he sought 
 to elucidate the origin of the existing factious and sectional 
 agitation throughout the United States, and in which he 
 also gave his advice as to a proper remedy for that con- 
 fessedly dangerous agitation. Mr. Seward conceives that 
 during forty years past, we have steadily diverged from 
 the ways of our forefathers ; and that this divergence has 
 now became so great, that we are fairly lost in mazes of 
 error, and must, therefore, consult our national safety by a 
 prompt return to old landmarks. He reviews the history 
 of our country, and proves conclusively that, beginning 
 with the acquisition of Louisiana and Florida, each suc- 
 cessive addition to our territorial possessions has awakened 
 a fresh and increasingly violent controversy as to the area 
 of slavery — the very controversy that agitates the whole 
 country at the present moment — and he then offers his 
 counsel, and foreshadows the policy of his party in these 
 words : 
 
 " My humble advice, then, fellow-citizens, is, that we 
 return and re-establish the original policy of the nation, 
 and henceforth hold, as we did in the beginning, that 
 slavery is and must be only a purely local, temporary, and 
 exceptional institution, confined within the slave States 
 where it already exists, while freedom is the general, 
 normal, enduring, and permanent condition of society within 
 the jurisdiction, and under the authority, of the Constitu- 
 tion of the United States." 
 
 The whole animus of the speech is, not that we have 
 acquired territory too rapidly, but rather that we have 
 given slavery a foothold in our several successive acquisi- 
 tions. His summary of our consecutive errors, from the 
 
time of the Missouri Compromise to tlie present exciting 
 crisis, is therefore appropriately made in the following 
 language : 
 
 " It was in 1820, then, that the national deviation began. 
 TVe have continued ever since the divergent course so 
 inconsiderately entered, until at last we have reached a 
 point, where, amid confusion, bewilderment, and mutual 
 recrimination, it seems alike impossible to go forward or 
 to return. We have added territory after territory, and 
 region after region with the customary boldness of feebly 
 resisted conquerors, not merely neglecting to keep slavery 
 out of our new possessions, but actually removing all the 
 barriers against it which we found standing at the time of the 
 conquest. In doing this we have defied the moral opinions 
 of mankind, overturned the laws and systems of our fathers, 
 and dishonored their mem'ories by declaring that the un- 
 equalled and glorious Constitution which they gave us, 
 carries with it, as it attends our eagles, not freedom and 
 personal rights to the oppressed, but slavery and a hateful 
 and baleful commerce in slaves, wherever we win a con- 
 quest by sea or land over the whole habitable globe," 
 
 Mr. Seward's speech is quite long, but almost the whole 
 pith and marrow of it may be found in the extracts above 
 given. 
 
 It is a singular fact that all the parties which have made 
 nominations for the next presidential term, favor the acqui- 
 sition of more territory. Both sections of the Democratic 
 forces boldly avow such acquisition to be a leading object 
 in their policy. The nominees of the " Constitutional 
 Union" party cannot have strength, without the support of 
 Democrats of the conservative order; and therefore they 
 acknowledge that they also favor moderate and well-timed 
 enlargements of territory. Indeed, they cannot profess any 
 other policy, unless Mr, Everett is willing to repudiate, or 
 disavow the sentiments of the famous post-official letter 
 which he addressed, some years ago, to Lord John Eussell, 
 in regard to Cuba as a necessary eventual possession of the 
 
United States. And then again, if we turn to the well- 
 considered Detroit doctrines of Mr. Seward we find that he 
 says : " In this view I regard it as belonging to the office 
 of a statesman not merely to favor an immediate and tem- 
 porary increase of national wealth, and an enlargement of 
 national territory ;''^ from which language it is plain that 
 enlargement of territory is a part, although not by any means 
 the whole, of the policy of the Republican party. 
 
 Mr. Seward is certainly sanguine as to the increase of our 
 population, and our consequent need of enlarged domain, 
 under the benign influence of free-soil doctrines; for he 
 subsequently says, in the prophetic grandeur of far-sighted 
 statesmanship : " There is not one acre too much in our 
 broad domain for the supply of even three generations of 
 OMT free pojjulation, with their certain increase;" and then, 
 after a brief intimation that for such exceeding " certain 
 increase" he relies in part on immigration, he draws the 
 sweeping conclusion : " Certainly, therefore, we have no need 
 and no room for African slaves in the federal territories." 
 
 Now we happen to be of the number of those who have 
 much more faith in the indications of Divine Providence, 
 than we have in the prophetic suggestions of Mr. Seward ; 
 and we look at the African question in manner following: 
 
 During our days of colonial vassalage, our British brethren 
 saw fit, notwithstanding our deprecations and remonstrances, 
 to encourage the importation of negro slaves into America. 
 Mr. Seward very charitably considers this high-handed 
 proceeding of our trans-Atlantic rulers to have been a 
 voluntary movement of the colonists themselves, to pro- 
 cure an adequate supply of laborers ; and, he adds in ex- 
 tenuation of that British slave-trade, to which we owe our 
 present four millions of slaves, these remarkable words : 
 
 " It was then thought an exercise of Christian benevolence 
 to rescue the African heathen from eternal suffering in a 
 future state, and through the painful path of earthly bond- 
 age to open to him the gates of the celestial paradise." 
 
 In this view, it was certainly the highest philanthropy, 
 
and not cupidity, nor lawless violence, that transplanted 
 from Africa to America a portion of the negro race. 
 
 Not so thought our revolutionary forefathers. Some of 
 them had visited Great Britain — not, however, so pleasantly 
 as the Sewards and Sumners of our day have done, nor to be 
 honored and feasted, as progressive men on the question of 
 freedom for all the negroes in North America. They went on 
 a vastly different errand, and they were received in a very 
 different vfaj. They went to complain of infraction of rights, 
 and to ask redress of grievances. They spoke bitterly of 
 exactions of money from the colonists, of troops quartered 
 amongst them, of African slaves thrust tq^on them ; but their 
 remonstrances were rejected, their supplications were dis- 
 regarded, and they were spurned with contempt from the 
 foot of the throne. It is remarkable that their prejudices 
 were so strong, and their tempers so violent, that they 
 failed altogether to suggest or even to allow that charitable 
 view of the British slave trade which the great Republican 
 expositor of the present presidential canvass has presented. 
 It is quite probable that they were equally misguided by 
 passion in regard to other alleged grievances. We live in 
 an age of progress, and may soon come to be assured by 
 one of our countrymen, that British duties on teas, together 
 with sundry other taxes imposed before 1776, were whole- 
 some checks by the mother country upon colonial extrava- 
 gance ; and that those mercenary troops, about which our 
 forefathers made so much ado, were only an efficient police 
 suitable to au obviously riotous population. 
 
 In spite, however, of such possible progress of our chief 
 statesmen iu "Anglomania," we commit ourselves to un- 
 qualified approbation of our forefathers. They would not 
 submit to coercion by a distant power which ignored their 
 rights. They detested taxes ; they detested soldiers ; they 
 detested the slave trade. They were nobles and patriots of 
 the highest stamp; men competent to subdue a wilderness, 
 and competent also to repel all intruders on the soil so sub- 
 dued ; and we marvel greatly when we hear any of our coun- 
 
trjmen instituting any sort of comparison between tliem and 
 the Italians and Hungarians, or other effeminate and merce- 
 nary patriots of the present day. 
 
 But our forefathers were not prophets, nor authoritative 
 interpreters of the designs of Divine Providence in respect 
 to the African race ; and therefore, although they generally 
 deprecated the extension of slavery beyond the limits of the 
 original thirteen States, we may reverently and safely dis- 
 regard their opinions on this point. Those opinions were 
 simply the sincere, but premature, reasonings of great and 
 good men who had, as it were, seen Joseph sold into bond- 
 age, but who did not know that " God meant it unto good, 
 to bring it to pass as it is this day, to save much people 
 alive." As yet, cotton was not in America ; and the men 
 of that day were therefore sorely perplexed to divine a hope- 
 ful future for a transplanted race, which multiplied so rapidly 
 and was so full of tropical indolence that it could not be 
 self-supporting on the common husbandry of temperate 
 latitudes. That race now outnumbers considerably the 
 three millions of colonists who declared themselves inde- 
 pendent of Great Britain in 1776. For each man, woman 
 and child of that race, within the bounds of our greatly 
 enlarged United States, a bale of cotton is annually pro- 
 duced ; and the bales of cotton which we export annually 
 average more than half of the whole surplus products or 
 exportable wealth of the Union. Upon that export of cot- 
 ton repose mainly our shipping interests, our foreign ex- 
 changes, our national credit throughout the world. We 
 have a raw material, which African fingers gather, and with 
 which the manufacturing masses of Europe cannot dispense. 
 And we are happy to add, that the condition of our Africans, 
 although they be called slaves, is vastly better than that of 
 an equal number of the laboring population of any part of 
 Europe, although these last be called freemen. And when 
 we speak thus, we admit no exception nor reservation in 
 favor of Great Britain and Ireland ; nor, on the other hand, 
 are we insensible of the noble efforts which great and good 
 
men liave made during tliirtj years past, and are still 
 making, for the improvement of the condition of the masses 
 of the United Kingdom. But serf-like poverty is not easily 
 remedied by legislation ; and the American, who cannot go 
 abroad and see for himself, may easily read at home enough 
 to convince him of the social misery of " merry England." 
 The English newspapers of the past summer tell us that 
 peers of the realm have expressed grave apprehensions that 
 a population armed against France may easily become an 
 intestine danger to Great Britain herself, and that Mr. 
 Bright has avowed his conviction that a continuance of 
 oppressive taxation may goad the people into the subver- 
 sion of a monarchy and an aristocracy which are too 
 expensive to be compatible with the comfortable subsistence 
 of the laboring masses. The holders of such language may 
 be, and probably, nay, almost certainly are, extremists ; 
 but still there must be vast social misery, vast personal 
 degradation, great family resemblance to slavery, in a free 
 population of which such things are said, by men who are 
 not only of sound mind and discretion, but high in public 
 confidence, and elevated by wealth above the platform on 
 which the demagogue stands to prepare the hearts of the 
 people for revolution. 
 
 And do we not all remember the Chartists' great and 
 solemn procession, and the Iron Duke's great and wise pre- 
 cautions against riot and insurrection ? And what has been 
 done by England, since the days of the monster petition, to 
 enrich her suffering masses, or at least to free them from 
 that oppressive, enslaving poverty Avhich maddens man and 
 debases woman ? Go to London. Visit Exeter Hall on the 
 occasion of an annual jubilee for West India emancipation. 
 Listen to British eloquence on the ruthless separation of 
 man and wife under legalized sales of negroes in the South- 
 ern States of our confederation. Enquire of the orator why 
 husbands and wives are likewise separated in British work- 
 houses ; he will inform you, that it is a necessary part of a 
 great system for the public good. Listen to him, whilst he 
 
enlarges upon the nullification of marriage, by the control 
 which the planter exercises over his submissive female 
 slaves. Then enquire of him whether the prostitutes of the 
 great cities and principal towns of the United Kingdom do 
 not outnumber its standing army. He will admit the unde- 
 niable fact, but will protest against the legitimacy of the 
 allegation, that these things are so mainly because women 
 cannot find work in Great Britain, except at starvation 
 prices, and that 
 
 " It's oh ! to be a slave 
 
 Along with the barbarous Turk, 
 Where woman has never a soul to save, 
 If this is Christian work." 
 
 Gentle reader, are you familiar with the works of Dick- 
 ens? If you are, pray tell us the great staple of which 
 they are composed. Is it not the hopeless misery of the 
 masses of Great Britain ? Have you forgotten " Hard 
 Times/' and its poor creatures, to whom the world is always 
 "a muddle?" Do you not remember " Trotty Veck," and 
 his conclusion that the poor are " born bad," because they 
 trouble the rich to take care of them ? Can you ever forget 
 that passage in "Bleak House," in which, after having de- 
 scribed the death of "poor Joe," the author boldly apostro- 
 phises Queen, Lords and Commons — yea, all estates and 
 conditions of comfortable people — in this noble strain: 
 "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. 
 Dead, Eight Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every 
 order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly com- 
 passion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every 
 day ;" — as though all the power, and intelligence, and hu- 
 manity of the realm were assembled to consider that mise- 
 rable death-bed, and to provide a just remedy for such 
 fearful destitution ? 
 
 " But that is only fiction," some one will say. True, good 
 friend ; but a popular author cannot, without contradiction 
 or protest, libel his own country, even in fiction. Mrs. 
 
10 
 
 Beecher Stowe has libelled a part of her country, and the 
 South has exclaimed against her injustice. Mr. Charles 
 Dickens has drawn fearfal pictures, not of alleged sectional 
 misery in Great Britain, but of the plain and fearful preva- 
 lence of debasing want in city and country throughout the 
 realm ; and who, among his countrymen, has risen to protest 
 against such exaggerated descriptions of the condition of 
 the laboring masses? Nay, if any one should do so, he 
 could easily be silenced on testimony collected by parlia- 
 mentar}^ committees, or by investigating philanthropists in 
 Great Britain. 
 
 And now let us turn to Ireland, of whose unhappy con- 
 dition we find, in one of her journals, the following account, 
 dated not many months ago : 
 
 " In an article headed ' Flying,' the Nation thus vents its 
 grief: 'They are flying: through Dublin our flying people 
 pour daily in weeping crowds. For years our streets have 
 not beheld such scenes as those of the past week, though, 
 alas ! the ebb of po^Dulation has not wholly ceased for a 
 quarter of a century. Long lines of woful faces, strangely 
 mocking the holiday attire in which the poor creatures attire 
 themselves, as they quit forever their fathers' clay ; caravans 
 of vehicles, piled with the bright-red painted boxes and 
 trunks, with owners' names marked rudely on the fronts; 
 aged women, with hair white as the hoar of December ; old 
 men, bent and broken by sixty j^ears of toil in furrow and 
 trench ; young men, who try to look hopeful that the mother 
 may weep the less; young women, feeling all the more 
 deeply, as women do, at rending the thousand silent ties 
 that link them to home ; while children, too young to know 
 the cause of all the sorrow they see on every face, are only 
 delighted with the wonders of the great big streets through 
 which they pass. 
 
 " ' Away, away, away — and not willingly or happily. 
 They are not a nomad race. It is not an Arab community 
 that has struck the tent-poles; they are not dull-hearted, 
 plodding Saxon people, who for a meal more in the mouth 
 
11 
 
 would cross the globe itself, and call it folly to feel less at 
 home in Kamschatka than in the land where their fathers' 
 ashes for centuries repose. No, no ; these are a people 
 whose very heart-strings are wrung by the idea of eternal 
 exile ; a people who, almost to a fault — if a virtue so beau- 
 tiful could ever be a fault — cling to the ancestral home ; a 
 people who, if they could but live — if they could but eat an 
 humble crust, broken amid the hardest toil — in Ireland, the 
 land of their hearts' affections, would deem it swgeter than 
 the bread of luxury in a foreign clime. Away, away, away ! 
 Men thought it had ceased, this terrible exodus ; they 
 thought this fearful hasmorrhage had ceased to drain the 
 life-blood of our country. But here it is, full upon us 
 again; the wails are rising once more in every village. 
 Whole communities are quitting forever, in sorrow and 
 despair, a land for which they would freely die.' " 
 
 Gentle reader, if 3^ou are an anti- slavery agitator, pray 
 draw upon your imagination for something in the way of 
 negro auctions, which shall equal in horrors the sober facts 
 of an Irish exodus. 
 
 Now, do not tell us that two wrontjs do not make a rio-ht ; 
 that the oppressions of Great Britain upon her own poor 
 and upon the Celts of Ireland, do not and cannot justif}'- the 
 oppressions of America upon African slaves. We seek no 
 such justification for slavery. We are of the number of 
 those, who conceive that there is a vast difference between 
 social evils and personal wrongs. That the degrading 
 poverty of vast masses of Great Britain is a great social evil 
 is certain ; but no man can say that the members of those 
 masses endure any personal wrong. They are fully pro- 
 tected in their every right by English law ; but they are 
 too many for the land in zvhich they divell. In other words, 
 the social evil of Great Britain is a redundant population 
 for present means of subsistence, and neither parliaments 
 nor philanthropy can provide a remedy for that evil. So 
 also in Ireland. There is no personal wrong done to any 
 Celt : but the race to which he belongs cannot compete in 
 
J 
 
 12 
 
 industry and energy ivith the Anglo-Saxon race, whicli has 
 peacefully and lawfully colonized the Emerald Isle; and 
 therefore we behold now, as we did some years ago, the 
 miseries of precipitate emigration by vast masses of Irishry, 
 whom a recent crisis has taught that they must fly elsewhere 
 to live. And in respect to the Africans in bondage in our 
 Southern States, we beg leave to say, that in the providence 
 of Almighty God, they have been transplanted from the tropics 
 in u-hich^ they might have lived indolently^ into temp)erate 
 latitudes, where they must starve if they are not compelled to 
 work. We admit that the compulsory labor, or in other 
 words the slavery of the transplanted race is a great social 
 evil ; but we do not see that it is possible to do otherwise 
 than enforce that labor, for we cannot change the Ethiopian's 
 skin, nor eradicate his indolence, which is more than skin- 
 deep, and which is so thoroughly constitutional with him, 
 that it precludes the possibility of his living without a master 
 in temperate latitudes. He is but a lazy overgrown child. 
 All that the people of the United States can do for him, is 
 to endeavor to make his relations to his master approximate 
 to the relations of the child to the parent. And here we may 
 remark that the large, densely-crowded cities of the North 
 famish to an observant and dispassionate eye more cases 
 of children morally abused and systematically depraved by 
 their own parents than the plantations of the South would 
 present of slaves morally abused and systematically de- 
 praved by their masters. Any City Missionary or Bene- 
 volent Society's Visitor, can give fearful facts as to the 
 abuse of the parental relation by the vicious and degraded 
 of Bedford Street, in Philadelphia, or the Eive Points, in 
 New York, or Fort Hill, in Boston ; and yet no one is bold 
 enough to draw the conclusion that such exceptional cases 
 prove that the parental relation is founded in injustice and 
 tvrong. 
 
 All that we have just advanced as the true and necessary 
 cause of the continued slavery of the African race in the 
 United States falls to the ground, unless we prove the in- 
 
13 
 
 capacity of that race to be self-sustaining in our land in a 
 condition of freedom. 'And on this point we are quite 
 willing to judge of the whole race on the evidence which is 
 afforded by the lives and habits of that fractional part, 
 which we have in our midst, as freemen in the North, In 
 speaking of those freemen we will not even require allow- 
 ance for the fact that many of them are by no means of 
 purely African descent, and that some of them have a great 
 predominance of Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins. We 
 will simply enquire, what are their pursuits? Do they 
 labor in productive industry, or do they simply minister to 
 luxury ? The answer is plain. No one can find laborious 
 blacks in any free State. So great is their aversion to 
 labor, that the entrance of free blacks into some of our 
 Western States is prohibited by law. The existence of 
 snch laws implies plainly two things: 1. That they are an 
 idle race, tending to pauperism, 2. That they are not 
 citizens of the United States ; otherwise their passage from 
 one State into another State could not lawfully be pro- 
 hibited. In view of such anti- African legislation by Wes- 
 tern States, let ns have no more Northern twaddle about 
 the enormities of the Dred Scott decision, which did nothing 
 more than to affirm what the legislatures of border States 
 have for many years past quietly assumed as a constitu- 
 tional axiom, or at least a postulate. 
 
 But to consider free blacks more in detail. The writer 
 was born and brought up in Philadelphia, a city where 
 there is no prejudice against them, and where they thrive 
 and prosper more abundantly than in any other part of the 
 United States, The colored population of our city is pro- 
 bably twenty -five thousand, or about five per cent, of the 
 total number of its inhabitants. Now how do they live ? 
 A few of the poorest amongst them are hod-carriers to 
 bricklayers ; the rest hardly work at all, except as minis- 
 ters to the luxury, or gatherers of the spare material of a 
 large city. The men are barbers, public and private wait- 
 ers, coachmen, venders and scourers of cast-off clothing. 
 
n 
 
 porters, — any thing in sTiort but common laborers or me- 
 chanics. They neither dig cellars, nor wheel coal, nor stow 
 away heavy goods, nor exercise trades as carpenters, or 
 machinists, or painters, or paper-hangers, or factory-work- 
 men. The women are cooks and washerwomen of the 
 highest grade, particularly in the last named department of 
 ministry to luxurious living. But, gentle reader, if you 
 have travelled as much through free States as the writer 
 has done, and have, like him failed to find blacks producing 
 any thing whatever in any State, whether they be living in 
 the city or in the country, you should already, on principles 
 of common sense, have come to his conclusion, which is 
 this ; that any great or sudden addition to the number of 
 free blacks in the United States would of necessity pauperize 
 the whole of that class of our population, and lead to incal- 
 culable suffering amongst them. A great city like Phila- 
 delphia can maintain on the service of its personal luxury, 
 twenty-five thousand blacks, or five per cent, of its entire 
 population ; but suppose that their number were doubled or 
 trebled, so as to be abruptly increased to ten or fifteen per 
 cent, on that population, do you suppose that our city, or any 
 other northern city could afford employment to such a per 
 centage of loungers-about for a job ? And what city of the 
 Union would receive and maintain them n.^ paupers and for 
 that pseudo-philanthropic end and object oppressively in- 
 crease taxation upon its white population ? Certainly we 
 may affirm that Boston, philo-African Boston, would not 
 do so. She has always been remarkable for her dislike to 
 any taxation which yields no equivalent benefit. On this 
 principle, she got up a great tea party at Liverpool wharf, 
 in the days of 1776 ; and on the same principle, a few years 
 ago, she sent back to his father-land, a poor old Irish gentle- 
 man, sick and crazy, who, at the solicitation of his friends, 
 had left his country for his country's good, choosing rather 
 to be a pauper in New England, than a pauper in old 
 Ireland. The Sods of the Pilgrim fathers were wise in 
 counsel of this w'orld, and prompt in action respecting a single 
 
15 
 
 insane pauper from Ireland ; and we very much fear, that if 
 African paupters should flood them, and require at their 
 hands practical tax-paying friendship, it would be found 
 that the negro had counted without his host. It is 
 pleasant to denounce slavery and to talk about the pro- 
 priety of our eagle carrying with it freedom as " the gene- 
 ral, normal, enduring and permanent condition of society 
 within the jurisdiction and under the authority of the Con- 
 stitution of the United States." All this is philanthropic 
 and it costs nothing. But to maintain a crowd of shivering, 
 shiftless, thoughtless, useless blacks ! Aye there would be 
 the rub, people of New England, if you should ever accom- 
 plish your cruel scheme of compelling the white man in 
 the southern border States to emancipate the negro. If you 
 shall once succeed in making slaves such a burden that 
 many masters shall, with one consent, break their fetters, do 
 you suppose that their former masters will keep within their 
 own borders as free paupers those very blacks whom they 
 will then have liberated, simply, because they could not 
 turn their services to good account? Be not deceived. 
 The people of the South understand fully the social evils, 
 the disabling influences of their " peculiar institution." The 
 Virginian knows full well that the Old Dominion is daily 
 waxing older and more feeble, relatively to other great 
 sea-board States, simply because the presence of negro 
 slaves hinders her from developing her great agricultural 
 and mineral wealth. He will inform you, and inform you 
 truly, that her coal-fields are quite equal in extent to those 
 of Pennsylvania ; but that negroes are incapable of the per- 
 sistent labor, and systematic skill which daily load the 
 railways and the canals of the Keystone State with black- 
 diamonds. The North Carolinian can add his testimony as 
 to the marvellous power of the African bondsman to hide 
 internal wealth, to check the productive industry of native 
 whites, and to repel the emigration of skill-laborers from 
 the North. Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee and Kentuckj^, 
 impatiently tolerate the incubus of slavery upon every 
 
16 
 
 member of their bodies politic. Does any one suppose that 
 the States of which we have just spoken can be or should 
 be well affected towards free blacks? It is not slavery ^er 
 se that degrades labor in the eyes of the white man south 
 of Mason and Dixon's line. The reason why labor is there 
 lightly esteemed, is, because the slave that performs it is a 
 negro, a man of inferior race. When he shall have become 
 unprofitable as a slave, he will be summarily expelled as a 
 non-producer and a costly cumberer of the ground. And 
 now, people of the North generally, and of New England 
 particularly, will you be ready, in the hour of need, to 
 receive the exiles whom free-soil agitation may throw in 
 large numbers upon your hands, sooner then you suppose? 
 
 But some one will say that there is an abundance of 
 cheap and good soil in almost every free State of the Union, 
 and that in such an event as extensive manumission, the 
 enfranchised negroes need not crowd our cities, but might 
 easily, with a little philanthropic aid, settle upon their own 
 homesteads in the country. The suggestion, good friend, 
 is simply ridiculous. Did you, did any one, ever see a negro 
 farmer? It is safe to affirm, that the blacks in the free 
 States of our Union do not raise one bushel of grain for 
 five hundred that they consume. Are you a political econ- 
 omist, man ? And do you not know that the primal, distinc- 
 tive principle of all prosperous, prevalent races of men is, 
 that they love to eat bread grown under their own hands, 
 and on their own soil ? But the African comes not of such 
 a race. 
 
 Such being our views, we are not shame-faced on account 
 of African Slavery in the United States, as are the Sewards 
 and Sumners of our day, when they meet British statesmen 
 and philanthropists. We conceive, on the contrary, that an 
 American may with much propriety address an Englishman 
 in such terms as these : Somewhat less than a century 
 ago. Great Britain had in her extensive dominions three 
 races of men, whom she had grievously wronged, and whose 
 future she seemed incapable of directing for good. She 
 
17 
 
 had dragged ^the African from his home of tropical ease 
 into bondage and rigorous servitude in the cold climate, and 
 on the exacting soil of North America. She had infuriated 
 the Irish Celt bj military occupation of his soil and politi- 
 cal proscription of his race. She had shed like water the 
 blood of swarthy Indians whom Clive and Hastings had 
 compelled to swear allegiance to her power, but whose 
 bosoms still burned with inextinguishable hatred against 
 their spoilers and oppressors. Here then were three great 
 perplexities for the statesmen and the philanthropists of 
 Great Britain. We have since that time relieved her of 
 two of them. She has as yet failed to relieve herself of the 
 third. 
 
 "We say that we have relieved Great Britain of two of the 
 above named perplexities. We took to our own account, 
 in 1776, the colonies on which she had foisted African 
 slaves, contrary to our desires, our views of right, our 
 judgment of what was for our own good. But we have 
 had time, since 1776, and Divine Providence has indicated 
 to us ways of making the African a blessing, not only to 
 the land in which he is comfortably domiciled, but to Great 
 Britain herself. For what said Mr. Beecher Stowe, at Man- 
 chester, or some such cotton-spinning place, immediately after 
 Mrs. Stowe's triumphant landing in England ? '' I see around 
 me great prosperity ; but, unhappily, that prosperity is to 
 a great extent based upon cotton: and it is demand for 
 cotton that makes the value of the slave, in the United 
 States, fifteen hundred dollars." Good friend, that high 
 price of the slave, which so greatly afflicted the heart of 
 Mrs. Stowe's husband, is the best possible evidence to a 
 well-ordered mind, not only of the productive power, but 
 of the domestic comfort also of the poor African. Slaves 
 are perishable property ; and he who pays fifteen hundred 
 dollars a-head for them, cannot afford to maltreat them. It 
 is only in Cuba, where fresh importations from Africa are 
 cheap, under Great Britain's lax interpretation and non- 
 
 2 
 
18 
 
 enforcement of her stringent treaties with Spain about the 
 slave trade, that slaves are worked to death. 
 
 So much for one of the perplexities of which we have 
 relieved Great Britain. The other perplexity of which we 
 claim to have relieved her — be not amazed, British brother 
 — is Ireland. "What would have been the population, what 
 would not have been the misery of Ireland at the present 
 day, if the United States had not been open during two 
 generations to emigration, and full of work for emigrants ? 
 Consider, and admire, and rejoice in our smoothly-flowing 
 canals and our noisy railways, oh Briton! whosoever thou 
 art. They are the monuments of the enterprise of thy 
 brother Jonathan, and the security of certain shares and 
 bonds, on which thou payest no income-tax to thine own gov- 
 ernment. But more than all, they are the work of hundreds of 
 thousands of Celtic hands which longed to grasp the insur- 
 rectionary pike in Ireland, but which have gladly taken up 
 the peaceful spade in America. Have we not greatly relieved 
 thee of perplexity in the matter of rebellious Ireland ? 
 
 And how far hast thou relieved or acquitted thyself in 
 respect to the poor Indian ? It is not long since the press 
 of the civilized world was teeming with the fresh horrors 
 of a Sepoy insurrection. It seemed as though the sons of 
 Shem had risen in their might, and were about to trample 
 down, in their fury, the small band of Englishmen who, in 
 the name of the bold race of Japhet, were endeavoring to 
 maintain such extensive Eastern dominions. The struggle 
 of the conflicting races was fearful, and the warfare between 
 them was merciless on either side. Close upon the heathen 
 atrocities of the Sepoy insurrection came the Christian 
 atrocities of British revenge. We do not speak, here, of 
 the general refusal of customary quarter to " the niggers," 
 as the Bngligh soldiery freely called them. War is a 
 demonizing trade, and we can read with some allowance 
 the records of the passionate and unsparing revenge of 
 the common soldier, or even of the officer of ordinary 
 rank. But we cannot m.ake, and we do not wish to learn 
 
19 
 
 to make allowance for barbarous, cold-blooded executions 
 of Sepoys by high military authority. We were horrified 
 to read, and we are still horrified to remember, that con- 
 victed rebels were blown away at the cannon's mouthy in 
 order to impress with salutary awe their countrymen, who 
 were compelled to witness their executions, and whose tawny 
 skins are said to have become livid with terror at the sick- 
 ening sight. British brother ! go to Exeter Hall, and tell 
 your countrymen, plainly, that if such atrocities prove to 
 Indian minds that your government is strong, they also 
 prove to the same minds that .your religion is not " peace 
 on earth, good will towards men." 
 
 " What was the cause of that Sepoy insurrection?" "An 
 injudicious military order," you will reply, " involving a 
 question of conscience about greased Do you believe such 
 nonsense, although it be soberly endorsed by the dignita- 
 ries and high functionaries of British India? Did you ever 
 read certain investigations about the collection of revenue in 
 British India ? Those investigations were made by order of 
 Parliament some years before the breaking out of the insur- 
 rection, and were epitomized in British newspapers which 
 have considerable circulation in the United States. On the 
 testimony therein set forth, we learned that certain capital- 
 ists of Indian race were extensive farmers of the revenue, 
 and that one of tho^e who thus collected revenue in the 
 name and by the authority of the East India Company'-, that 
 is to say of Great Britain herself, had a huge pair of boots, 
 in which he kept sundry wild cats. '' For what purpose?" 
 you will enquire. Simply to afflict the legs of his fellow 
 Indians, which were thrust thereinto whenever they could 
 not or would not pay taxes. Another of those Indian agents 
 of the British govermnent went literally to the opposite 
 extreme with his recusant countrymen, and tied them up 
 by the hair of the head. Now, we simple-minded Ameri- 
 cans, consider an Indian insurrection to have been the 
 natural result of such frightful misgovernment. We are 
 even disposed to think that your way of taking upon your- 
 
20 
 
 selves an Indian empire, about a century ago, has never, as 
 yet, been completely justified to Indian minds. We have 
 no doubt that you have told them repeatedly, that Lord 
 Clive Avas called to account in the House of Lords, on the 
 score of his private rapacity, and that you caused Warren 
 Hastings to be impeached for his cruelty by the greatest 
 orators of the eighteenth century. But inasmuch as you did 
 not really punish either of those unscrupulous great men, 
 and inasmuch as you have lucratively occupied all the con- 
 quests which they made, and have even greatly added, during 
 the nineteenth century, in the same repacious way to your 
 Indian empire, it may reasonably be presumed that the 
 Indian mind is very much perplexed to understand the 
 heights and depths of the morality of the British Govern- 
 ment. Good friend, do you think that Great Britain has 
 done as much since the days of 1776, to heal the wounds of 
 India, as we have done to repair the wrongs of the African 
 race? Go to the South. See those sunny black faces. 
 Listen to those musical negro voices chanting the praises of 
 our God and Savioui-, whom they worship in great congre- 
 gations. Look upon that dark-skinned nursing mother. 
 Does she not love, and fondly caress the white child which 
 she suckles for her mistress? Can you show such harmony 
 of races, such a total absence of soldiers to keep down in- 
 surrection, in India ? 
 
 " But Jamaica," you reply. Oh, yes, Jamaica, we re- 
 join. Jamaica must not be forgotten. Now, good friend, 
 it happens most unfortunately that you Englishmen differ 
 greatly amongst yourselves as to the results of your great 
 experiment in Jamaica. The orators of Exeter Hall say it 
 is a great success. The columns of the London Times tell 
 a very different story. Planters, who have been ruined by 
 tlic depreciation of property, groan. New men, who have 
 purchased estates at a great sacrifice, say that everything is 
 as it should be. In fact, it is just as impossible to get con- 
 cordant testimony about emancipation in Jamaica, as it is to 
 get agreement of view about the operation of a tariff in the 
 
21 
 
 United States. The only feasible way to decide such a 
 tedious controversy is that of the Knickerbocker justice of 
 the peace, who loeighed the testimony on both sides of a 
 great suit, and found that the scales were even. 
 
 But suppose that you should prove the success of eman- 
 cipation in Jamaica, that success would not be relevant to 
 the question of slavery in the United States. Jamaica has 
 a tropical climate, whilst the slave territory of the United 
 States lies almost entirely in the temperate zone. "We do 
 not dispute, on the contrary we freely admit, the ability of 
 the tropical African to pick up a subsistence as a freeman 
 in a tropical climate. He was formed for residence in such 
 a climate by an All-wise hand, which adapts each family of 
 His creation to its proper habitation. In such a climate 
 luxuriant nature affords sustenance to man almost without 
 toil. No one need, therefore, consider it to be a grand 
 achievement of British philanthropy, that enfranchised 
 Africans can, without danger of starvation, lead lounging 
 lives on the bountiful soil and under the burning sun of 
 Jamaica. But what has such African life in Jamaica in 
 common with African life in those latitudes of the United 
 States, which know the winter's cold as well as the summer's 
 heat, and which produce bread to strengthen the industrious 
 husbandman's heart, rather than spontaneous fruit for the 
 refreshment of idle dwellers in the land ? Therefore, good 
 Briton, forbear to quote effected emancipation in tropical 
 Jamaica as an encouragement to attempt emancipation in 
 temperate North America. 
 
 And thou mayest all the more properly thus forbear, 
 because it is plain enough that after all there is certainly 
 something ivrong about Jamaica. It is confessed on all hands 
 that the island has, since emancipation, had very little sur- 
 plus productioyi of sugar to export. The friends of emanci- 
 pation say, that this want of exportable wealth is abun- 
 dantly balanced by internal prosperity. The explanation 
 seems vague, until it is translated into plain language, in 
 which it means that the blacks are comfortable and inde- 
 
22 
 
 pendent of control and work — that they eat the fat of the 
 land, and are its virtual owners, in indolence accordant with 
 their African constitution. In a word, the island has been 
 given up to them ; and yet Englishmen are a money-making 
 race, as colonists throughout the world, and they have there- 
 fore concluded that Jamaica must not be sacrificed in toto. 
 They have consequently devised the importation of Coolies, 
 whose service to them shall gradually make the proprietary 
 of the island independent of the free African race, and of 
 the unreasonable demands of that race for little work and 
 much pay. 
 
 Now we have a word to say, good Briton, about the 
 Coolie system. If ever a remedy was worse than the dis- 
 ease, it is so in the present instance of the importation of 
 Asiatics into the West Indies. "We do not purpose to dwell 
 on the frauds, or even on the personal compulsion, by which 
 it is credibly alleged that the poor fellows are drawn into 
 one-sided contracts with heartless speculators on their 
 money-value as laborers ; nor do we intend to institute a 
 comparison between your Coolie emigrant-ships and the 
 slavers, which there is too good reason to say that those 
 emigrant-ships closely resemble, in all points that concern 
 health, comfort, decency, and care of the lives of the unfor- 
 tunates in either case. We are willing to suppose, gratui- 
 tously, that your Coolies have been fairly gotten in the land 
 of their birth, and humanely transported to the land where 
 their labor is desired. But, good Briton, nearly the whole 
 of your importations into your West India possessions are 
 males only — males of a most licentious race. Have you 
 considered the moral, or rather the immoral, tendencies of 
 such immigration, — the necessary consequences of the influx 
 of hundreds and thousands of sensual male Asiatics, with- 
 out wives, and without conscience as to abominations of 
 which it is a shame even to speak ? And do you suppose 
 that domestic happiness and female virtue amongst your 
 enfranchised Africans will be increased under the reign of 
 free-love laborers ? 
 
23 
 
 One of tlie primal Divine utterances, in respect to the 
 sons of men, its the declaration that 'it is not good for the 
 man to he alone^ That declaration was made whilst the man 
 was yet in the innocence of Paradise ; and all Divine reve- 
 lation, as well as all history, sacred and profane, since the 
 fall, adds solemn confirmation to the vast moral evils of 
 neglect to heed the law that ' every man have his own wife 
 and every woman have her own husband.' Celibacy, as a 
 religious vow or ordinance, has consequently come to be 
 esteemed by Protestants an unsuccessful and most pernicious 
 fraud on the nature which God has given-to man. In proof 
 t»f their views, they appeal to facts in respect to priestly, 
 monastic and conventual life, which candid and intellisrent 
 members of the Church of Kome cannot gainsay nor con- 
 tradict. The followers of the last-named communion admit 
 that vows of religious celibacy are high and exceedingly 
 difficult to observe ; but they claim that the good of the 
 Church of Christ requires such self-consecration, and that 
 the grace of God is sufficient for those who have undertaken 
 it in His strength. We do not stop to decide this endless 
 diffi^rence of two great religious bodies. We advert to it 
 only to remark, that the virtue which Protestants allege to 
 be almost impossible for man thoroughly refined and chris- 
 tianized, and which Komanists admit to be exceedingly hard 
 even for such an one, must be altogether impossible for 
 semi-barbarous, half-heathen Coolies; and what language 
 can sufficiently condemn an industrial system which tends 
 to place Jamaica on the vile eminence of Sodom and Go- 
 morrah? Do not, good brother, for a single moment sup- 
 pose that the people of the United States of North America 
 will imitate your pseudo-philanthropy in this matter. 
 
 And now our British brother is reduced to his last strong- 
 hold, which is our own Declaration of Independence. " He 
 will take his stand," he says, " on that singularly bold and 
 able assertion of human rights, which is daily contradicted 
 and violated by every slaveholder in the United States." 
 Well, good brother, it was a declaration of independence — 
 
of tlie independence of a nation^ and of its separation from 
 another and a distant people from whom it had sprung, and 
 to whom, except in numbers and in wealth, it was fully 
 equal. Do you see a strong analogy between the men of 
 1776, whom your fathers could not subdue, and our African 
 slaves, whom we can easily control ? Is there not some 
 difference between Anglo-Saxon resistance of oppression 
 exercised by distant brethren, their simple equals as to race, 
 and African impatience of the control of a household mas- 
 ter of superior race ? Does national independence, achieved 
 by the former, justify insurrection for personal liberty by 
 the latter ? Oh, no ; you understand full well the perfect 
 absence of parallelism between the two cases. Our forefa- 
 thers knew that by the help of Almighty God, and without 
 much comfort from the mother country, they had gotten the 
 mastery over the wilderness of the North American sea- 
 board, and over the savages of that wilderness. Under 
 their industrious hands, the newly subdued land was begin- 
 ning to bloom as a garden ; and that land was, in their judg- 
 ment (which Divine Providence soon ratified), their own 
 rightful possession, free from the control of a non-resident 
 sovereign and a distant and ill-informed legislature. And 
 what does the African slave of our day know ? Simply 
 that he is a comfortable day -laborer, directed by the intelli- 
 gence of his master, and that he has not himself the faculties 
 requisite for the supply of his own wants in that state of 
 freedom into which he sometimes wanders in dreams. Now 
 we must insist that there is a difference between two such 
 cases. 
 
 And what if Mr. Jefferson, who was not much more than 
 thirty years of age when he drafted our Declaration, became 
 somewhat oratorical in the outset, and afiirmed "that all 
 men are created equal,^^ and "endowed" with "unalienable 
 rights" of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" 
 Did any one ever pretend that he was inspired? Are we 
 people of the United States bound to all possible extreme 
 inferences and consequences from each and every word of 
 
25 
 
 Bis text? By no means. "We are, one and all, perfectly- 
 free to modify those vague principles and general observa- 
 tions about liberty in the abstract, with which he prefaced his 
 otherwise admirable practical summary of grievances and 
 declaration of rights. All that we are held to is the spirit 
 of 1776; and that spirit, rightly interpreted, is this : "that 
 they who know how to build up for themselves shall enjoy 
 in their own right, or, in other words, be independent." 
 There is a vast gulf between that spirit of 1776, and the 
 spirit of the men of the Mountain, who desolated France a 
 few years later, and the spirit of the Jacobins, who simul- 
 taneously agitated Ireland, and the spirit of the revolution- 
 ists who have lately convulsed Europe, and the spirit of the 
 abolitionists who now seek to convulse the United States. 
 The gulf of which we speak is as broad as is the difference 
 between edification and destruction. Therefore, good Briton, 
 believe not every revolutionary spirit, but try the spirits of 
 what sort they are. 
 
 Having thus disposed of that public opinion in Great 
 Britain, which the humanitarian Sumners and the political 
 Sewards of our day so greatly fear, and which the English 
 Brougham has recently so politely expressed, we return to 
 Mr. Seward's argument at Detroit. 
 
 The premises of Mr. Seward's argument have, to our 
 mind, the least possible relevancy to his conclusion. Those 
 premises, divested of all coloring by his peculiar prejudices, 
 amount simply to this historical fact, which no one can deny, 
 viz., " that, beginning with the acquisition of Louisiana and 
 Florida, each successive addition to our territorial posses- 
 sions has awakened a fresh and increasingly violent contro- 
 versy as to the area of slavery." From these undeniable 
 premises, he abruptly jumps to the conclusion that slavery 
 must " be confined within the Slave States where it already 
 exists." 
 
 Mr. Seward's way of settling the controversy plainly 
 assumes that all the right has always been and still is on 
 one side, which has at length become weary of making 
 
26 
 
 concessions to t"he other side. In his view, the Missouri 
 Compromise was a weak, and injudicious divergence from 
 the ways of our forefathers, the Compromise of 1850 was a 
 greater divergence, and the subsequent repeal of the Mis- 
 souri Compromise was the superlative degree of divergence. 
 He therefore gives us due notice that the patience of free- 
 soilers is thoroughly exhausted, and that the number fifteen 
 is the final and perfect number of slave States. 
 
 Such being the Kepublican. platform, it is quite immate- 
 rial to the slaveholding States of the Union, whether that 
 party shall or shall not be successful iu the present Presi- 
 dential canvass. It is enough for those States to know that 
 the doctrines of Mr. Seward seem to be increasingly popular 
 in the North, and that there is an even chance that a candi- 
 date of such views will carry an election in 1864, or 1868, 
 even if he fail in 1860. They know full well that such a 
 sectional basis for a canvass would have had, ten years ago, 
 but a few feeble and crazy supporters, and they therefore 
 have rightly concluded that they have no time to lose in 
 making a decided and final stand against Northern denial 
 of their rights. 
 
 And now, what are those rights ? They have been 
 greatly mystified by politicians and lawyers ; but a child 
 can understand them. After the achievement of indepen- 
 dence on Great Britain, thirteen States, of ivhich twelve 
 were slaveholding^ adopted a Constitution. Tliat Constitu- 
 tion recognized the lawfulness of slavery, not by formal 
 statements, which would have been gratuitous verbiage at 
 a time when all the States except one were slaveholding, 
 but by provisions which implied that a slave population 
 existed, without any choice of our forefathers, and must be 
 dealt with as jmH and parcel of the institutions of the country. 
 Consequently representatives and direct taxes were ordered 
 to be apportioned on a basis which implied that the pro- 
 ductive value of a slave is to that of a freeman as three are 
 to five. There was also a provision for rendition to service 
 
27 
 
 of any slave "who might escape from one State into another 
 State. 
 
 Slavery was not at that time a sectional interest, nor was 
 it a profitable institution in any State, although the increas- 
 ing population of slaves in certain States showed that y 
 those States could turn African labor to some account. Its 
 extension, therefore, was generally deprecated on the simple 
 ground that it was a system that tended to pauperism. 
 
 It appears, as we remarked in the outset of this discus- 
 sion, that our forefathers were quite mistaken in the opinion 
 that African slaves would continue to be a hopeless burden 
 on the United States, In our day their productive power 
 in cotton and sugar has become so great, that our great J 
 Eepublican has proclaimed that an irrepressible conflict 
 exists between their labor and the labor of the free white 
 man. In other words, he proposes to forbid the extension 
 of slavery on the ground that it is too prqfitahle to the States 
 in which it exists. 
 
 The animus of Mr. Seward's advice, " to return and re- 
 establish the original policy of the nation," is, therefore, 
 sectional jealousy. It is not humane regard for the negro, 
 nor is it patriotic concern for the pauperizing influence of 
 the presence of the African slave. It is simply Northern \ ^ 
 dollar and cent policy against Southern dollar and cent j 
 interest. That divergence, or deviation from the ways of ' 
 our forefathers which he pathetically laments, is simply the 
 profitableness of slave property for certain uses, and its 
 consequent extension of room in our day and generation. 
 The South has nourished and brought up dark-skinned 
 children, and she is rapidly increasing every year in wealth, 
 on their plantation-labor, which the intelligence of the white 
 man directs. It is true that the presence of the foreign race 
 hinders the developement of mining and manufacturing 
 interests, and the success of small farming, shop- keeping, 
 and other suitable employments in the South for certain 
 classes of white men whose only capital is the skill and 
 labor of their hands. It is true that the whole North feels 
 
28 
 
 the benefits of Southern purchases of the many goods and 
 commodities which slave States hardly attempt to produce 
 for themselves. But, with all these drawbacks, the South 
 is thriving, and her progress in the beneficial use of slaves 
 must be arrested. So says our Eepublican adviser, and he 
 therefore counsels inflexible restriction of the limits of 
 slavery. 
 
 We will do him the justice to say that his policy, if it 
 could be carried out, would rapidly undermine and eventu- 
 ally destroy the prosperity of the South. The African 
 race, which there aggregates now about four millions, will, 
 within the present century, probably have increased to ten 
 millions. Within that period the predominance of interests 
 to which the presence of African laborers is adverse, will 
 probably have banished slavery from Delaware, Maryland, 
 Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina, — from 
 all those border States, in a word, which have great mining, 
 farming and manufacturing advantages now, in posse and 
 not in esse, in capability and not in development, simply 
 because the "peculiar institution" hinders the development 
 of such advantages, however great. Under prohibition of 
 the passage of slaves into territories to be hereafter organ- 
 ized, there would soon be a redundant, and, therefore, an 
 unprofitable and wretched African population in the exist- 
 ing limited cotton and sugar States, and the price of the 
 slave would soon decline to such a point as might satisfy 
 even the scrupulous mind of Mrs. Beecher Stowe's husband^ 
 
 But our Southern brethren have no notion of first losina: 
 their strength and then begging for their rights. They 
 mean to ask those rights without delay, even now, in the 
 fulness of their power and their prosperity. 
 
 Those rights are co-extensive with the territories or 
 common property of the United States. They are founded 
 on a constitution which African slavery underlies as plainly 
 as depravity underlies the moral constitution of man. Our 
 forefathers were not speculative philosophers, nor preten- 
 tious philanthropists. They therefore framed a constitution 
 suitable for the United States as they were, slavery included, 
 
29 
 
 and not for the United States as they should have been, if 
 Great Britain had left the colonies free to choose for them- 
 selves in the matter of a supply of laborers. That constitu- 
 tion has never been changed in this particular, although 
 many States, some free States, others slave States, have 
 been added to the original thirteen which adopted the same; 
 twelve of them, be it remembered, being slaveholding 
 States at that time. It is not in the power of Congress, it 
 is not in the power of the Supreme Court of the United 
 States, nor, least of all, is it in the power of the people, or 
 of the legislature of any territory, to restrict the movements 
 of the slaveholder within the territory or common property 
 of the Union. 
 
 Mr. Seward is keenly alive to divergence from the ways 
 of our forefathers to the profit of the South, Why is he 
 not equally sharp-sighted and equally strenuous as to 
 divergence from the ways of our forefathers to the profit, 
 the great and manifest profit, of the North ? Does he not 
 know that, beginning with the date of the Missouri Com- 
 promise, which he calls the date of divergence in favor of 
 the South, the resources and productive powers of the North 
 have been quintupled ? And by what means ? Not by 
 the toil of the hardy hands of the Northern sons of Eevolu- 
 tionary sires, but by the toil of European immigrants, and 
 of the sons and daughters of those immigrants, whose 
 common, hard, or menial labor we direct by our intelli- 
 gence, but seldom assist with our own hands. And does 
 he not also know that our forefathers greatly apprehended 
 the consequences that must flow with such immigration 
 into the United States ? The works of Mr. Jefierson and 
 his contemporaries show that their wisdom was quite as 
 much at fault in respect to the eft'ects of an influx of emi- 
 grants, as it was in respect to the employment of an African 
 slave population. They had no far-sighted vision of our 
 present public improvements and expanding Western coun- 
 try, just as they had no vision or prophetic dream of our 
 present cotton crop. They supposed, naturally enough. 
 
^/ 
 
 A 
 
 30 
 
 that uneducated multitudes, flying from the famines or 
 oppressions of monarchical Europe, would bring with them 
 political and social vices which must unfit them for partici- 
 pation in a government in which the voice of the many- 
 is law. But Almighty God, in His gracious and wise 
 providence, has, by the hands of those very immigrants, 
 whom our forefathers would have called a dangerous class, 
 made vast openings of what was wilderness, not only in 
 1776, or in 1787, but even in 1820. Yes; the changes of 
 Northern and Northwestern States, since 1820, by railroads 
 and canals, by soil cleared and subdued, by cities built and 
 inhabited in exceeding great prosperity, — prosperity such 
 as the sun never shone on before since the fall of Adam, — 
 are wonderful ; and they are mainly the effect of immigra- 
 tion, in respect to which we have, to the exceeding joy 
 and satisfaction of Mr. Seward, diverged from the ways of 
 our forefathers, having proved it to be profitable, just as we 
 have proved African slavery to be profitable in another 
 quarter of our happy land. We have learned to disregard 
 the warnings of our forefathers about an influx of foreigners, 
 as thoroughly as we set at nought their conclusions as to 
 the unprofitableness of slaves of African extraction. Indeed, 
 our present Chief Magistrate was carried into office over 
 two competing candidates, one of whom represented Native 
 Americanism, or opposition to immigration, whilst the 
 other represented free-soil ism, or opposition to the exten- 
 sion of the area of African slavery. 
 
 No one will deny that the benefits of immigration into the 
 United States have inured mainly to the North. No one 
 can deny, that there would have been no benefits, that, on 
 the contrary, there would have been vast evils from that 
 immigration, if the millions of immigrants, who, within the 
 last forty years have landed on our shores had been re- 
 stricted to our northern sea-board States as the bounds of 
 their habitation. Pauperism and crime would long since 
 have been rife from Maine to Delaware, amongst a foreign 
 population so restricted as to the soil on which they should 
 
31 
 
 settle ; and northern lovers of their own Commonwealths — 
 such men as Mr. Seward for example, would, under the 
 pressure of such an evil, have been willing to adopt any 
 measures, however extreme, to roll back to Europe the 
 destructive human flood which was coursing over the 
 broad Atlantic. Gentle reader, you smile at this imaginary 
 picture ; you say that such a restriction on immigrants 
 as we have have asked you to fancy, has not even been 
 proposed by any one ; you say that the West, our great 
 national territory, has afforded abundance of soil and 
 abundance of work for all that have come, that millions 
 from over-peopled Europe have landed on our blessed 
 shores, and that there is room for millions more, and in 
 all this you are quite right. We fully agree with you. 
 Nay, we go beyond you, for we sometimes imagine that 
 our country is portended by that vision in the Book of 
 Eevelations, in which the beloved Disciple saw " a woman 
 clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and 
 upon her head a crown of twelve stars," who " brought 
 forth a man-child which was to rule all nations with a rod 
 of iron," " and to the woman were given two wings of a 
 great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness from the 
 face of the serpent, and the serpent cast out of his mouth 
 water, (which in prophecy means people), as a flood after 
 the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of 
 the flood. And the earth, (that is our extensive territory) 
 helped the woman and swallowed up the flood which the 
 dragon cast out of his mouth ;" or, in other words, the flood 
 of immigration has not been felt otherwise than beneficially, 
 simply because the immigrants have expatiated or scattered 
 themselves over our vast Western country, which was quite 
 a wilderness at the commencement of our alleged divergence 
 in favor of the South, by means of a certain compromise in 
 1820. Immigration from Europe to the profit of the North 
 began to be large about the same date. And we wish t6 
 know why a measure of restriction or exclusion from the 
 common National territory, which no one ever contem- 
 
32 
 
 plated or proposed in respect to immigrants coming from 
 Europe, should, by the Republicans of our day be contem- 
 plated aud proposed in respect to African slaves born on 
 our own soil. 
 
 Sectional questions must ultimately be settled by a trial 
 of relative sectional strength; and for good or for evil, God 
 only knows which — the day of that trial has come exceed- 
 ing near. Many public men, and many private citizens 
 who do not appreciate the importance of the issue involved 
 in a strongly supported Eepublican, that is to say, a sec- 
 tional nomination, have proposed or assumed as feasible or 
 probable various palliative measures for our present diffi- 
 culties. One says, that a conservative cabinet will quiet 
 the country ; as if the South were simply desirous of pro- 
 viding employment for a few of her distinguished citizens 
 at a few thousands per annum. Another affirms, that the 
 whole of the questions in respect to the extension of slavery 
 belong to the Supreme Court of the United States, and that 
 North and South alike will unhesitatingly bow to the decision 
 from time to time of that august tribunal ; as if the Judges 
 of that Court were intended to overrule the madness of the 
 peo2}le^ and not to decide points of law. Who does not 
 know that those who now sit on the bench of that Court 
 are men, resembling all other men, in that, they have so77ie 
 political bias, and in that they must die in their proper 
 times and be succeeded by other men who may have 
 quite a different political bias, because they will have been 
 appointed under quite different political auspices ? Another 
 maintains, that the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty in the 
 territories must ultimately prevail ; as if children in a state 
 of tutelage and maintained at the charge of a trust-estate 
 were competent to proscribe and exclude the personal pro- 
 perty and effects of nearly one-half of the guardians and 
 legal trustees of that very industrial farm on which those 
 children are undergoing an expensive training for self- 
 government, which is to begin only when they shall have 
 reached the state of manhood; or as if the necessary couse- 
 
33 
 
 quence of that doctrine were not, as we unhesitatingly 
 affirm it to be, that the polygamy of Mormonism is proper 
 and lawful in Utah, because it is an institution which Popular 
 Sovereignty has there established, and which the letter of the 
 Constitution of the United States in no wise forbids. No, no, 
 good people of the procrastinating, temporizing style of mind, 
 such expedients for putting oft' the day of decision are too 
 late. You may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. 
 The doctrine of Popular Sovereignty in the territories is 
 simply the device of an agitator. It makes every organized 
 territory a sectional battle-ground, a soil from which a 
 root of bitterness shall spring up to trouble us. We are 
 weary of emigration societies which undertake to supply 
 Bibles and Sharp's Eevolvers, and which produce John 
 Browns as the children of such unblessed amalgamation. 
 We are weary of hearing of the Duchess of Sutherland's 
 interest in bleeding Kansas, and of the contributions of the 
 late Lady Byron to the good cause in that territory. Time 
 was, within our brief memory, when the great Andrew 
 Jackson objected strenuously to the peaceful Bank of the 
 United States, that it was a political corporation in which 
 foreigners were simple shareholders. Have we not greatly 
 degenerated from his times and his temper, if we permit 
 longer continuance of a sectional controversy which enlists 
 the interest and commands the pecuniary aid of noble 
 foreigners, male and female, who really have scope enough 
 for charity at home? 
 
 Some distinguished lawyers seem to be much exercised 
 in mind as to the kind of law by which slave property 
 shall be governed in a territory which may not have already 
 passed laws for the regulation of the same as recognized 
 property within its borders. We must confess that we have 
 never before heard of lawyers who deplored the wide range 
 which litigation of any kind might take. Let no one how- 
 ever be disturbed in mind on this account. The great 
 lawyers will do famously on cases of appeal to Washington 
 
 from the territories, unless those territories shall speedily 
 
 3 
 
34 
 
 cut off this source of profit by passing simple and sensible 
 provisions, securing to the master of the slave all possible 
 benefit from his servitude, and to the slave all comfort, 
 and advantage not inconsistent with his obligation to that 
 servitude. The obvious duty of each and every territory, 
 to which slaveholders may at any time emigrate, is to 
 secure the happiness of its whole population b}^ such legis- 
 lation as shall make the relation of the slave to his master 
 approximate as closely as possible to the relation of a child 
 to its parent. 
 
 This necessary sanction of slavery by territories, is, how- 
 ever, the very issue which has been raised between New 
 England and the South ; and we are, therefore, thrown 
 back upon the simple question of relative strength between 
 the two sections which unhappily are at open variance in 
 our day. Mr. Seward himself is with us, that is to say, of 
 our mind, as to the hopelessness of all attempts to salve 
 over our difiiculties, for he says: " We have reached a point 
 where, amid confusion, bewilderment and mutual recrimi- 
 nations, it seems alike impossible to go forward or to 
 return," 
 
 And now, let us address ourselves to this question of 
 relative strength. And first we beg to premise by assuring 
 our brethren of the South that their strength is to sit still 
 in quietness and confidence of a happy result which hardly 
 anything short of gratuitous folly or hot haste on their 
 own part can frustrate, or even delay for many months. 
 There has already come forth from the daily issues of their 
 press, a great amount of gunpowderish paper, which is mor 
 worthy of the Celestial Empire than of the birth-place of 
 Washington and Jefferson, or of the Pinckneys and Eut- 
 ledge. We therefore think it well to remind them that the 
 first thing at all events to be considered at such a juncture 
 as the present, is not the presence of arms and ammunition, 
 but the possession of internal wealth and of exportable 
 commodities. The sectional struggle will take place not in 
 tented fields, nor around beleaguered cities, but in merchants' 
 
35 
 
 counting-houses and bankers' offices. It will be an affi\ir of 
 golden coin, and not of leaden bullets or iron bombs ; and 
 it will probably end, after much excitement and much 
 suffering, without any bloodshed, in an amendment or 
 rather a declaratory addition to the Constitution of the 
 United States. That amendment will fully confirm and 
 guaranty the territorial rights of the slaveholder ; and its 
 adoption will necessarily make an end of agitation; and the 
 end of agitation is what all but a very few of the citizens 
 of the United States desire to see. 
 
 On the question of relative strength, we reason thus. 
 The parties in controversy are cotton-spinning States and 
 cotton-growing States; which of the two is the richer class 
 of States? It is New England arrayed against the South, 
 and warped by prejudice and false doctrine against the mani- 
 fest rights of the South; and the South has distinctly 
 avowed her preference to go out of the Union, and in that 
 outside position to maintain her rights, rather than to re- 
 main in the Union without her risrhts. The South is, there- 
 fore, spoken of as contemplating secession ; and unfortu- 
 nately her own speech at this crisis is thickly interlarded" 
 with that threatenincr and distasteful word. Now, it often 
 happens in this world of wrongs and errors, that he who in 
 precipitate anger and alarm threatens to cut short by violence, 
 an injustice attempted to be practised upon him and from 
 which the common interest of society must and will protect 
 him ; it often happens, we say, that such an one by his in- 
 temperate heat, greatly prejudices his own cause. And such 
 has been, in the Middle States, the influence of Southern 
 threats of secession. Why should the South speak of se- 
 cession at all? She is not dissatisfied with a Constitution 
 which acknowledges and protects African slavery. If New 
 England is dissatisfied with that Constitution, and if she 
 must for conscience-sake have violence done to its plain 
 meaning, Ut her secede. But where will she go? Towards 
 what greater body will she gravitate after she shall have dis- 
 severed herself from our great confederacy ? She is not a 
 
36 
 
 self-supporting country like old England. She does not, she 
 cannot raise her own bread. She has no coal except in 
 Ehode Island ; and the peculiarity of Rhode Island coal is 
 that it will not burn. She needs wool and she needs cotton, 
 day by day, to keep her population employed in productive 
 industry ; and in respect to the production of wool, she does 
 not at all compare with that great kingdom whose chancellor 
 sits on a wool-sack, whilst she resembles that kingdom in her 
 necessity of having slave-grown cotton. If her prejudices 
 against the peculiar institution are so strong that she must 
 depart from the confederation which sanctions that institu- 
 tion, let her prepare herself to follow the example of Tyre 
 and Sidon in the days of King Herod, viz., to make her 
 peace with the female successor of George the Third, and to 
 secure some fem.ale Blastus, som^e lady of the bedchamber — 
 the Duchess of Sutherland, for example — as her friend at 
 court, in order that the land of the Pilgrim Fathers may be 
 annexed to a land of bread and fuel, and be nourished by 
 the Queen's country, that is to say, by Canada and the 
 British Provinces. 
 
 , Gentle reader, we have no prejudices against New Eng- 
 land, nor against her people. We spend some weeks of 
 every summer in idle, listless rumination upon the wonderful 
 developments which New Englanders have made out of no 
 other resources than their own ceaseless industry and indo- 
 mitable energy. We stick our umbrella into the ground 
 there, and at the depth of about an inch it comes upon solid 
 rock. There is no soil, and as for the subsoil, it is what geolo- 
 gists term a primary formation. We get into a railway car 
 and are borne at thirty miles an hour amidst boulders which 
 cover great tracts of land, and which Grecian mythology 
 would have pointed out as evidence of a vast amount of 
 stone-throwing amongst the giants and men of renown which 
 were of old. We wonder who could have conceived the 
 idea, and above all, who could have subscribed to the stock 
 of the railroads which traverse the interior of such a country. 
 We pass from the tracks of the roads thus constructed for 
 
37 
 
 local accommodation, to the main seaboard line from Boston 
 to Portland. We see lots of grass, a good many potatoes, 
 but no grain, except buckwheat. "We inquire what becomes 
 of the grass, and are told that few of the inhabitants of the 
 land require a servant, but that every man above the grade of a 
 common laborer, must have a horse to drive. We inquire how 
 the land pays for the bread and flesh which its inhabitants 
 require from States that have been more highly favored in re- 
 spect to soil and climate ; how it pays for its fuel, domestic 
 and steam-raising, which is brought from Pennsylvania and 
 Maryland, for its wool from the West, and its cotton from 
 the South ; and the answer is, by sales of manvfactured goods. 
 We inquire next, whether goods are scarce, and we are told 
 that they are in very good demand. We suggest that they 
 consequently bring cash, or something closely approaching 
 cash, as terms of payment. We find that we are considered 
 an ignoramus on account of such an inexpansive suggestion. 
 We listen respectfully to an explanation which developes 
 the fact that between the mill in New England and the con- 
 sumer in the South, or South- West, there is an aggregate 
 of credits on dry goods, through commission houses, job- 
 bers, and retailers, (each class naturally buying on the longest 
 time, and selling on the shortest time it can command,) there 
 is, we say, an average aggregate of credits on New England 
 dry goods of considerably more than a year. Ignoramus as 
 we are, we conclude that dry goods are not scarce, except 
 in the same sense in which fancy stocks are scarce when 
 money is easy ; that, on the contrary, they are in super- 
 abundant supply; and that if the spindles of New England 
 were stopped for a year by a great political and financial 
 difficulty, there would be cassimeres and Kentucky jeans, and 
 prints, and mousselines de laines, and Bay State shawls 
 enough for the backs and pockets of the West and South- 
 West during a twelve-month of contraction of the currency 
 to a specie-basis, under an alarm about disunion and seces- 
 sion. In such a supposed and quite supposable state of 
 things, how could the present population of New England 
 
3S 
 
 live ? The clays of sparse settlements; and of fondness for 
 codfish have gone by, and her people in their hearts prefer 
 good food to anti-slavery sentiment. 
 
 " God made the country, man the town," said some one. 
 "We may add that all the wealth of New England is almost 
 as artificial an affair, and that her whole population is about 
 as dependent on trade for bread to eat as is the good city of 
 Philadelphia, in which we sit whilst we pen these remarks. 
 " They are a shop-keeping people," as the great Napoleon 
 said of the English, when he proposed to ruin Great Britain 
 by the exclusion of her fabrics from the Continent. His 
 arbitrary decrees against British commodities, might readily 
 have brought even corn-growing Great Britain, to want of 
 money, and to terms of peace with imperial France, if the 
 profits of trade had not tempted Eussia to brave the ven- 
 geance with which he mig-ht endeavor to visit an infraction 
 of his anti-commercial policy. And it is in the power of 
 the South, by simple financial pressure, to convey to New 
 England in a few months hence, just such an understanding 
 of her true position as she ought to have on a clear recollec- 
 tion of the financial panic of 1857, during Avhich, week 
 after week passed over the heads of many manufacturers 
 without the sale of a single piece of goods. And how dif- 
 ferent at that time was the condition of the South ? and how 
 different must it always be under a state of monetary pres- 
 sure ? The great revulsion of 1857, which pervaded Europe 
 as well as America, checked but slightly the prosperity of 
 the cotton States. Why? Simply because cotton is an 
 article of prime necessity in Europe as well as in America. 
 The investments of Great Britain alone in the manufacture 
 of cotton, are seven hundred and fifty millions of dollars, 
 which is nearly equal to one-fifth of her great national debt ; 
 and the population which that manufacture employs is esti- 
 mated at five millions, or nearly one-fifth of the population 
 of the island. And even without such British, or other 
 foreign demand for her great staple, the South could feed 
 upon her own agricultural resources, could import some 
 
39 
 
 luxuriesfor the use of her whites, aud could produce b j domes- 
 tic labor the coarse and simple clothing which a population 
 of African slaves, requires. We, therefore, see no practical 
 difficulty in rebuking, without delay, that dangerous ascend- 
 ancy of New England prejudice, which has shaken confi- 
 dence, and marred fraternal concord in our land. 
 
 Some persons may suppose that the great Commonwealths 
 of New York and Pennsylvania have Republican proclivi- 
 ties, and will back up New England against the South. The 
 writer is penning these pages before the election, but he is 
 bold to say that, let it go as it may, the people of his native 
 State will, in the day of trial, treat the imaginary equality 
 of the negro as a ridiculous abstraction, in behalf of which 
 no one is willing to do more than to attend a political laeet- 
 ing, and there huzzah at the right time, in hope of getting 
 a tariff amidst the disruption of old political parties. We 
 are not enthusiasts, nor fanatics, hereabouts. We have seen 
 the blacks from childhood, free blacks, lazy blacks, good- 
 humored and very serviceable, but hardly our equals. 
 Moreover, we make no money out of New England, although 
 she has shrewdness enough to make our merchants pack- 
 horses to carry her goods to the West and South- West, and 
 has, by her commission agents in our midst, the virtual con- 
 trol of many of our banks, to the injury of those institu- 
 tions, and of our own community alike. We had good- 
 reason to conclude amidst the developments of insolvency, 
 secret as well as open, which 1857 made in our midst, that 
 our commission business for New England benefits her, and 
 impoverishes us ; that she gets our negotiable paper and 
 turns it into money to pay for her cotton, and to scatter in 
 wages amongst her own population, whilst we are left during 
 distress for money, high and dry, without cash or comfort 
 from Western or South-Western shopkeepers, whom we 
 have industriously drummed up as customers for those goods 
 on terras of payment virtually " at their own convenience." 
 We have become convinced that New England has so much 
 need of profit from manufactured goods, her almost exclu- 
 
40 
 
 sive resource and means of living, that she cannot spare a 
 good living out of those goods to Philadelphia, or any other 
 city of the Middle States ; and what we say in respect to 
 Philadelphia, well-informed merchants of New York will 
 confirm in respect to the commercial metropolis, which lives 
 richly, not on the manufactured products of New England, 
 but on the agricultural resources of the West, and the raw 
 material of the South; and as for the State of New York, she 
 must follow the lead and interest of the City of New York 
 on any question which involves profit and loss. The whole 
 commercial and banking system of the Empire State hangs 
 upon the metropolis. So long as the great city stands erect, 
 the interior of the Commonwealth is solvent and prospe- 
 rous; but when, as in 1857, the commercial centre staggers, 
 a far greater trembling pervades every channel of her cir- 
 culation, and paralyses every movement of her members. 
 
 In speaking of New England's industry, we have dwelt 
 mainly on her dry-goods as being her chief production. 
 The commercial position of her boots and shoes, her hats, 
 her hardware, and her notions generally, is not materially 
 different from that of her dry-goods. Nearly all that she 
 produces is for sale on long and easy credits, witbin the 
 borders of the United States, She has little export-demand 
 for the bulk of her commodities; and most of her citizens 
 consider some incidental protection by means of a tarilY for 
 revenue an almost indispensable prop of their manufactur- 
 ing prosperity. Now it seems to us, that a land thus de- 
 pendent on good will from, and exchange of commodities 
 with other States of the Union, should understand her own 
 interest too well to endeavor to exalt her pseudo-philan- 
 thropic prejudices over the manifest rights of States, which 
 can easily raise all their own bread, which have abundant 
 stores of coal and iron ready for development, and which 
 have cotton, a cash article^ in monstrous excess over all 
 reasonable wants of their population for manufactured 
 goods, of any and of every sort. 
 
 We think that we may confidently look for no other 
 
41 
 
 warfare from our great sectional feud, than that civil and 
 financial one, in which we have endeavored to show, that 
 one of the combatants will be found to be surprisingly 
 weak, whilst the other is surprisingly strong. We there- 
 fore respectfully suggest that our British brethren need not 
 consider us as near the very throes of dissolution. We 
 especially desire to calm the nerves of Lord Grey, who not 
 long ago undertook to prove to an attentive house, that too 
 many voters would shortly be the uncontrollable instrument 
 of ruin in the United States. His Lordship had probably 
 forgotten, that about thirty years ago, under the ministry 
 of a certain Earl Grey, (his own father perhaps,) Great 
 Britain was supposed to be on the verge of revolution, be- 
 cause an extension of suffrage, or in other words, the great 
 Reform Bill, was negatived in the House of Lords. The 
 people of Great Britain, the great mass of her commercial 
 and manufacturing citizens, were determined to be repre- 
 sented in Parliament. Such men as Grey, and Russell, and 
 Brougham, and Macaulay, had declared that " through Par- 
 liament, or over Parliament" the reform bill should and 
 would be carried. But the Lords were not content for all 
 that. They stood upon their prerogative as a distinct and 
 independent branch of the legislature ; and they declined 
 to confirm the bill which the Commons had passed. During 
 several days, the two houses stood apart, in hopeless and 
 apparently irreconcileable opposition ; and the mighty trade 
 of London stagnated, and was about to pass into wild panic 
 under the dread of revolution. But the ministers of the 
 Crown adopted a simple and wise, though confessedly an 
 extreme measure. Earl Grey quietly informed those Lords 
 who were most strenuous as to their right of defeating the 
 Reform Bill, that the Crown possessed the right of creating 
 more peers ; that under a whig administration, whigs would 
 naturally fill any new peerages which the Crown might 
 erect ; and that it was easy for their lordships to see, that 
 a certain number of new whig peers would turn the scale 
 in their house. On this hint their lordships permitted the 
 
43 
 
 Eeform Bill to pass. We 'will only add that in all constitu- 
 tional governments, there are safety-valves, and happily for 
 us, our country would, even in the contingency of Mr. Lin- 
 coln's election, sink into perfect repose upon the adoption 
 of such a declaratory amendment to the Constitution of the 
 United States, as that which we have suggested. "Equal 
 and indefeasible right in the territories," is all that the 
 South asks. 
 
 We have thus endeavored to show that Mr. Seward has 
 given his countrymen very poor advice. We, however, agree 
 with him, as we have already said, in his premises, which 
 are virtually these, that " beginning with the acquisition of 
 Louisiana and Florida, each successive addition to our ter- 
 ritorial possessions has awakened a fresh and increasingly 
 violent controversy as to the area of slavery ;" and we will 
 therefore endeavor to correct his advice. The conclusion 
 which we derive from such premises and from the history 
 on which they are based, is that we have gotten territory in 
 advance of our wants, injudiciously, and even wrongfully, to 
 a great extent ; and therefore, that abstinence from further 
 acquisition of territory, on any pretext whatever, is the 
 manifest present duty and highest interest of a people for 
 whose posterity to the third generation, with a large addi- 
 tion of immigrants besides, there is ample room already 
 provided, even in the liberal judgment of Mr. Seward. 
 
 The acquisition of Louisiana and Florida may have been 
 necessary. We purchased them fairly and quarrelled over 
 them bitterly, and came in 1820, to a quasi-settlement, known 
 as the Missouri compromise. About fifteen years later, a lone 
 star began to form itself on the nebulous border of Mexico. 
 As a natural consequence came up a New England light, 
 viz., Mr. John Quincy Adams, with his petitions for the 
 abolition of slavery in the. District of Columbia. Then 
 followed sectional withdrawal from the house, which re- 
 sulted in another compromise on a finely-spun distinction 
 as to the right of petition. Then in due time, Texas having 
 shown herself to be a troublesome outsider, was smuggled 
 
43 
 
 into the Union. History will not, we think, give pleasant 
 or lofty names to the heroes of San Jacinto, and other illus- 
 trious Texan battle-grounds; and perhaps some future his- 
 torian will venture to say that we admitted a territory 
 stolen from Mexico, on a principle analagous to that which 
 William of Orange alleged in support of his British crown. 
 ^' Recepi non rapui,^^ "I received it, I did not steal it," was 
 the monarch's motto. "The receiver is as bad as the thief," 
 was the ready comment of Swift. 
 
 We had hardly admitted Texas before we found that her 
 southern boundary was obscure, and (what was still more 
 tantalizing) inconvenient in view of a prosperous future, 
 which would probably make a fine river like the Rio Grrande 
 del Norte desirable as our frontier. Accordingly Mr. Presi- 
 dent Polk pitched into the Mexican territory, and called the 
 result " the existence of war by the act of ^Mexico." Sup- 
 plies must be had for the war, and supplies were voted 
 under a preamble which affirmed the existence of war hy the 
 act of Mexico ; which was true in the letter, but false in the 
 spirit of its asseveration. Did Mr. Seward vote for that bill ? 
 Did not Mr. Calhoun stand alone in the Senate in magnani- 
 mous refusal to be gagged ? He was quite willing to vote 
 for supplies, for his country luas at war, and right or wrong, 
 she was still his country ; but he scorned to be coerced into 
 endorsement of falsehood in the name of patriotism. He 
 saw full well and he deprecated with mournful solemnity 
 the adventurous career of wrongful conquest, in which his 
 country had embarked, and of which, he added, no human 
 eye could foresee the end. We honor him for his truthful 
 courage on that trying day. It made large atonement for 
 his rash advocacy of strange doctrine at an earlier period 
 of his life. 
 
 The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo came in due season, 
 under the potent influence of weapons of iron and brass and 
 silver and gold. We had gotten great possessions; and we 
 immediately fell out as to the use that posterity, as well as 
 the present generation, ought to make of the surplus means 
 
44 
 
 or common and undivided fund of tlie great house of 
 " Thirteen & Co," under the original partnership articles 
 of the " Tliirteen." On that controversy we have been 
 engaged, with but little intermission, during more than ten 
 years past ; and the present aspect of the affliir is certainly 
 alarming. And what is still more alarming, is the fact that 
 whilst we are evidently, in any calm judgment, laboring 
 under a great indigestion of territory, men high in public 
 position openly advocate further acquisition of that same 
 indigestible article. They exhort us to do, as did the won- 
 drous wise man who having scratched out his eyes in a 
 bramble bush, jumped with all his might and main into 
 another bush, to scratch them in again. Our present Chief 
 Magistrate and other Straight-out Democrats point to Cuba 
 as the head-quarters of that existing slave-trade, which all 
 men deprecate on the score of humanity, and which most 
 men of common sense deprecate as adverse to the interests 
 of our own slave-holders ; and they mildly suggest that the 
 Ostend manifesto will soon be considered a highly moral 
 document, and that the President should have been indulged 
 year before last with thirty millions of dollars, to purchase 
 perhaps the good will and fixtures of France in our tropical 
 latitudes and her co-operation as to Cuba, or for some simi- 
 lar act of diplomatic bribery. Other Democrats are greatly 
 distressed in respect to the mal-administration of Mexico ; 
 and they gently insinuate that, in the name of humanity, 
 we should give stability to some sort of government in that 
 distracted land. Now can the mind of man imagine greater 
 folly than that which is involved in such suggestions ? We 
 already resemble a mercantile house which has involved itself 
 in speculations of doubtful morality outside of its legitimate 
 business. Already we have discord amongst the States on 
 the Atlantic slope. On the Pacific we have manifest weak- 
 ness against any powerful European foe, who may there 
 assail us. Every message of our Secretaries of War during 
 a number of years past has been witness of the anxiety of 
 our military officials to place our Pacific settlements in a 
 
45 
 
 satisfactory position for self-defence, in case of sudden con- 
 tingency, in the matter of war. There is, or at least in due 
 time there must be, some rivalry, if not some antagonism of 
 interest, between Atlantic and Pacific States. Why should 
 we engross more of Mexico, as food for sectional jealousies? 
 Why should we dream of Cuba, which during war would 
 be to the United States what Sebastopol was recently to 
 Eussia, viz. : a vulnerable distant point. Eussia was unable 
 to display her full strength at Sebastopol. At any other 
 point she would have foiled Napoleon the Third, and Great 
 Britain also, as easily as she had once foiled Napoleon the 
 First. Do we wish to embark in a colonial system, that 
 will entail upon us standing armies and cruising fleets, and 
 corrupt officials, for provinces peopled by a soft and idle 
 race ? Do we not know that the first step in such a career 
 is but the beginning of crime and folly ? And are we san- 
 guine that the sectional jealousies which in our present state 
 of moderate expansion threaten us with disruption, will be 
 more safe when they shall have room to sweep in tempes- 
 tuous fury over distant tropical lands and seas? 
 
 We have done. It may seem presumptuous for one who 
 is neither a lawyer, nor a politician, nor a controversialist, 
 who has no remarkable social position and who cannot 
 even claim to be a gentleman of leisure ; it may seem pre- 
 sumptuous, we say, for such an one to undertake to teach 
 our senators wisdom, and above all, to correct the deliberate 
 advice of one of the very chiefest of those senators. But, 
 for this offence against propriety, the author claims indul- 
 gence on the ground, that a time of public alarm has 
 already come, or at least is certainly about to come, and it 
 therefore behooves every one who has an audible voice to 
 lift it up, not to increase, but to quell in some measure that 
 alarm. We need not be alarmed. We have not gone so 
 far in a wrong path that amendment of ways has become 
 impracticable. Our God and Heavenly Father graciously 
 designs that our intestine dissensioyis shall effectually check 
 and subdue that spirit of aggressive and unrighteous conquest 
 
46 
 
 which has gained great strength within us during the 
 present generation ! Let us " bear the rod and Ilim who 
 hath appointed it," and it shall be well with us. 
 
 The writer is well aware that nice people will raise many 
 critical objections to his accuracy on the many points which 
 the foregoing discussion has opened. To such he begs 
 leave to say that he writes in the name of common sense 
 rather than in the name of cobwebs. He is also aware that 
 two leading objections may be made to his whole argument. 
 
 1. That he does not explain the precise course of the 
 financial storm which he seems to anticipate as imminent 
 upon the election of Mr. Lincoln. In answer to this he 
 will only remark, that his meteorology does not go higher 
 than simple prediction of a storm. He does not undertake 
 to be as precise in regard to financial changes as the 
 philosopher of Brooklyn Heights is in respect to heated 
 terms. 
 
 2. That he does not indicate any means or any probability 
 of the removal of the African race from our land, nor even 
 of their eventual enfranchisement. In answer to this he 
 desires to say that he is no better than his fathers were. 
 Their wisdom was altogether at fault as to the designs of 
 Providence in respect to the transplanted race; and we 
 need not be ashamed to confess that we are neither prophets 
 nor the sons of prophets. The Lord hath done great things 
 for the dark-skinned race, which Africa gave and America 
 hath nourished. Let him who doubts on this point consider 
 first the poor idolatrous creature that recently wallowed on 
 the soil of Africa, like a brute, to express an emotion of 
 joy in the presence of the manly Livingstone, and then 
 listen to the godly discourse and observe the gentle, well- 
 ordered life of the plantation negro in the United States. 
 
 We are of the number of those who believe, that in due 
 season the sons of Africa will in large measure be restored 
 to the land of their fathers. We have often figured to our 
 imagination the almost miraculous speed with which large 
 discoveries of gold in the interior of that land may at no 
 
 Lot-19 
 
47 
 
 distant day change the face of Africa and of our slave- 
 holding South simultaneously. Washing gold is vastly 
 more profitable than raising cotton ; and indeed a gold 
 region is the only field of labor which will defray the 
 enormous expenses of enfranchisement of slaves and of 
 emigration on a vast scale. But be the instrument of 
 restoration what it may, eventual restoration in some way 
 seems highly probable, for is it not written that " Ethiopia 
 shall stretch out her hands to God ?" And how shall she do 
 so without preachers — not a few, but many ? And who so 
 likely to be her preachers as her restored sons ? And when 
 the restored sons of Africa shall thus worship God in the 
 land of their fathers in exceeding great numbers and in 
 exceeding joy over many tribes of native converts, they will 
 call blessed not the British slave-trader of the eighteenth 
 century whom Mr. Seward has excused, but the American 
 planter of the nineteenth century whom Mr. Seward has 
 denounced. 
 
 Philadelj)hia, November 5, 1860. 
 
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