"Molest the ancient, solitary reign"
of prejudice in their minds against the South, they either mope, or make a sad noise. With regard to others, are there any limits to their anger and denunciations? You may, without difficulty, imagine how this appears to the Southerner, who knows the truthfulness of the representations which excite this passionate resentment, and how much the character of the North for ordinary candor falls in his esteem, and how little disposed he is to heed their admonitions, and how absurd their demands upon his ecclesiastical bodies to suffer their remonstrances, appear, together with their subsequent withdrawal of fellowship for the reason publicly assigned; namely, that the South will not let them admonish her "in the Lord." Indeed, whatever may be true of slavery, the South looks on the great body of zealous anti-slavery people as being in as false and unnatural a state of excitement as the Massachusetts people were in the times of witchcraft. A great delusion is over the minds of many at the North, like one of our eastern sea-fogs. It always makes a Southerner merry, when listening, in New York or Boston, for example, to a lecture, if the speaker concludes a sentence with some allusion to "freedom," and the people clap and stamp. That the blood should tingle in our veins at so slight a cause, makes him think that we are certainly in need of something worthy of our great excitability, and that we are thankful for small favors in that way. He does not think less than we of liberty where an occasion makes that name and idea appropriate; but that the condition of his slaves should reconsecrate for us all the old battle-cries of freedom, seems to him pitiably weak. It shows him how incompetent we are to deal with the acknowledged evils of slavery; and there are those at the South who are stirred up by us to take extreme views of an opposite kind, which good people there very generally deplore.
A Southern lady here tells me that some time since, being on a visit at the North, she received through the post-office anonymous letters with extracts from newspapers containing little items of woe, declared to have been experienced at the South, with here and there delirious abuse of slave-holders and frenzied words about freedom. She could have matched every one of them, she said, with wife-murders at the North, during her visit. In dealing with people like the slaves, of course men of brutal passions, provoked by their stupidity and negligence, or exasperated by their crimes, and, in cases of ungovernable anger, venting their displeasure upon their negroes under slight or merely imaginary affronts, give occasion to tales of distress which are nowhere mourned over more deeply than at the South. These cases are the natural results of a superior and inferior class of society, standing in the relation, the one to the other, of proprietor and dependant, and such evils are not peculiar to this institution. Human nature is the same everywhere. The South is willing to have the abuses of irresponsible power among them compared with abuses, discomforts, disadvantages elsewhere. Grant that an owner may abuse his liberty; ownership leads to more of care and protection than of abuse and cruelty. The slaves are here; the question is not, What would be the best possible condition for these people under the sun, but, What is best for them, being on this soil. "Set them all free," is the answer of some. Half the ministers at the North every Sabbath pray for the slaves thus: "Break every yoke; let the oppressed go free." If this means, Give the slaves their liberty, this would be their most direful calamity; they would be chased away from every free state, in process of time, and the Dred Scott decision would be invoked, even in Massachusetts, by its present most bitter opposers, and in its most misrepresented forms, as a defence of the American white race against the blacks. "Set them free and hire them!" is the reply of others. This, among other effects, would make them a far more degraded people than they now are. Slavery keeps them identified with the whites; they are more respectable and respected by far, in this relation, than they can be, in the circumstances of the case, if they are detached from the whites. There is no expression which conveys a more absolute error than this, and we often meet with it: "He ceased to be a slave, and became a man." I read lately the report of a lecture at the North, by an eminent gentleman, of great moral worth, and highly respected. He said, "A man cannot be, voluntarily, a slave, without having his manhood crushed out of him." That might be true in our case; but having seen manhood forced into benighted natures here, and splendid specimens of man as the result, I was, by this remark, reminded again of the delusiveness which there is sometimes in the best of logic. You gave us a good specimen in your admirable illustration of no water in the moon. A comparison of the slaves with the free negroes of the North, and in Canada, and with the free colored population in some of the Slave States, will satisfy any impartial spectator that manhood is full as conspicuous in the slaves, as a body, as in the free negroes.
Here are two extracts from Northern papers, which, true or false, awaken compassion in every human bosom toward the free colored people. Indeed, allowing these statements, so unfavorable to them, to be mostly false, it reveals the antipathy of the white to the colored race when the blacks come to seek equality with the whites. Let these free blacks be mixed up in large proportions with society in England and Scotland, and if Canadians feel as they are here represented, we may be sure that the present tone of the British people with regard to American slavery and the blacks, would also be modified. But here are the extracts:—
"Getting Sick of Them.—The colored persons of Toronto, having had a meeting to denounce Colonel John Prince, a member of the Canadian Parliament, for speaking against them, he publishes a reply, in which he says,—
"'It has been my misfortune, and the misfortune of my family, to live among those blacks (and they have lived upon us) for twenty-four years. I have employed hundreds of them, and with the exception of one, named Richard Hunter, not one of them has done for us a week's honest labor. I have taken them into my service, fed and clothed them, year after year, on their arrival from the States, and in return have generally found them rogues and thieves, and a graceless, worthless, thriftless set of vagabonds. This is my very plain and simple description of the darkies as a body, and it would be indorsed by all the Western white men, with very few exceptions.'"
"Underground R.R. Return Trains.—The 'Cleveland Plaindealer' states that every steamboat arriving at that place brings back from Canada families of negroes, who have formerly fled to the Provinces from the States. They are principally from Canada West. They describe the life and condition of the blacks in Canada as miserable in the extreme. The West is, therefore, likely to have large accessions to its colored population. The Canada folks do not want them, and have shown a disposition in their Parliament, and otherwise, to discourage their coming to, or remaining in the Provinces. In some instances, the question of ejecting those now resident there, has been discussed. Our Western States will be likely to experience a similar attack of the black vomito, when they shall have become satisfied with this peculiar Southern luxury. In some localities the superabundant free negro population has already become a burden, while in others they are under severe restrictions, which amount almost to an exclusion from the limits of the state.
"Should this exodus from Canada continue to any great extent, it would throw such a burden upon those states which have adopted the most liberal policy towards the negro, that it would occasion a reaction in the public sentiment which would compel them to abandon their abolition doctrine and practice, for their own self-protection. We should then hear of fewer attempts to abduct slaves from the slave-holding states; and abolitionists would be content to allow slaves to remain under the care and protection of their masters. Even though at heart sympathizing with the oppressed and task-worn negro, and yearning towards him with all the love of the professed philanthropist, he would still be permitted to toil and bleed; for now that the route to Canada has been closed, there is no alternative but to take them to their own bosoms."
Compare with this the condition of the free blacks in South Carolina. The amount of property held by them is $1,600,000; their annual taxes, $27,000; and the free blacks own slaves to the amount of $300,000 in value.
The above statements teach us that any attempts to force the Southern slaves away from their present relation, are in violation of the laws of Providence concerning them. If they become free in a natural way, and can provide for themselves, or be provided for, it is well; otherwise, the South, and their present relation to the white race, are the bounds of their habitation fixed for them by an all-wise God, till his purpose concerning them as a race shall be made manifest. The people of the Free States ought to thank God that the South is willing to keep the colored people. Instead of inflaming our passions against the abstract wrongfulness of holding fellow-men in bondage, we should consider that theoretical justice to the slaves as a whole would be practical inhumanity. The destiny of the colored race here is a dark problem. But it is not for us to penetrate the future. When God is ready to finish his purposes with regard to their continuance with us, He will open a way for their liberation; in the mean time it is our duty to protect them from their own improvidence and from the neglect and degradation which they would suffer at the hands of the Free States. Instead of aiding slaves to escape, or rejoicing when we hear of runaways, I say we should feel grateful, on our own account, and for the slaves, that the South is willing to harbor them, and we ought to consider that the very best thing to be done for them is to encourage the South in treating them well, mitigating their trials and sorrows, and, in short, complying with the Apostle's doctrine and exhortations as to the duty of masters.