the case, under legal sanctions. But the law may | has become painfully prominent. Sixty years ago be a dead letter, and the people to whom it relates there were only about half a million of colored may be in the comparative enjoyment of liberty and people in the States; now, there are two millions happiness. I sincerely wish this could be predi- and a half; and they are increasing in a greater cated of this case; but, in many respects, the actual proportion than the whites, great as that is. They condition of the colored population is worse than have, consequently, become an object of alarm and the law contemplates; and severe and despotic as fear. Instead of meliorating their circumstances, it is, it knows no relaxation, except what may spring and medicating their wounds, their bonds are from individual charity; and where slavery is drawn closer, and made well nigh insufferable. found, charity does not often dwell. Every variation in the law itself has been against the slave, and the execution has been usually in excess rather than otherwise. The small remnant of social liberty which these people had, has been dreaded; and it has therefore been abridged. Education has been felt to be incompatible with slavery, and it has been refused. To the honor of religion, it has been open to the same objections; and the slaves must not meet to rest their griefs on God their Maker, unless a white man will condescend to be present and watch their conduct. One of the highest encomiums ever offered to religion, was pronounced by the West India planters, when they declared that Christianity and slavery could not exist together. The American planters are adopting the same declaration; and they are both right-indisputably right. But who could ever have supposed that men, with such an admission on their lips, should commit themselves to the dreadful alternative of sustaining slavery at the expense of Christianity?

Of course, where such law exists, and where there is a disposition to exceed rather than to relax, the daily and hourly enormities must be unspeakable. The domestic slaves, indeed, often meet with kind treatment, and they as often repay it by sincere attachment. I witnessed many such instances with unmixed pleasure, and was struck to perceive how capable the slave was of generous sentiment, where it had the least place for action. This was often pleaded in mitigation of the system there, as it has been here. It might be very well, if the subject were a mere matter of treatment; but it is not. It is a question of right and wrong, and not a question of more or less. The vice of the system is, that it gives to the white man a power which no man is competent to possess, and it deprives the slave of a right which makes him less than man to surrender. To plead that the slave is in better condition because I hold him in bonds, matches, in effrontery, though not in guilt, the man who justifies a robbery he has committed on your person, by maintaining that your property will be safer in his pocket than in your own!

So far as treatment has to do with the actual state of the African, I fear, on a large scale, little can be said in its favor, while much may be truly stated of a most appalling character. Many of the instances of kind management which fall under notice, are to be ascribed to persons who are decidedly unfriendly to slavery, and who gladly seek to lighten the chains which, for the present, they cannot break. Many more, again, arise from the consideration prudently given to them as property; they are, to the owner, a portion of his live stock, perhaps the whole of it; and he has the same reasons to preserve them that influence him in the care of his oxen or horses. But, too generally, prudential motive is insufficient to secure to the slave the attention which is shown by a merciful man to his cattle. The master does not fear his cattle, but he does fear his slave; and fear is always cruel. He is satisfied of his right of property in the one case; his conscience forbids that he should be wholly satisfied in the other; and the uneasiness which attends on conscious wrong, stings him, and converts him, however reluctantly, into an oppressor.

This feature, in the present condition of the slave,

The field slave, of course, is the more exposed to had treatment; and though much protection is now brought to his aid by the force of public opinion, there is no doubt that he is mostly submitted to hardships which, if they are proper to brutes, disgrace alike the man who inflicts, and the man who suffers them. In the South, this is especially the case; and it arises naturally from the circumstances in which they are placed. They are bought and sold as cattle; they do the work of cattle; they are provided for as cattle till the overseer and owner come to think that they are cattle and no more. As far as thought is the parent of action, I am persuaded this is very commonly the case; and even where thought takes a more settled and philosophical form, instances will sometimes occur. I never thought it possible, that I should meet with a man of education and property, who would seriously argue that his slave, if not a brute, was, at least, not of the human species; but I have found such persons in this country, as, without doubt, I should in the West Indies, and who have invited me to formal discussion on the subject.

In harmony with this, I was told confidentially, and, from excellent authority, that recently, at a meeting of planters in South Carolina, the question was seriously discussed, Whether the slave is more profitable to the owner, if well fed, well clothed, and worked lightly, or if made the most of at once, and exhausted in some eight years. The decision was in favor of the last alternative. That decision will perhaps make many shudder. But, to my mind, this is not the chief evil. The greater and original evil is considering the slave as property; if he is only property, and my property, then I have some right to ask, how I may make that property most available.

But the crying aggravation of slavery, in the United States, arises from the internal traffic. It is in the South, as you know, that cotton, rice, and sugar, are raised; and it is in this service that slave labor is found to be indispensable. Slaves are, therefore, accumulating in these parts, and a much higher price is given for them there than elsewhere. This, of course, is a great temptation to the cupidity of many; and the vilest means are eventually adopted to satisfy it. Slaves are regularly bred in some States, as cattle for the southern market. Besides this, the men who pursue this nefarious traffic have acquired wealth, and use it extensively to acquire more. They have secret agents spread over the States where the slave is less gainful, to avail themselves of all opportunities of accomplishing their ends. They seek to trepan the free colored man, and by throwing the proof of his freedom upon him, find him off his guard, and often succeed against him. They especially seek to buy up, as for local and domestic use, all the slaves that are at different places to be disposed of; and when the unhappy beings are once in their power, they disappear in the night, and are lost to their birth-place and connections for ever. Most of the sales and the kidnapping that arise have reference to the southern market; and are too commonly conducted on false and foul pretences. It is supposed that not less than ten thousand slaves are by these means procured for the demands of the South.

From the mysteriousness of these disappearances,

from the impossibility of hearing any more of the parties so abstracted from society, and from the known severity of the heat and labor in the South, this domestic slave-trade is the terror of the African, and it makes slavery, which would otherwise wear a milder aspect, twice cursed.

"The trade is still briskly carried on in Africa, and new slaves are smuggled into these States through the Spanish colonies. A very extensive internal slave trade is carried on in this country. The breeding of negroes for the markets, in other States (Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas, and Missouri,) is a very lucrative branch of business. Whole coffles of them, chained and manacled, are driven through our capital, on their way to auction."-Idem, p. 30.

"A slave being missing, several planters united in a negro hunt, as it is called. They set out with dogs, guns, and horses, as they would chase a tiger. The poor fellow, being discovered, took refuge in a tree, where he was deliberately shot by his pursuers."-Idem, p. 24.

A case in illustration occurred in a certain town of Virginia, that I visited, which had created a sensation of pity and indignation through the whole western portion of that state. A gentleman sold a female slave. The party professing to buy not being prepared to make the necessary payments, the slave was to be resold. A concealed agent of the trade bought her and her two children, as for his own service, where her husband, also a slave in the town, might visit her and them. Both the husband and wife suspected that she would be privately sent "A planter had occasion to send a female slave away. The husband, in their common agony, of- some distance on an errand. She did not return fered to be sold, that he might go with her. This so soon as he expected, and he grew angry. At was declined. He resolved on the last effort, of last he gave orders that she should be severely assisting her to escape. That he might lay suspi-whipped when she came back. When the poor cion asleep, he went to take leave of her and his creature arrived, she pleaded for mercy, saying children, and appeared to resign himself to the she had been so very ill, that she was obliged to event. This movement had its desired effect; sus- rest in the fields; but she was ordered to receive picion was withdrawn both from him and his wife; another dozen of lashes for having had the impuand he succeeded in emancipating them. Still, dence to speak. She died at the whipping-post; nor what was to be done with his treasure, now he had did she perish alone; a new-born babe died with obtained it? Flight was impossible; and nothing her."-Idem, p. 25. remained but concealment. And concealment seemed hopeless, for no place would be left un-hibited slavery in all its sickening deformity. The searched, and punishment would fall on the party who should give them shelter. However, they were missing; and they were sought for diligently, but not found. Some months afterwards it was casually observed that the floor under a slave's bed (the sister of the man) looked dirty and greasy. A board was taken up; and there lay the mother and her children on the clay, and in an excavation of three feet by five! It is averred, that they had been there in a cold and enclosed space, hardly large enough for their coffin (buried alive there) for SIX MONTHS! This is not all. The agent was only provoked by this circumstance! He demanded the woman; and though every one was clamorous to redeem her, and retain her to her husband, he would not sell! she was taken to his slave-pen, and has disappeared! The man-most miserable man!-still exists in the town.

Let us attend to other testimony on this subject, chiefly American, and I believe, of unquestioned

truth.

"A few days since I attended a sale, which exbodies of these wretched beings were placed upright on a table-the physical proportions examinedtheir defects and beauties noted. A prime lot; here they go!' There I saw the father looking with sullen contempt upon the crowd, and expressing an indignation in his countenance that he dared not speak; and the mother pressing her infants closer to her bosom with an involuntary grasp, and exclaiming, in wild and simple earnestness, while the tears chased down her cheeks in quick succession, I can't leff my children! I won't leff my children!' but on the hammer went, reckless alike whether it united or sundered for ever. On another stand I saw a man, apparently as white as myself, exposed for sale. I turned away from the humiliating spectacle.

"At another time I saw the concluding scene of this infernal drama. It was on the wharf. A slave ship for New Orleans was lying in the stream, and the poor negroes, handcuffed and pinioned, were hurried off in boats, eight at a time. Here I witnessed the last farewell-the heart-rending separation of every earthly tie. The mute and agonizing embrace of the husband and wife, and the convulsive grasp of the mother and the child, were alike torn asunder for ever! It was a living death; they

"Dealing in slaves has become a large business. Establishments are made at several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places are strongly built, and well supplied with thumb-screws, gags, cow-skins, and other whips, oftentimes bloody. But the laws per-ed fast, and mine with the rest."—Stuart. mit the traffic, and it is suffered."-Niles' Register, vol. xxxv. p. 4.

"Dr. Torrey says, whole families of free colored people have been attacked in the night, beaten nearly to death with clubs, gagged, and bound, and dragged into distant and hopeless captivity, leaving no traces behind, except the blood from their wounds."-Child's Appeal, p. 31.

"Advertisements are very common, in which a mother and her children are offered either in a lot, or separately, as may suit the purchaser. In one of these advertisements, I observed it stated, that the youngest child was about a year old."-Idcm,

p. 33.

"The captives are driven by the whip, through toilsome journeys, under a burning sun; their limbs fettered; with nothing before them but the prospect of toil more severe than that to which they have been accustomed."-Idem, p. 33.

never see or hear of each other more. Tears flow

Such are the evils consequent on slavery, and especially on a domestic slave trade. And these worst evils are not proper to persons, so much as enormities are not put down invidiously. The they are common to the system. Some, in dealing with it, may be severe, and some lenient; but the system is accursed, and only accursed; and if allowed to exist, would quickly produce the same results in England and France as it does in Ame rica, and did in the West Indies. If it finds man benevolent, it makes him cruel. It is, by a wise and righteous arrangement of Providence, a greater curse to the oppressor than to the oppressed; though we judge not so. We see the whip, we hear the lash, and we instantly give our tears to the man who is made less than human; but we are not so quick to perceive and stand aghast at that in ward and moral desolation, which has spread itself over the prosperous oppressor, and has withered up the

LETTER XLII.

a great measure of public confidence. Its founders
and original friends are of unimpeached integrity;
but it has now many devoted slaveholders among
its chief supporters, and this awakens suspicion.
Some of its agents, acting in difficult circumstances,
and wanting due discretion, to say the least, have
commended it in the North, as an Anti-Slavery So-

MY DEAR FRIEND-It would be a libel on the peo-ciety; while others, in the South, have labored to ple of America to say, that they, that is, the portion show, that it does not disturb slave property, and of the States best entitled, by numbers, intelligence, that its tendency is to secure and perpetuate it; and and wealth, to receive that denomination, have con- this has confirmed suspicion in distrust. The best tentedly participated in this state of things, or have friends of the Society and the slave, have protested even remained indifferent to it. All the northern against these conflicting and unworthy statements; States have entirely washed their hands of slavery but they have not been able to revive confidence. and the slave trade; and the middle States are either Then, 3. as a remedy for slavery, it must be placed free, or will quickly be so. The religious of every amongst the grossest of all delusions. In fifteen name and every place are prepared to admit and years it has transported less than three thousand deplore the evil of slavery in itself; and are express-persons to the African coast; while the increase on ing an anxious desire for any remedy that might their numbers, in the same period, is about seven be effectual. Many, very many, with whom I met, hundred thousand! By all means let the Coloniwould willingly have released their slaves, but the zation Society exist, if it will, as a Missionary Solaw requires that in such case they should leave the ciety for the benefit of Africa; but, in the name of State; and this would mostly be not to improve common honesty and common sense, let it disabuse their condition, but to banish them from their home, the public mind, by avowing that it does not preand make them miserable outcasts. What they tend to be a remedy for slavery. 4. If this society cannot for the present remove, they are studious to could accomplish its object, and transport all the mitigate; and I have never seen kinder attentions slaves to a foreign shore, it would inflict on Amepaid to any domestics than by such persons to their rica herself a most deadly wound. She wants the slaves. In defiance of the infamous laws, making colored people; she cannot do without them. She it criminal for the slave to be taught to read, and has hitherto depended, and does still depend, on the difficult to assemble for an act of worship, they are African or the Irish for every instance of consolidated labor; and she owes to the sweat of their instructed, and they are assisted to worship God. brow a full moiety of her prosperity and wealth. If the Africans were removed to-morrow, one half of her territories would be a mere desolation. To wish to get rid of them is a mere prejudice-the most vulgar of all prejudices-the prejudice of color. Only make them white, and America would know how to value them!

The more ostensible means for their relief, which have been created by the force of public opinion, are to be found in the Colonization and Anti-Slavery Societies. The Colonization Society is the elder of the two, and originated in a pure motive of compassion for the slave. It proposes to establish a free colony on the coast of Africa, and by this means to confer a benefit on a country which has been wasted by our crimes, and to open a channel to the slaveholder to give freedom to his slaves. Its founders hoped that the movement thus made, while it brought the direct blessing of liberty to many, would indirectly, and without stimulating the prejudices of the plante:, familiarize the common mind with the inherent evils of slavery, and thus contribute to ultimate emancipation. For many years this was the best and the only remedy offered to public attention, and the benevolent, of course, took hold of it; and it has at present the concurrence of New England, and of the intelligent and influential in most places.

The Anti-Slavery Society is of later formation. Without hesitation or condition, it demands immediate and complete abolition; and in doing this, it does not scruple to pit itself against the older Society, and to denounce it as standing in its way, and as favorable to the perpetuation of slavery. This, as you may expect, has brought the two Societies into a state of violent collision. Neither party has kept its temper; much personal abuse, and bitter vituperation, have been emitted; and both, in the heat of party conflict, have been in danger of losing sight of the slave, and affording a humiliating, but acceptable spectacle to the slaveholder.

Apart from these animosities, you seek an unprejudiced judgment on these societies. You shall at least have an honest opinion. The Colonization Society may have been well as a harbinger of something better; but it was never equal to the object of emancipation, and is now below the spirit and demands of the day. 1. It does not lay hold sufficiently on the public mind. What it proposes to do is indirect, and indefinite, and complicate; and bears no proportion to the pressure and extent of the evil with which it professes to deal. 2. It has lost

It is quite evident, then, if benevolent opinion and effort, in its improved state, was to be concentrated in favor of the slave, that some other association was indispensable. It is only to be lamented that the Anti-Slavery has shot at once as much in advance of the public mind as the older Society fell below it. By saying this, however, I would not be understood to complain of the great principle it adopts, but of the methods by which it has sought to give it predominance. Had it calmly and firmly announced, on religious grounds, that all slavery is a sin against God, as well as an offence against society, and that as such requires without delay, to be abolished; and had it refused to come down from this high vantage ground, to deal in personal invective and exaggerated statement; it would have won its way, unresisted, over the whole portion of the religious and philanthropic of the community with surprising rapidity. But it has not done so. In looking to a noble issue, it has been impatient of means necessary to the end. In proposing to confer an inestimable good, it has not paused to ask, how

may be granted with the least alloy of evil. It has allowed nothing to prejudice; nothing to interest; nothing to time. It has borne on its front defiance, and not conciliation; and this not merely against slavery, but against the slaveholder. Means leading to the result, and remuneration consequent on it, instead of being considerately discussed, are peremptorily denounced. If there be any thing that has special power to shock existing prejudice, it has been called up, and placed in the foreground of the battle; it will demand amalgamation as well as emancipation. It has been resolved on getting the wedge in; but in fuifilling this resolution, it seems to have been careless, whether it should be by the butt end or the fine one.

As you might foresee, the effect has been, that |ernment had the power, on the settlement of a new mostly those who would have been its best friends, State, to determine whether it should be free or have been afraid of it; and those who were pledged, slaveholding, they resolved in favor of bondage, and from the truest benevolence, to the Colonization So- the matter, it must be admitted, is somewhat disciety, have received offence; while, in the slave couraging. States, its personality and want of prudence, apart But, although the Congress can do but little, and from its devotion to a hated principle, has thrown is backward to do what is within its orbit; and alback the cause for which it pleads to a lamentable | though the legal renovation of the slave State rests distance. with itself, and it may defy extraneous dictation; there are, nevertheless, many cheering indications that America will cast away this foul reproach soon and for ever.

emigration! It reminds one of the increase of Israel in Egypt; and where would be the wrong of supposing that Providence is strengthening them, as he did Israel, to forsake the house of bondage? And observe, it is not the mere amount that is to be reckoned here, as of ten millions against two: there is especially to be noted, the accumulation of these numbers in one portion of the empire. This accumulation of the black population in the South, is still going on; while that of the whites is diminishing. Evidently this is tending to a crisis; and, in terror of it, many have already fled from the vicinity. That crisis will come, if existing causes are allowed to produce their proper effects. What determination it shall take, must depend on many contingencies; but it can hardly find and leave the slave a slave.

4. Then, finally, public sentiment is ripening to this end. It has grown surprisingly within these few years. All discussion nurtures it. Daily observation strengthens it. If the proximity of the evil may create difficulties, which we could not know, it presses the subject on the mind and the senses incessantly, and demands relief. The clanking of their chains, the piercing cries of the oppressed, "Am I not a man and a brother?"-are at their doors and in their cars, and will not suffer compassion to slumber within them. The very struggles and animosities between the two societies for their relief, and the advance which the younger has made, in principle, beyond the elder, are evidence of the gathering power of opinion, and of its determination to make to itself suitable channels of action. And, above all, the feverish anxiety which possesses those who are unwilling to look at change, announces an inward consciousness that the change

must come.

America; and so long as slavery remains, it exists in letter and not in fact !

The eyes of the world are now fixed on America. She will act worthy of herself, her high professions, and her distinguished privileges. She will show that the evil by which she suffers has been inflicted, and not adopted. She will repudiate it without delay; only asking the time and the means, which inay secure to all parties the greatest good with the least evil. And kindred nations, and oppressed man, shall look on her from afar with admiration and delight, as to the new world of promise "wherein dwelleth righteousness!"

Besides this, there is another field of philanthropic service open to America. It is that of seeking the welfare of the aborigines of the country. They are far less thought of, at the present moment, than the oppressed African; but their claims are not inferior, nor scarcely are their wrongs. They amount to about five hundred thousand persons. They have the highest claim to the soil. It has been allowed as such both by Britain and the United States; and America, by conciliation and justice, might confer the greatest good on these interesting people; and all the good done to them, would be so much benefit brought to herself.

has been taken of their ignorance and generous conYet no people have suffered more. Advantage fidence, at various times, in every possible way. While the invader has been weak, he has allowed their claims; as he gathered force, he doubted them; and when he was confident in his strength, he practically denied them. Very recently, some flagrant instances of oppression and plunder, under the form and sanction of law, have occurred; and it Court of the States, by a signal act of justice, rewas only at the eleventh hour, that the Supreme versed the acts of local government and of Congress too, and saved the nation from being committed to deeds which must have been universally condemned as flagitious and infamous.

Nothing has accelerated this state of feeling so much as the recent deeds of England. When by the highest moral act our country ever performed, slavery was abolished throughout the British doBut to tell of their wrongs would be to write a vominions, I could not help saying, that it was done, lume; and that such a one as Ezekiel was once not merely for ourselves, but for the world. Slave-commissioned to inscribe. Many of them rest with ry, indeed, lingers now in America; but it is im- former generations; and the reference, either to possible it should linger long. The example of the present or the past, is only desirable, as it may Great Britain has acted on the whole people like a awaken compassion and dispose to justice. At shock; and if no reverses attend the transition, and least, let the existing generation seek indemnity for if their jealousies are not aroused by indiscreet in- the past by care for the future. If their fathers may terference and direct agencies from the parent land, have acted beneath the influence of fear and resentit will continue so to act, till every free man shall ment, there is now no place for the action of such resolve that every slave shall be free. And whatpassions. These people commend themselves to ever may oppose the consummation, it can only reprotection, by their weakness as well as their mantard, and not prevent it. It is a source of great al-liness and generosity. It is high time that they leviation to find, that, as our country first inflicted should be allowed to live in peace and security, and this evil on America, her late but noble example is in the inviolable possession of their lands, their acting with silent but amazing power for its anni- laws, their liberty. If this may not be in the United States, where can it be? Is the most solemn Declaration" of a whole people to be nullified a SECOND TIME, and pronounced a mere legal fiction? Justice, Truth, Mercy, Religion-Earth and Heaven, demand of America that she should assure the world she is what she professes to be, BY PRESERVING THE INDIAN, AND EMANCIPATING THE AFRICAN.

hilation.

LETTER XLIII.

Yes, the slave must go free! Slavery now has a legal existence only in America. But America is the very place, of all others, where it cannot, must not be tolerated. With her Declaration of Rights, with her love of liberty, with her sense of religion, with her professed deference for man as man, and with the example of the old world against herwhich she has forsaken from its defective sense of freedom-to uphold slavery would be an act of such supreme iniquity, as, beside it, would make all common vice seem to brighten into virtue. Much evil may be; but this cannot be! What, slavery in the last home of liberty! The vilest despotism in the presence of boasted equality! The deepest oppression of man, where the rights of man are professedly most honored! No, this cannot continue. Slave-servation, requires considerable space. ry and Liberty cannot exist together; either slavery must die, or liberty must die. Even now, the existence of slavery is a violation of the Constitution of

MY DEAR FRIEND-It is now time that I brought both my narrative and disquisitions to a close. The field, however, is so extensive, and so interesting, that only to glance at the various objects within the scope of this communication, and which demand ob

Although I have endeavored to convey my honest and first impressions as I have passed onward, you may desire that I should yet express the general