of any description; and with the utmost expedition and safety; having every necessary apparatus for the purpose.
J. ACKERMAN.
220, Division-St., Sept. 22.”
This removal of houses reminds me of the removal of household furniture, which annually takes place on the first of May. By an established custom, houses are let from this day for the term of one year certain; and, as the inhabitants in general love variety, and seldom reside in the same house for two consecutive years, those who have to change, which appears to be nearly the whole city, must be all removing together. Hence, from the peep of day till twilight, may be seen carts which go at a rate of speed astonishingly rapid, laden with furniture of every kind, racing up and down the city, as if its inhabitants were flying from a pestilence, pursued by death with his broad scythe just ready to mow them into eternity.
I found the negroes much more numerous, and presenting a much better appearance than I ever expected; and I am happy to say, that although still retained in bondage in the Southern States, they are all now free in this and the five New England States, and have been so for upwards of fifteen years. They invariably excite a feeling of deep interest in the minds of all Europeans. But I beheld, with acute sensations of sorrow, their late task-masters regarding them with feelings of hatred mingled with contempt, and as a class far below the rest of the human species in point of moral rectitude and intellectual power. I was not prepared to find this in a nation who are taught to lisp, with their infantile breath, that monstrous falsehood—“All men are born free and equal.”
This maxim, the pole star of the republic, was first promulgated by Thomas Jefferson, whose writings are acknowledged by all Democrats as the standard of political authority. About the commencement of the present century this same Thomas Jefferson filled the office of President of the United States for the period of eight years; and his memory is still held in profound veneration by a large section of the Americans. Yet it is well known here, that this sublime character had, by his Quadroon slaves a vast number of children of both sexes; whom he retained on his plantation in a state of vassalage, and dying left them so!!
It is with no feelings of pleasure that I drag the crimes of this atrocious wretch before the public; but, I believe this fact is not known in England, and it may serve to give some idea of the charming things that are transacted in those regions of slavery, where both the framer and the violator of the law are found united in the person of the planter. Surely it may here be said, that licentiousness and tyranny have met together; democracy and slavery have kissed each other.
The existing slavery of these “free and independent” States, combined with the atrocious conduct of Jefferson, the progenitor of whole gangs of slaves, forms a beautiful comment on his favourite apopthegm—
“All men are born free and equal.”
An expression which declares precisely the same doctrine, occupies a prominent position in their national manifesto—the famous Declaration of Independence.