their houses plundered, and their property destroyed; their printing-presses demolished; their free citizens, for defending freedom and establishing free institutions, were imprisoned and murdered; and almost every act of injustice and inhumanity was perpetrated. In this great contest the free State men stood firm, and acted and said— "Give us liberty or death;" and the free women of Kansas, like their mothers of Revolutionary memory, rallied with their husbands and sons, to the defense of freedom, and laid their offerings and themselves upon the altar of liberty.

The struggle is still in progress, and the issue is with Him who ruleth among the nations; and who created, not only all men to be free, but gave the earth, as a rich patrimony to men, to be cultivated as a free soil, and by free labor. Of Kansas, let every freeman ask, in the words of a poet.

Shall the free winds, that sweep her grassy vales

Be burdened with the groan of sad despair?

Shall the free waves, that wash her fertile shores

Blush with the blood that runs from furrowed backs?

Shall her tall mountains, crowned with sparkling snow,
Become red altars for the slaughtered slave?

Shall her green valleys be the early grave

Of Freedom, or the cradle of the Free?
Shall her broad rivers, rolling to the deep,
Shout Liberty's inspiring song for aye,

Or slink to the old Ocean's arm to hide

Their stains behind his ample cloak of waves?

Shall her vast plains and prairies, filled with flowers

As glorious night is filled with gleaming stars,

Be cleared, and ploughed, and hoed, and reaped by slaves?

Not only Christianity, the genius of our free institutions and of the age, but humanity and the interests and dignity of Free labor, demand that the soil of our nation, every acre of it, should be preserved free from slavery.

Slavery is a system that puts dishonor and disgrace on labor, which has the seal of honor instamped upon it by the Creator

The free States of the North, where free labor, has wrought out all their splendid achievements of enterprise, are described, by the Southern press, as "rioting in the excesses of an indiscriminate freedom, prodigal in liberty, bankrupts in law;-where labor is elevated to political power, and enjoys the same political privileges with the capital that employs it." "All society," says a Southern politician, "settles down into a classification of capitalists and laborers. The former will own the latter." "If laborers," said Mr. McDuffie, "obtain the political power of a country, it is, in fact, in a state of revolution. The institution of slavery supersedes the necessity of an order of nobility." Slavery is by the South declared to be a "National blessing; "a Patriarchal Institution;" "The corner stone of our Republican Edifice." "In a few years the blasphemous Reformers, who curse the Constitution for legalizing, and the Bible for consecrating slavery, will curse Heaven, that it did not bless the North with African slavery, the only antidote to a crowded, motley, foreign and native population."

Slavery is not only the antagonism of free labor, dishonoring it, and the free laborers of the North, but it is a system that operates most injuriously and debasingly, upon the poorer classes of the non-slaving South. Of the six millions of people in the slaveholding States, and of the 876,243 voters in the same section, there are but 347,000 slaveholders, leaving 528,000 voters in the South, and more than five millions of persons, who have no personal interest or complicity with slavery. They are in the technical language of the slave system, the "Poor Whites of the South." Though not able, or not willing to be the owners of slaves, yet this immense preponderating population of the slave States, are dishonored by the system

that surrounds them. They have but little influence in political affairs, and are so under the surveillance of the slave Aristocracy, that freedom of opinion is stifled, and an independent course of action prevented. Social as well as political disfranchisement, and debasement, is the condition of this class, who are numerous and worthy in the South. Schools for popular education, are not provided, and Free Schools, are unknown, and thus ignorance, the natural result of slavery, aids in the work of degradation.

The soil also of a slave country, soon becomes, under the working of the slave system, unproductive. In this aspect it is a perfect contrast with the results of freedom and free labor. Consecrate a soil to perpetual freedom; let the genius of freedom, breathe its air of inspiration and purity over the soil, and the soil under its power will produce an abundant harvest. Freedom will replen ish, too, the waste and worn out soil, with a new life and a fresh reproductive vitality. Not so with slavery.

Governeur Morris, a statesman of the highest order of talents, in the Convention that formed the Constitution, in 1787, said, "Compare the free regions of the Middle States, where a rich and noble cultivation marks the prosperity and happiness of the people, with the misery and poverty which overspread the barren wastes of Virginia. and Maryland, and other States having slaves. The moment you leave the free States and enter the slave States, the effects of the institution become visible. Every step you take through the great regions of slaves, presents a desert, increasing with the increasing proportion of these wretched beings." This contrast, ages of experiment, the whole history of the world, and the philosophy of cause and effect, confirm; thus demonstrating, that slavery is a curse, blighting and destroying every true interest of a nation, and ought not to extend and establish itself anywhere among a free people, or over a free soil.

CHAPTER XXIV.

SLAVES brought to Ohio-Mr. Morris memorializes the Governor against it-Slaveholders in office in free States-Mr. Morris's views on it-A Judge refuses to license a colored Clergyman to perform the Marriage Rite-Mr. Morris obtains a writ to compel him to grant it-A memorial to the Legislature of Ohio, in 1844-Extracts from a LetterAppeal to Christians-Poem, descriptive of his course and principles. THE Constitution of Ohio, and of all the free States, secures personal freedom to every slave, voluntarily brought by his master within their jurisdiction. The noble truth, uttered by Cowper, the Christian poet of England, is the doctrine incorporated into their charters of freedom:

"Slaves can not breathe in England; if their lungs
Receive our air, that moment they are free;

They touch our country, and their shackles fall.
That's noble, and bespeaks a nation proud

And jealous of the blessing."

Ohio, in her Constitution, does not permit slavery, or the foot-prints of a slave, to pollute her soil. Notwithstanding this prohibition, and in defiance of the public sentiment and moral sense of the citizens of the free States, slaveholders, in their social visits, or on their way to a Southern market with their slaves, have brought them into free States, and during their transit or stay, have virtually converted free into slave territory.

The free States, also, not unfrequently, are represented in their State and National interests, by virtual slaveholders. Marriage, or inheritance, puts into their possession, or under their control, Southern plantations, well

stocked with slaves. Interest and sympathy are then transferred to the slave power, and thus Northern politicians become the most subservient and devoted friends of the slave power. A potent evil influence, from this source, has spread through the free States, and tended to vitiate the public sentiment of the North on the subject of slavery. In reference to these two subjects, connected with slavery, which involved the free States in indirect complicity with the system, Mr. Morris addressed a memorial to the Governor of Ohio, containing the following sentiments:

"The violation of our laws by slaveholders bringing, or sending their slaves into our State, is productive of more injury to, and creates more disgust and heartburnings among our citizens, than any other violation of the laws known among us. Ought we not then to be protected by Executive proclamation, as to what the law is, and encouraged to carry it into faithful execution? Ought not our people to be honored in securing liberty to every man upon whom our laws confer it, instead of the constant attempts to disgrace them, by heaping upon them opprobrious epithets, as "negro thieves," etc., to which the public press, if not the pulpit, sometimes basely descends.

"For myself I go for the law, the whole law, and nothing but the law, in which the liberty of my fellow-man is concerned; and as a citizen of the State I call upon its Executive officer to do the same. If we have no sympathy for the slave, no feeling for his sufferings, let us take care that a power, arising out of his condition, does not rule and govern us. To talk of security and peace in Ohio, while our laws are trampled under foot by the slavehunter, is vain and idle. Even the slave-trade is carried on through Ohio, with entire impunity; coffles of chained slaves have landed on our wharf, while numbers are almost daily within our jurisdiction, on steam-boats, on