"Gentlemen wanted to drive out the black population, that they may obtain white negroes in their place. White negroes have this advantage over black negroes, they can be converted into voters; and the men who live upon the sweat of their brow, and pay them but a dependent and scanty subsistence, can, if able to keep ten thousand of them in employment, come up to the polls and change the destiny of the country.
"How improved will be our condition when we have such white negroes as perform the servile labors of Europe, of Old England, and he would add now of New England; when our body servants and our cart drivers and our street sweepers are white negroes instead of black. Where will be the independence, the proud spirit, and the chivalry of Kentuckians then?"
Had the gentleman looked across the river, he might have found an answer to his question, in the wealth, power, intelligence and happiness of Ohio.
In reading the foregoing extracts, it is amusing to observe how adroitly the slaveholders avoid all recognition of any other classes among them than masters and slaves. Who would suspect from their language, that they were themselves a small minority of the white inhabitants, and that their own "white negroes" could, if united and so disposed, outvote them at the polls? It is worthy of remark that in their denunciations of the populace, the rabble, those who work with their hands, they refer not to complexion, but to condition; not to slaves, but to the poor and laborious of their own color. It is these haughty aristocrats who find in Northern democrats "allies," who in Congress and out of it are zealous in obeying their mandates, and who may justly be termed their "white negroes."
Slavery, although considered by Mr. Calhoun "the most stable basis of free institutions in the world," has, as we shall presently show you, in fact, led to grosser outrages in the social compact, to more alarming violations of constitutional liberty, to more bold and reckless assaults upon "free institutions," than have ever been even attempted by the much-dreaded agrarianism of the North.
V. STATE OF RELIGION.
The deplorable ignorance and want of industry at the South, together with the disrepute in which honest industry is held, cannot but exercise, in connection with other causes, a most unhappy influence on the morals of the inhabitants. You have among you between two and three millions of slaves, who are kept by law in brutal ignorance, and who, with few exceptions, are virtually heathens. [8]
[ [8] "From long continued and close observation, we believe that their (the slaves') moral and religious condition is such that they may justly be considered the Heathen of this Christian country, and will bear comparison with heathen in any country in the world. The negroes are destitute of the Gospel, and ever will be under the present state of things."—Report published by the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia, Dec. 3, 1833.
You have also among you more than 200,000 free negroes, thus described by Mr. Clay:—"Contaminated themselves, they extend their vices to all around them." [9]
[ [9] Speech before the American Colonization Society.
If evil communications corrupt good manners, the intimate intercourse of the whites with these people must be depraving: nor can the exercise of despotic power by the masters, their wives and children be otherwise than unfavorable to the benevolent affections.