The Richmond, Va., Inquirer, The Muscogee, Ala., Herald, The New Orleans, La., Delta and the Charleston, S. C., Standard, are all quoted by an English writer, whose work appeared in print about 1855.[73] The three first as sustaining the above extraordinary claim; while the fourth called for a revival of the Slave Trade.
Even if correctly quoted the comments of these papers do not establish the prevailing sentiment in the South at that time; for the publication at Charleston and reception of Dr. John Bachman’s work on the “Unity of the Human Race” would to some extent constitute an opinion to the contrary.
But that the South was positively, unreservedly, and even aggressively committed to the institution of African Slavery is indisputable.
It had not been so always. The change began in 1833, when the Charleston Mercury declared—“The institution of slavery is not an evil but a benefit.” That paper had upon that occasion admitted that in the past the South had entertained a view to the contrary; but asserted in 1833, that even in Virginia and North Carolina:
“The great mass of the South sanction no such admission, that Southern Slavery is an evil to be deprecated.”[74]
And, as the appetite grows by what it feeds upon, in 1855, The Richmond Examiner was quoted as declaring:
“It is all a hallucination that we are ever going to get rid of African Slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so.... True philanthropy to the Negro begins at home; and if every Southern man would act as if the canopy of Heaven were inscribed with a covenant in letters of fire, that the Negro is here and here forever; is our property and ours forever; is never to be emancipated; is to be kept hard at work and in rigid subjection all his days; and is never to go to Africa, to Polynesia, or to Yankee land,—far worse than either,—they would accomplish more good for the race in five years than they boast the institution itself to have accomplished in two centuries.”[75]
Yet as extreme as the above is, it is quite probable that the extravagance and injustice of the declaration against slavery in the Southern States, had exasperated those supporting it to utterances as extravagant.
In the opening of the year 1850 a resolution of the Legislature of Vermont was introduced in Congress which recited:
“That slavery is a crime against humanity, and a sore evil in the body politic, that was excused by the framers of the Federal Constitution as a crime entailed upon the country by their predecessors, and tolerated solely as a thing of inexorable necessity.”[76]