THE END.
We have before given a table of the number of slaves in the United States in 1790. It was then 697,696. The following is a similar estimate for the year 1850, as determined by the seventh census:
| 1 | New Jersey | 222 |
| 2 | Delaware | 2,990 |
| 3 | Maryland | 90,368 |
| 4 | Virginia | 472,528 |
| 5 | North Carolina | 288,548 |
| 6 | South Carolina | 384,984 |
| 7 | Georgia | 386,682 |
| 8 | Florida | 39,309 |
| 9 | Alabama | 342,892 |
| 10 | Mississippi | 309,878 |
| 11 | Louisiana | 244,809 |
| 12 | Texas | 58,161 |
| 13 | Arkansas | 47,100 |
| 14 | Tennessee | 239,460 |
| 15 | Kentucky | 210,981 |
| 16 | Missouri | 87,422 |
| 17 | District of Columbia | 3,687 |
| 18 | Utah | 26 |
| Total | 3,204,347 |
Adding to this sum thirty per cent, a fair estimate of the increase for the last ten years, and we have in 1860, 3,965,651 slaves in the United States, or four millions in round numbers. There were in the United States 347,525 persons owning slaves. Of this number two owned 1,000 each; both resided in South Carolina. Nine only owned between 500 and 1,000, of whom two resided in Georgia, four in Louisiana, one in Mississippi. Fifty-six owned from 300 to 500, of whom one resided in Maryland, one in Virginia, three in North Carolina, one in Tennessee, one in Florida, four in Georgia, six in Louisiana, eight in Mississippi, twenty-nine in South Carolina, one hundred and eighty-seven owned from 200 to 300, of whom South Carolina had sixty-nine, Louisiana thirty-six, Georgia twenty-two, Mississippi eighteen, Alabama sixteen, North Carolina twelve, five other States fourteen, and four States none. Fourteen hundred and seventy-nine owned from 100 to 200. All the slaveholding States, except Florida and Missouri, are represented in this class, South Carolina having one-fourth of the whole; 29,733 persons owned from ten to twenty slaves each. South Carolina, from this statement, owns more slaves in proportion to her population than any other State in the South.
A few general considerations, and we conclude our narrative. After tracing the course of events recorded in the foregoing pages, the questions naturally arise—What has been the result? what have the abolitionists gained? The answers may be briefly summed up as follows:—
1. They have put an end to the benevolent schemes of emancipation which originated among the real philanthropists of the South, and were calculated, in a proper time and manner, beneficent to all concerned, to produce the desired result. In their wild and fanatical attempts they have counteracted the very object at which they have aimed. Instead of ameliorating the condition of the slaves, they have only aroused the distrust of the master, and led to restrictions which did not before exist. The truth is, the lot of the people of the South is not more implicated in that of the slaves than is the lot of the slaves in the people of the South. In their mutual relations, they must survive or perish together. In the language of another, “The worst foes of the black race are those who have intermeddled in their behalf. By nature, the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless: and no calamity can befal them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system. Indeed, the experiment has been tried of precipitating them upon a freedom which they know not how to enjoy; and the dismal results are before the world in statistics that may well excite astonishment. With the fairest portions of the earth in their possession, and with the advantage of a long discipline as the cultivators of the soil, their constitutional indolence has converted the most beautiful islands of the sea into howling wastes. It is not too much to say, that if the South should, at this moment, surrender every slave, the wisdom of the entire world, united in solemn council, could not solve the question of their disposal. Freedom would be their doom. Every Southern master knows this truth and feels its power.”
2. Touch the negro, and you touch cotton—the mainspring that keeps the machinery of the world in motion. In teaching slaves to entertain wild and dangerous notions of liberty, the abolitionists have thus jeopardized the commerce of the country and the manufacturing interests of the civilized world. They have likewise destroyed confidence. Northern institutions are no longer filled with the young men and women of the South, but find rivals springing up in every State south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Northern commerce can no longer depend upon the rich places of wealth it has hitherto found in Southern patronage. Northern men can no longer travel in the South without being regarded as objects of suspicion and confounded with the abolitionists of their section. In short, all the kind relations that have ever existed between the North and the South have been interrupted, and a barrier erected, which, socially, commercially and politically, has separated the heretofore united interests of the two sections, and which nothing but a revolution in public sentiment, a higher sense of the moral obligations due our neighbor, a religious training, which will graft upon our nature a truer conscience and inculcate a purer charity, and finally a recognition of abstract right and justice, can ever remove.
3. They have held out a Canadian Utopia, where they have taught the slaves in their ignorance to believe they could enjoy a life of ease and luxury, and having cut them off from a race of kind masters and separated them from comfortable homes, left the deluded beings incapable of self-support upon an uncongenial soil, to live in a state of bestiality and misery, and die cursing the abolitionists as the authors of their wretchedness.
4. They have led a portion of the people of the North, as well as of the South, to examine the question in all its aspects, and to plant themselves upon the broad principle that that form of government which recognizes the institution of slavery in the United States, is the best, the condition of the two races, white and black being considered, for the development, progress and happiness of each. In other words, to regard servitude as a blessing to the negro, and under proper and philanthropic restrictions, necessary to their preservation and the prosperity of the country.