all who look to them for direction, or whom they can contrive to work upon by hope or fear, or argument or trick.

To the electoral colleges for the choice of President, consisting of two hundred and ninety members, the Slave States send a hundred and twenty voters, every one of them a devotee of the Slave Power. Who that wants to be President, now or hereafter, can venture to give displeasure to such a force as this; or who that wants an office from the President whom the Slave Power is to have so large a direct share in making, will not see that prudence requires him, according to his opportunities, to do its will and get its favor? The Slave Power makes Presidents. Presidents and Senators make Heads of Departments. Presidents, Heads of Departments, and Senators make Collectors, District Attorneys, Land-Agents, Postmasters, and other salaryreceivers. These make all sorts of subordinates, every one of them with a palm to be touched from the public chest "through all the classes of venality," and every one of them, from high to low, with a noisy voice for the caucus, and a favor or a rod for some editor of a newspaper in town or village, according as he loudly cries up the creators and creatures of the Slave Power as patriots and sages, or is recusant enough to keep such words to something like their old-fashioned sense.

Such, very imperfectly described, is the Slave Power, an aristocracy of one hundred thousand men governing by its wellplayed machinery twenty millions of men who call themselves republicans; an authority by itself and its instruments already omnipresent in this country, and, unless checked by an early and vigorous resistance, destined to be before long omnipotent.

No. II.

POSITION OF THE SLAVE POWER FIVE YEARS AGO.

SOME of our readers express surprise at our rating the whole number of slaveholders in the United States men, women, and minor children at not much more than one hundred thousand. We do not see how it is possible to put it higher.

In 1849, the New York Express published a report of a portion of a speech then recently delivered by Mr. Senator Underwood at a public meeting in Kentucky. Mr. Underwood is therein represented as saying, that, by the recent census of that State (1848), the number of slaves appeared to be 192,470, and that of slaveholders 8,743, being an average of twenty-two slaves and a fraction to each master. Now the number of slaves in

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the United States, by the census of 1850, was 3,177,589; and assuming th came proportion between slaves and masters for the whole United States as for Kentucky (according to the statement ascribed to Mr. Underwood), the whole number of slaveholders in the country would be 144,343.

But Kentucky is a grazing and wheat and hemp growing State. It does not raise rice, sugar, or cotton. Its products are not of those kinds which employ large gangs of negroes. If in Kentucky there are twenty-two slaves to a slaveholder, we should say that fifty per cent. more, or thirty-three slaves to a master, would be a very small average allowance for the whole Slave States together; and this would reduce the whole number of slaveholders, of both sexes and all ages, below a hundred thousand.

We cannot answer for the authenticity of the report of Mr. Underwood's speech, or for the correctness of the figures. But all the facts with which we are acquainted lead to the opinion that our estimate of the number of slaveholders is too high rather than too low.

A considerable number of slaves in the aggregate is employed in domestic service, it is true; but even as to them, where there are any in a house, there are generally several, for it takes six or eight of them to do what two or three domestics do with us, and commonly the family which can afford to have them at all can afford itself some indulgence in this particular. The business of planting, involving an outlay in land, tools, machinery, cattle, &c., would hardly be worth carrying on with a force of less than thirty or forty hands, including children; while on the other hand, we read of Mr. Hariston, of Virginia, having 3,000 slaves; General Wade Hampton, 5,000; Mr. Duncan, of Mississippi, 2,000; and Mr. Pollock, of North Carolina, 1,500. A Louisiana paper in 1849, describing the ravages of the cholera in one parish, that of Ascension, said that Bishop Polk had lost 64 negroes, Colonel Bibb 70, Mr. Minor 66, and so on. We happen

to have at hand a memorandum of two advertisements, of a description which may be found as often as they are looked for. The Charleston Mercury of December 1, 1849, advertises for sale a plantation with 131 prime rice-field negroes, of course exclusive of children. The Charleston Courant for January 19, 1850, advertises three plantations with 267 working hands. Now, if but sixty were the average number of slaves of all ages to a master, we should have only about fifty thousand slaveholders in the country, less than half the number at which we have estimated them.

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Yet this number of men, women, and minors—three quarters, perhaps, as large as the population of the city of Boston is what Mr. Calhoun was used to call the South, and what Northern people, with tongues more busy than their brains, call so

after him. And so they make it out, to all who keep their eyes shut, that the unwillingness of twenty millions of free people to be governed, and misgoverned, by one hundred thousand, is a sectional jealousy of North against South.

At the beginning of our national existence, the cloud that has since overspread our sky with blackness was no bigger than a man's hand. Between six and seven hundred thousand slaves was the whole number in the country at the time of the census of 1790, the first year after the government went into operation. Nearly half of those were held in Virginia, in which State, as well as in Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina, the statesmen and the people were looking to speedy emancipation. South Carolina had one hundred and seven thousand, and Georgia twenty-nine thousand; and in these two States alone it was that there appeared a desire to maintain the odious condition of things.

The prevailing state of opinion at an earlier period was made manifest by the action on the Jeffersonian Ordinance. very day of the cession by Virginia of her Northwestern Territory to the confederacy, viz. March 1st, 1784, Mr. Jefferson, a delegate from that State, reported to the Congress of the Confederation a plan for the government of all "the territory ceded, or to be ceded, by the individual States to the United States." It provided that it should be, from time to time, "formed into distinct States," and that "after the year 1800 of the Christian era there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty." Had this plan been adopted, it would have stopped the extension of Slavery on the ridge of the Alleghany Mountains. It failed by one of those singular accidents which sometimes give a direction to events for generations and centuries. Of the twenty-three delegates present and voting, sixteen were in favor of the Proviso, and seven against it. But in the Congress of the Confederation, the vote was taken by States; a majority of the thirteen States was necessary to carry a measure; and no State could vote unless represented by two delegates. Six States voted for the Proviso; three against it. One vote more was wanted to carry it. Delaware and Georgia were not represented. The two delegates from North Carolina neutralized each other's vote. New Jersey had but one delegate present. He voted for the plan, but his colleague, who would have voted with him and carried it, was called away from Congress a day or two before, and was detained a day or two after, the decision of the question. And so that most salutary measure failed. It was revived by Mr Dane of Massachusetts in 1787, and carried, but then in a more limited form, being made to apply only to the territory northwest of the

The introduction of the culture of cotton put a new face upon Slavery. In 1789, only a million of pounds was raised in the United States, in 1801 there were nearly fifty millions; and since then the amount produced has gone on to the present enormous quantity of between two and three millions of bales. Slavery appeared differently from what it had done in the eyes of the cotton-planters of South Carolina and Georgia, when that article sold for forty cents a pound, and in the eyes of the proprietors of Virginia and North Carolina, who raised the salable laborer, worth a thousand dollars when cotton was high. A new interest was established, binding together for joint action the men of condition throughout the whole Southern country. And a new element of immense power was introduced into the sphere of American politics.

Fortune, which is apt to favor the brave, on this occasion favored well the bold and skilful enterprise of ambition. The settlement of the country belonging to Virginia and North Carolina beyond the Alleghanies called for a right to the free navigation of the Mississippi to the sea. The necessities of the French treasury were such that Louisiana was to be had for money. Mr. Jefferson bought it for fifteen millions of dollars, nearly one half of its population consisting of slaves. In 1810-11, a bill was introduced into Congress "to enable the people of the Territory of Orleans to form a constitution and State government, and for the admission of such State into the Union." It was one of those bold strokes whose audacity is oftentimes an omen of sucThere was no pretence of proof that the sages who framed the Constitution, or the people who ratified it, had ever intended to give the power of introducing foreign countries into the partnership of the States by act of Congress. Mr. Jefferson himself avowed that there was no power in the Constitution to carry out his favorite measure, and desired that such a power might be obtained by an amendment of the Constitution in the form prescribed by that instrument.* But the Southern statesmen were domineering; the Northern were easy; party spirit ran high; the administration was in the Slavery interest; and two more representatives of the Slave Power took their places in the United States Senate for a country lately a province of Spain and France.

cess.

The wedge was well entered, and in due time came the sturdy blows of the beetle to drive it further in. In 1820, the government had been in operation thirty-one years, and only for one

* "When I consider that the limits of the United States are precisely fixed by the treaty of 1783, and that the Constitution expressly declares itself to be made for the United States, I cannot help believing the intention was not to permit Congress to admit into the Union new States which should be formed out of the territory for which, and under whose authority alone, they were then acting. I do not believe it was meant that they might receive England, Ireland, Holland, &c., into it."- Letter to W. C. Nicholas, of Sept. 7th, 1803.