An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans

by Lydia Maria Child

If the Union cannot be preserved without crime, it is an eternal truth that nothing good can be preserved by crime. The immense territories of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida, are very likely to be formed into slave States; and every new vote on this side, places the free States more and more at the mercy of the South, and gives a renewed and apparently interminable lease to the duration of slavery.

The purchase or the conquest of the Texas, is a favorite scheme with Southerners, because it would occasion such an inexhaustible demand for slaves. A gentleman in the Virginia convention thought the acquisition of the Texas so certain, that he made calculations upon the increased value of negroes. We have reason to thank God that the jealousy of the Mexican government places a barrier in that direction.

The existence of slavery among us prevents the recognition of Haytian independence. That republic is fast increasing in wealth, intelligence and refinement.—Her commerce is valuable to us and might become much more so. But our Northern representatives have never even made an effort to have her independence acknowledged, because a colored ambassador would be so disagreeable to our prejudices.

Few are aware of the extent of sectional dislike in this country; and I would not speak of it, if I thought it possible to add to it. The late John Taylor, a man of great natural talent, wrote a book on the agriculture of Virginia, in which he acknowledges impoverishment, but attributes it all to the mismanagement of overseers. In this work, Mr. Taylor has embodied more of the genuine spirit, the ethics and politics, of planters, than any other man; excepting perhaps, John Randolph in his speeches. He treats merchants, capitalists, bankers, and all other people not planters, as so many robbers, who live by plundering the slave-owner, apparently forgetting by what plunder they themselves live.

Mr. Jefferson and other eminent men from the South, have occasionally betrayed the same strong prejudices; but they were more guarded, lest the democracy of the North should be undeceived, and their votes lost. Mr. Taylor's book is in high repute in the Southern States, and its sentiments widely echoed; but it is little known here.

A year or two since, I received a letter from a publisher who largely supplies the Southern market, in which he assured

me that no book from the North would sell at the South, unless the source from which it came, were carefully concealed! Yet New-England has always yielded to Southern policy in preference to uniting with the Middle States, with which she has, in most respects, a congeniality of interests and habits. It has been the constant policy of the slave States to prevent the free States from acting together.

Who does not see that the American people are walking over a subterranean fire, the flames of which are fed by slavery?

The South no doubt gave her influence to General Jackson, from the conviction that a slave-owner would support the slaveholding interest. The Proclamation against the nullifiers, which has given the President such sudden popularity at the North, has of course offended them. No person has a right to say that Proclamation is insincere. It will be extraordinary if a slave-owner does in reality depart from the uniform system of his brethren. In the President's last Message, it is maintained that the wealthy landholders, that is, the planters, are the best part of the population;—it admits that the laws for raising of revenue by imposts have been in their operation oppressive to the South;—it recommends a gradual withdrawing of protection from manufactures;—it advises that the public lands shall cease to be a source of revenue, as soon as practicable—that they be sold to settlers—and in a convenient time the disposal of the soil be surrendered to the States respectively in which it lies;—lastly, the Message tends to discourage future appropriations of public money for purposes of internal improvement.

Every one of these items is a concession to the slaveholding policy. If the public lands are taken from the nation, and given to the States in which the soil lies, who will get the largest share? That best part of the population called planters.