African Slavery in America

C. Ingersoll

This is a prooftext of Charles Jared Ingersolls African Slavery in America, published in 1856 by T.K. and P.G. Collins in Philadelphia. The text is currently being annotated and will be published in a revised electronic edition. Original spelling, punctuation and page citations have been retained; minor typographic errors have been corrected.

This electronic edition has been prepared for the Antislavery Literature Project, Arizona State University, a public education project working in cooperation with the English Server, Iowa State University. Digitalization has been supported by a grant from the Institute for Humanities Research, Arizona State University.

Proofing and editorial annotation by Joe Lockard. Digitalization and annotation research by April Brannon. All rights reserved by the Antislavery Literature Project. Permission for non-commercial educational use is granted.

PHILADELPHIA: T. K. AND P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS.
1856.

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AFRICAN SLAVERY IN AMERICA.

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Now that the Presidential election is over, and pursuant to its equally dubious and perilous, but fortunate conclusion, this is the time, Pennsylvania is the meridian, and an aged descendant from New England, withdrawn from party politics, is not an improper person to submit to the whole country of these United States their temperate but decided philosophy of vindication from foreign misrepresentation, and intestine disturbance concerning slavery; a task, insensibility to whose difficulties would be in-capacity for the patriotic undertaking. To explain satisfactorily the most crying and formidable of our national evils is beset and hindered by passionate contradictions. Within the last half century, the vast influence of England has undergone complete revulsion, from approval of much cultivated to aversion of much abused slavery, which aversion has been naturalized in parts of the United States with virulent intensity. The baneful fanaticism of political abolition, endemic in Great Britain, and widely spread throughout this country, has become an intractable distemper, discarding discussion, disregarding facts, ignoring history, however recent and instructive, and substituting shouts of clamorous vituperation, drowning argument and reason. While in fifteen sovereign States, nearly four millions of negroes, continually and rapidly increasing in number, are held in slavery by some eight millions of free people, passionately, with all the instincts of right of property, insisting on that right as inherited, legal, moral, profitable, indispensable, and constitutional, which neither can, must, or shall be questioned; at the same time this their asserted right of property is vehemently denied and disputed by other fourteen millions of fellow-countrymen, in sixteen other sovereign and nearly contiguous States, the whole thirty-one altogether confederated in constitutional union. British influence, with im-

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mense ponderosity, overpowering the established public policy and individual morality, not only of their former colonies, but of the whole world, denounces slavery as execrable iniquity, defiling the very food, if not the clothing it produces. Fuel to feed that execration is continually furnished by millions of not only English, but other European abolitionists, denouncing American slavery as the worst tyranny; many of whom also decry American democracy, identified with slavery, as the most turbulent, rapacious, and dangerous anarchy; and the licentious popular insubordination, imputed to the American combination of liberty with slavery, as the most lawless and formidable parody of government ever attempted to be imposed on mankind. Wherefore, explaining the traditional and vital reality of negro slavery as an accomplishment of supreme state necessity renders its vindication as a fact apparently its moral justification. Without inquiring whether it be evil, as most insist, or good, as some_. contend, unquestionably it is a vast, stupendous, and vital American reality. In the Middle States, the temperate zone of American republican continental union, holding together the slave-holding southwest and slave-hating northeast, there should and must be considerate and patriotic Americans enough, independent of all foreign influences, neither owning slaves, nor hating those who do, even if regretting slavery, willing to accept historical, political, and philosophical ascertainment that, whether slavery be evil or not, modern external abolition is a much greater evil. Vouched by irrefutable English and American authority, negro slavery in America may be so vindicated that no American need shrink from its communion. Its abrupt, forcible, or extrinsic removal would be a tremendous catastrophe. Dismembering the United States and destroying the American republic would tend not to abolish, but perpetuate slavery. Few in this meridian have any practical knowledge of much abused slavery. Its English denunciation, adopted by New England, is merely remote and theoretical philanthropy, national or sectional prejudice. Such of us as live in Pennsylvania, where for a long time there have been no slaves, can be moved by no natural impulse to defend their ownership. If descended from New England, the bias must be otherwise. But every lover of his country should desire to vindicate its institutions, of which this is one, from foreign detraction and its American adoption.

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Notwithstanding much sciolous speculation concerning slavery, and even questioning its authentic existence, yet by overruling Providence men have been slaves of masters in all ages and in every country, as attested by all history, sacred and profane. Villanage, much more odious bondage than African slavery in America, was an English tenure, before negro slavery in America became English law, in great favor. Mr. Hallam explains how common it was in the ninth and tenth centuries for the English to export slaves to be sold in Ireland. But no ancient or European slavery, Greek or Roman bondage, villanage or serfdom, no slavery in any other form, had the motive or justification of African slaves, both the trade and tenure, transported from mere barbarism, to cultivate in congenial climates, modern luxuries become universal necessaries of life. Negro laborers cultivating rice, sugar, coffee, and cotton, in tropical regions, where neither white labor nor free can be relied upon, is a form of servile labor with indigenous and political recommendations peculiar to this country. In the beginning of this century, the slave trade in the opinion of a large majority of Englishmen, most competent to judge, was providential transition from African barbarism to civilized emancipation; and should the anticipations of Liberia be realized, or negro national independent community be otherwise effected, no greater result of overruling Providence will have ever taken place. Even as it is under what may be termed British persecution by sword and fire of both the trade and the tenure of slavery, there is said to be manifest improvement among the slaves of this country, from one generation to another. Meantime, under all the disadvantages of enraged abolition, inestimable political advantages by means of slavery and its products advance continental prosperity, maintain the grandeur of confederated United States, cheaply vouchsafe almost permanent peace, and develop a benign experiment of tranquil republican government. The mother country of these United States unanimously and sedulously cultivated both the trade and the tenure of African slaves in America. By legislation, and treaties, jurisprudence, social encouragement, every how, from the first colonial settlement of this now extensive empire, the transportation of Africans to be male slaves in all its parts, was encouraged and legalized by metropolitan superintendence. The year after British liberty,

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which began but one century, 1688, before American, 1775, both by revolutions, the attorney and solicitor-general published professional opinions, equivalent to laws, that negroes were merchandise within the meaning of the navigation act. Acts of Parliament in 1733 and 1758, countenanced both the trade and the tenure in them as slaves. In 1729 the attorney and solicitor-general Yorke and Talbot, both afterwards chancellors, and among England's greatest lawyers, gave opinions assuring the colonists who had numerous negro slaves in England, that property in them was as valid and safe there as in America or the West Indies. The Assiento contract is familiar history. This attorney-general Yorke, and solicitor-general Talbot, great men, as Lord Stowell said Lord Mansfield admitted, great men of that age or of any other age, said Lord Stowell on the bench, those great lawyers assured the London merchants that they were perfectly secure in their legal tenure of slaves. "They both pledged themselves to the merchants of London," said Lord Stowell, "to save them harmless from all inconvenience on such a subject; which pledge was afterwards fully confirmed by a similar judgment pronounced in 1749, by Sir Philip Yorke, then become Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, sitting in the Court of Chancery."

"This judgment," adds Lord Stowell, "so pronounced in full confidence, and without a doubt, upon a practice which had endured universally in the colonies, and (as appears by those opinions) in Great Britain, was in not more than twenty-two years afterwards, reversed by Lord Mansfield. The personal traffic in slaves resident in England had been as public, and as authorized in London as in any of our West India Islands. They were sold on the Exchange, and other places of public resort, by parties themselves resident in London, and with as little reserve as they would have been in any of our West India possessions. Such a state of things continued without impeachment, from a very early period up to nearly the end of the last century." But in 1772, three years before the American revolution, the English Chief Justice Mansfield, unexpectedly gave the negro slave Somerset the benefit of habeas corpus act, to prevent his master sending him back in fetters to Jamaica, to be sold as a slave. It is difficult from another eminent English judge, Lord Stowell's, sarcastic dissection of what he termed Lord Mansfield's

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speech on the bench, to ascertain its judicial result: nothing more suspension of slavery in England, Lord Stowell says. And as to the air of England being too pure for slaves to breathe,

how did the villains manage to respire, his lordship contemptuously asks, during the several centuries of their slavery? By what Lord Mansfield faintly articulated as legal policy, after

much hesitation and great doubt, disregarding, as he said, all the precedents, and looking only to what he called municipal policy of law, he decreed, without, as far as appears, the concurrence of

the other judges, that the negro should not be sent manacled to Jamaica. Still, he said a contract for the sale of a slave might be enforced in an English court of justice, and sales of slaves in open market in London were as legal as sales of cattle in Smithfield Market. Blackstone, who is said to have declined while at the bar, to give an opinion against slavery, vaunting in a subsequent edition of his commentaries (citing a prior case which does not sustain the vaunt), that as soon as a slave lands in England he becomes free, dispels the bubble by adding that the masters right to the slaves service may possibly continue.

All nations, however enslaved, boast their freedom. In Louis the Fourteenth's age, when every Frenchman might be imprisoned for life, as his brother was understood to be, by the king's order, and kept in an iron mask till he died, an ordinance forbade negro slavery. Lord Mansfield ruled the press gang to be common law in England, without which even Lord Chatham declared that it is impossible to equip a fleet in time. Yet long after Mansfield's flourish in Somerset's case, it was announced as common law by an American judge. Spurning the federal constitution, whichshould have been his supreme law, that disloyal magistrate, intoxicated with more than flagrant abolition, extrajudicially blurted that outside the compact the principle sprung fresh and perfect and beautiful from the mind of Lord Mansfield; not only so, but, like Minerva from Jove, it worked the miracle of endowing slaves with sanctity of reason, an exploit of this judge's notion of common law which seems to have bereft him of common sense. In 1772, by revolution of legal policy, an English judge broached what, in 1827, another eminent English judge almost contemptuously sentenced as contrary to common law, international law, and the rights of property. Still, such might be legal policy where no African slaves were or could be. But where

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they abounded, and were legalized by all the codes and the comity of many confederate sovereignties, an American judge, by much more egregious judicial legislation, interpolated extrajudicially his crude notion of legal policy as American common law. Common law, never mentioned by Mansfield, must be venerable in order to be valid, recondite and imperceptible in permeation of obvious justice, growing like the oak, not forced in political hot-bed to rotten ripeness, or by sickly sentimentality watered to maturity. The judiciary is bound to maintain property in slaves like all other, till legislative enactment abolishes or reforms it. To pronounce abolition common American law, because a judge pronounced it municipal law in England, was not mere judicial but licentious usurpation; such legislation as passionate judges sometimes enact.

Lord Mansfield, a leading politician, was remarkable for many strokes of judicial policy, which it would have been more becoming to leave to act of Parliament, instead of judicial usurpation. American state judges cannot ape a worse political example. English law, legislation, and public opinion concerning slavery, are exhibited with much ability by Lord Stowell in his dissection of Lord Mansfield's rhetorical declaration of independence of them all, by sudden revulsion which from Old England travelled to New, to mislead the latter after the former into the deplorable palinodes of modern abolition. Slavery planted and cultivated by England throughout the United States, trade, tenure, and all, was as general a favorite in both countries as abolition of it has become. Till the latter end of the last century it was more firmly seated in English regard than the reigning royal family. Soon after Mansfield's judicial stroke of state, when it was universal, and by any abrupt action indestructible throughout the American colonies, their independence united democracy with slavery, both together and equally indispensable to American republican sovereignty. English enemies much more of democracy than slavery, apostatized from tolerance to abuse and increasing dislike of the latter; which ethical revolution revealed slavery to be not only impolitic, but iniquitous. Legal legerdemain converted one slave into a sort of local temporary freeman. Raw and harsh climate rendered numerous slaves as impossible as lions, elephants or mosquitoes. Wherefore it was as good legal policy to free a negro as to impress a seaman. On more zealous examination of the Bible,

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English humanitarians discovered that slavery is forbid where it abounds in every page. Soon they came to insist, contrary to all the law, policy, and property they had established in America, that not a solitary one or few, but near a million, fast increasing to three or four millions of slaves, must be turned loose there, to plunge into licentious and pernicious idleness, mischief, and crime. In England nothing could be easier than such philanthropy,

whether legal or not. In America it was as impossible as to root out the virgin forests at one blow. But English climate abolishes all odoriferous as well as odious distinction between black and white, and every Briton, especially if liberal or radical, cannot understand why masters declaring their independence do not embrace their slaves.

Wherefore Paine, whose opportune pamphlet on politics was felicitous as his subsequent infidel tract was abominable, was the first mandatory of European abolitionists, to physic this country with foreign poison, curative perhaps in judicious doses, but fata1 otherwise. The first proceeding in the single branched Legislature of Pennsylvania, after he was chosen clerk in November 1779, was a motion for the act of March, 1780, which was the first attempt by legislation to abolish slavery, then an institution familiar throughout the United States.

One of the many perversions boiling of late from the Boston caldron of scalding abolition, is that Massachusetts was never or not then a slave State. According to authenticated exposition of that subject in the Massachusetts judicial courts, negro slavery was a cruel and costly luxury there, long after the United States Declaration of Independence; and long after declarations of independence by the slave-holding States of North Carolina and Virginia, claimed by them to have preceded the United States declaration in Pennsylvania. The harsh climate of the old Bay reduced the frost-bitten and half-perished negroes there, to mere pauperism, only fit for the almshouse, and without masters burdens on the township poor taxes. A miserable cripple of a negro slave, named London, was so dear a help that by judicial state, he was sold no less than eleven times in ten years, in Massachusetts, so that Lord Mansfield's convenient doctrine of legal policy was dictated by cold weather to Massachusetts justice, to get rid of negro incumbrances, much worse than useless as property. But Virginia and North Carolina, having, as the slave-holding

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States always have done, in the leading annunciation of free principles, adopted and published written constitutions in 1776, with bills of rights, and the other cardinal safeguards of free government; six years afterwards Massachusetts followed their example, and copied their bill of rights, adopting from that of Virginia the innocent preface that all men are free and equal. Seizing on that phrase, the judiciary of Massachusetts construed it to embrace perishing negro slaves, when not only Virginia never dreamt of such an interpretation, but the highest judicial tribunal of Pennsylvania, after solemn argument by the ablest lawyers, and on great deliberation, likewise resolved that negro slaves are not within the clause.

Massachusetts adroitly made a virtue of necessity, with no regard whatever to either liberty or humanity, and constructively consigned to the almshouses, the few cripples adjudged equal in freedom to healthy freemen; as Franklin in Pennsylvania parted with his negro slaves, because he found them unprofitable property to hold.

While legal policy constructively freed slaves in England and Massachusetts, a solemn and excellent act of legislation for that purpose, duly introduced abolition in Pennsylvania, disturbing no vested right of property in slaves, but on the contrary, protecting it from injury by the most conservative provisions. The act of 1780 for the gradual abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania, is a monument of what all abolition ought to be, and was till marplots put an end to it. No living slave was liberated by that act, nor the children of slaves, till twenty eight-years after their birth; by which time, 1808, climate and economy would by spontaneous liberation have rendered legislation superfluous. Abolition by that act of Assembly was to begin when slave trade was stopped by the subsequent federal constitution, in 1808.

A most signal merit of the Pennsylvania act was its patriotic nationality, its sacred regard for the United States, then only confederated. Twenty-three members of the assembly journalized by strong protest their insuperable aversion to any abolition that might, by any resilient possibility, prove detrimental to their slave-holding countrymen of the Southern States, or excite the negroes themselves anywhere to undue hopes of equality with white freemen. The last and most formidable blow of British invasion was then uplifted and about to fall on the Carolinas and

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Georgia. Bound to them by no more than a loose confederation, with not one word of slavery in it, the faithful representatives of Pennsylvania, nevertheless, without objection to prospective and conservative abolition, yet strenuously protested against the slightest risk of that continental specialty, which, uniting slavery with liberty, was the bulwark by union of American independence. Although the abolition act of 1780 expressly avouched the State comity by which fugitive slaves were subjected to extradition, and expressly negatived the legal policy of England and of Massachusetts, construing their judicial emancipation; nevertheless a large minority deprecated what might possibly injure the Union. A Pennsylvania legislative resolution of 1819 is erroneously suppose to harmonize with the abolition act of 1780; than which mistake nothing can be further from true history. When the reception of Missouri by the United States was made the first occasion for preventing the diffusion of slavery, Jefferson, Madison and Clay, earnest and among the only practical abolitionists, deprecated that disturbance of the Union. But naturalized Americans, not distinguishing between white and black, and insisting on freedom for both alike, like Paine, O'Connell and others, insensible to the American specialty of composite republicanism, postpone the Union and its vast development to a European theoretic sentimentality, there at least practicable, but here incompatible with our institutions. A resolution, therefore, presented to the legislature by a naturalized Irishman, Mr. William J. Duane, and seconded by a naturalized Englishman, Mr. Thackara, assumed, first the English dogma, that slavery being odious pollution, and stain, and cruelty, &c., of all of which those respectable gentlemen had no practical knowledge, nor any other than English equally ignorant assumption of it all, thereupon assumed further the constitutional right and policy of prohibiting its diffusion from one part of the United States to another. On that doublet of assumed postulates, an eloquent preamble and resolutions being constructed, calling on Pennsylvania members of Congress to vote against the admission of any territory in which slavery is not prohibited, one of those currents of legislative unanimity on certain subjects familiar to all members of such assemblies, unanimously voted for universal freedom. The abolition act of 1780 had done no

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such thing. Its emotions were those of American not European liberty. As Hamlet shouts on Ophelia's grave

Forty thousand Britons [or other foreigners]

Cannot, with all their quantity of love,

Make up our sum;

the sum of those born on American soil, who, if slavery be one of its infirmities, sympathize with it like a fond child in a parent's weakness. When Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton united to break Franklin's first treaty, which greatly succoured, if it did not secure independence, resolving on its sacrifice by a proclamation of neutrality, they struck for their country, right or wrong. Their wise and lofty patriotism, afterwards put into a war toast, attributed to Decatur was supreme loyalty, which even if slavery be a necessary evil, upholds the country with it as in war, against foreign aggressive interference with a national institution. It is utter mistake to consider the Pennsylvania resolutions of 1819, consonant with the abolition act of 1780. Then the direst jeopardy of all the United States called nationality to predominate and save struggling independence from imminent subjugation. Certainly not one of the patriotic minority, probably few if any of the majority of 1780 would have voted for the resolutions of 1819, the capitulation of somnolent love of repose in a period of profound public quiet, when foreign dictation of intemperate abolition prevailed over patriotism, and an eloquent shout for freedom, black or white, overruling union was really irresistible.

Abolition was inaugurated by law enacted by slave-holders generously careful of the vested rights of other and more interested slave-holders. Subsequent abolition by propagand from remote old English and distant New England sentimentalists having no slaves, no climate or products for their employment, no privity with or knowledge of their operations or situation, is mere spurious philanthropy, as futile and preposterous as any other ignorant, national, sectional or local theoretical prejudice, or fanatical antipathy; the same as European or American repugnance to polygamy or the Koran in Turkey, to infanticide, fetichism, or casteism in China or India. British invasion of the Southern States closing with independence achieved by the catastrophe at Yorktown, Cornwallis's sur-

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render left nothing to do but its acknowledgment, which soon followed at Paris. The treaty of that Congress is well known. But the grandeur of the mere event has overshadowed the magnificent frontispiece by which it illustrates and sanctifies American composite sovereignty, constituted of liberty and slavery. The three greatest powers of the world, France, Great Britain and Spain, met the United States in Congress at Paris, the metropolis of Europe. The three American ministers, all northern men, from Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York, no southern slave-holder among them; two of them, President Adams and Chief Justice Jay, great lawyers, the third the reigning monarch of practical and common sense and popular mother wit, decided with concurrence of England, France and Spain, as the law of Christendom, that slavery is an American national institution. While publicists and legists give out that it is too odious and unnatural to originate but by the positive enactment of local law, those great expounders of jurisprudence and teachers of philosophy, by their work of supreme, historical and conclusive authority, transcending technical treatises, Mansfield's speech, Blackstone's boast, and Massachusetts constructive judgments, lay down the highest law by a cardinal treaty that American negro slaves were surrendered as property (such are the words) not to individual owners or separate States, but to the thirteen United States as a nation. Old Franklin, in his pride of triumph, wearing the same suit in which he underwent Wedderburne's brutal onslaught in the British privy council; John Adams in his sturdy uncompromising patriotism, and John Jay in his conscientious self-possession; these dictators of American independence would not take it without as full and explicit recognition of American slavery as American liberty. The slave property was surrendered not to any man or any State, but to the said United States, naming the old thirteen, with whom peace was declared in the name of the holy and and undivided Trinity. Virginia and Massachusetts got nothing as such. The surrender was to the nation of which they were parts. The negroes came with the lands and houses, as national property to a nation of forefathers, some of whose descendants now in pulpits, on forums, in senates, and courts of justice, reversing the sacrament of American sovereign independence, contend that whereas American liberty is national, yet American slavery is sectional, with none but local odious origin,

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if any legal origin at all. Such is the revolution of sentimental abolition, which, since the beginning of this century, denies all the laws and all the recognitions of preceding ages. In this cursory historical and chronological refutation of English and new English abolition, a few years later comes the federal constitution, with negro slavery in its marrow, bones, and all: representation the spine, and direct taxation the blood of a body politic, which we are told these vital organs do not generalize; after a mere formal article of basis, put forward in the very second. The extraditionary clause concerning fugitive slaves, now so furiously denounced and bloodily rebelled against, was added unanimously, as mere complement, without a single word on the subject in convention, as not only the indispensable handmaid of the rest, but considerably softened from the same provision enacted by the Pennsylvania abolition act, and enforced without any written law by common State comity. An Irish gentleman, delegate from South Carolina, but denizen of Pennsylvania, where he long lived and is buried, Major Butler, moved it: and the Pennsylvania delegation were much gratified to see their own State provision thus nationalized. Of many nativities, they represented all Great Britain and North America: an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotchman, a New Yorker, two New England men, with only two Pennsylvania born, one of Quaker family, but altogether gratified in the central position of this State to find northern commerce and southern negro property so easily and harmoniously joined in that union of slavery with democracy, inconceivable and formidable, wherefore hateful in Europe, but the slavery not more than the democracy, or more vituperated. Though the generous donation by Virginia of the Northwestern Territory, simultaneous with the Constitution, interdicted slavery where excluded by climate, yet the extraditionary precaution against fugitive slaves was inserted by Nathan Dane, of Massachusetts, after being omitted in Jefferson's draft of the act of Congress; the whole ordinance declared by Madison, though proceeding from the best intention, with no shadow of authority. Soon after followed those valuable corporations, the early abolition societies, with Franklin, moribund and incapable of action, head of the one, and Jay of the other. Just men, as they both were, lovers of law and order and the Union, they would have condemned as strongly the robbery or enticement of a slave from

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his master, as they would any other malefaction. A member of the abolition society, especially of the Society of Friends, heading a gang of infuriated negroes, like Italian highwaymen, in broad daylight, on the highway to rob a gentleman of his slaves as he passed peaceably along, would have shocked such abolitionists as Franklin and Jay. To have pleaded the principles of abolition societies for such Lynch law, they would have pronounced monstrous perversion. Consisting of the most respectable individuals, foreign as well as American, of the Southern as of the Northern States, those societies were chartered expressly for the improvement of the negro race not to steal, secrete, or madden negroes by homicidal hatred put in their hearts, deadly weapons in their hands, or even crotchets in their heads against white fellow countrymen, nearly all always disposed to treat the negroes with all the kindness compatible with incongruity of race and peculiarity of position; to treat them much more kindly than Jews are treated in many of the most refined countries of Europe, than Irish by English, Italians by Austrians, Poles by Russians, or Scotch peasants by duchesses, whose hovels and food till their cruel expulsion from the hard homes they delighted in to make sheep pastures whose hovels and food were less comfortable or wholesome than those of negroes' dogs. In some called free States, the difficulty is not slavery, but skin. While free negroes are excluded as nuisances from several of these States, they are not only allowed in others, but allowed nearly all but civic and social rights, to which they cannot be received, while nearly all whites recoil with horror from their cohabitation. For a white woman to marry a black man excludes her from society. For a white man to marry a black woman is a crime against nature, like sodomy or incest. Nor can any humane or sensible person of either sex visit one of the suburbs of Philadelphia, without regretting that many free negroes there are not slaves. Disgusting filth, sloth, habitual vices, frequent crimes, if generated by English theorists suborning theoretical Americans, all far from and ignorant of the domestic slavery they strive to break up, are deplorable effects of pernicious infatuation, more so to black slaves than white free men. For such outcasts masters would be invaluable guardians, and freedom is great misfortune. Perfectly protected by equal laws in person and property, there is nothing in the non-slaveholding States to prevent negroes be-

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coming as rich and influential as the Rothschilds in Germany and England. But while mere abolition is most commonly the road to ruin, encouraging fugitive slaves or other negroes to ferocious and sanguinary resistance of their fate is provoking their destruction. Before these saturnalia their condition was much more respectable than now. Wealthy and well considered people of color were common. Deeply rooted in the American soil by a mother country, transferred by her to the United States on their coming to independent sovereignty, incorporated by them with their federal constitutions but with philanthropic plans for its reform or abolition if an evil negro slavery, just like the various soils and climates of the country, part of the American inheritance from England, was recognized with unanimous patriotism and exulting nationality as one of the institutions of a now republic destined to develop an experiment of representative democracy by greater liberty than was ever ventured or even conceived before. Kentucky and Tennessee, slave territories, ceded to the Union, were received into it by acts of Congress approved by President Washington, with express provision that Congress should make no regulation even tending to emancipate slaves. The act of 1793 for enforcing the constitutional clause concerning fugitives, passed by Congress without hesitation, the States of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Florida; in short, without overloading this statement of American succession to English slavery beyond all necessity of argument, with historical attestations of the highest authority for the tranquil contentment of all the people of all the States, with the indispensable and inevitable combination of black slavery with white liberty, it may be said that the American republic went on its way rejoicing in both. Whether it was right or wrong was no more questionable than whether the climate was pleasant or the soil fruitful. There slavery was; and though enthusiastic abolitionists like Jefferson flattered themselves that slavery might be abolished or reformed, yet no distant, ignorant, or mere sentimentalists undertook precipitately to spoil benevolence.

As the eighteenth century closed with Jefferson's succession to the presidency, human foresight could not anticipate, nor the most romantic imagination conceive, the revulsion by which, in the first quarter of the nineteenth, England was to disturb the four corners of the globe with sudden revolution in ethics. Slave

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trade and tenure were in full acceptance. Climate and economy were inculcating the superior cheapness of white labor in temperate regions.

Still, when I was at Princeton College in 1796, 7, and 8, Jersey farms were tilled by negro slaves; and when I was at Liverpool, in 1802, I saw the slave-ships in that port, large, roomy, well-ventilated, fine vessels, fitted for the suitable accommodation of negro passengers, as packets and ocean steamers now are for others, and in comparatively as much preference. But referring to English abolition, just as modern abolitionists do to American slavery, that is, without practical or any other knowledge of it than reading affords, and aware that slavery, though always in legal existence and allowance, was nevertheless an equivocal state of property, which many publicists questioned, it was natural that, in the course of human events, abolition of slavery should occur to freemen in England with colonial slaves, as it had before been recognized by kings in France, republicans in Holland, and judges in Scotland, while torture was applied there to extort confessions from prisoners. All these authorities were cited in Somerset's case, and England abounded in well disposed visionaries, together with radical reformers. Many benevolent men are abolitionists. Most of our southern slave-holders, were so, with Jefferson at their head, and Washington and Madison well inclined. Abolition of war has long been attempted. Franklin, Jefferson, Lords Aberdeen and Ashburton were of that class of abolitionists. Abolition of taxation, or certain kinds of it: abolition of inebriety and other vices; abolition of certain kinds of government; numbers of mankind are abolitionists. And those who undertook to abolish slavery, were induced to it in England by there being no slaves there, but only in distant colonies, which Parliament might rule as it would, by the alleged barbarities of English colonial slave-holders, and by that pragmaticalness which is part of the insular nature of a great nation, more so inclined, as their own historian Clarendon long ago deplored, than any other people. Wilberforce, the Methodists, and other sincere philanthropists, who began the attempt by holding a balance of party power, subdued the rival leaders, Fox and Pitt, into support of abolition. Still they were, like Franklin and Jefferson, rational, temperate, and prospective in their scheme for gradual abolition. Seizing,

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nevertheless, on the helpless colony of distant Jamaica, omnipotent Parliament could experiment there as physicians do, kill or cure, with poisons tried on dogs and cats. That fine colony might expostulate, but must submit. Nearly all the sober good sense of Great Britain was against abolition, though no one supposed it would prove so ruinous as it did; and the English treatment of negro slaves was so much severer than the American, as to furnish the abolitionists with a powerful argument by the cruelties of the tenure requiring the trade, to replenish victims. Yet the real, the conservative abolitionists, before they were supplanted, and their cause ruined by wild zealots, had the stone of Sisyphus to roll up, year after year, from 1785, when the first petition was faintly presented from an obscure place to Parliament, for more than fifty years, till 1834, their stone was tumbled down upon them, and the prospect of rational, forbearing, conservative abolition was extremely unpromising. Buxton's resolutions in the Commons, for prompt though not precipitate abolition, in 1833, were superseded by Canning's ministerial amendment for further postponement, inquiry, and ascertainment, until at last, yielding to what Lord Derby said must be submitted to as public sentiment, in one of those surging currents of legislation which occasionally overflow any assembly, but gilding surrender with enormous atonement by a hundred millions of dollars, Parliament enacted the absurd futilities of turning the Jamaica negroes into apprentices and soldiers for several years, to educate and prepare them, as Franklin advised, for emancipation. On the first day of August, 1834, what was acclaimed as the African Magna Charta, became a British law; condemned by much of the good sense of England; and King William the Fourth, who put his royal signature to that infatuation, told the American minister, with a sneer at such cruel stupidity of reform, that as a peer he had always voted against abolition. Just then, with Wilberforce's death, a new race of rabid abolitionists arose to run their career of riot, revelling in the ruin of the most productive British American colony, propagating and crusading against slavery all over the world, with the immense maritime potentiality of Great Britain. The Irish agitator O'Connel, like the infidel Tom Paine, a violent abolitionist, soon after the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, at a public meeting in Manchester, stigmatized the United States for sending a Virginia

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slave-breeder as their minister to England, declaring that any Briton would pollute his palm by shaking hands with an American. About that epoch Great Britain revolutionized her whole ethical system. British abolition, once if not rational, at all events a temperate and cautious essay, with the parliamentary ruin of Jamaica, broke out in reckless rage. Roman extermination of the first Christians, the Christian crusades, the blood-thirsty Inquisition, and other outbursts of national madness, which history depicts but cannot account for, were not more fierce, violent, or foolish than British abolition became, first of the trade , then the tenure of slaves. The American transition from colonial to independent condition was by no means so total a revolution of sentiment. Lord Stowell, in his dissection of Lord Mansfield's speech, cauterizes this British apostasy with classical severity like the Romans after Pompey's overthrow, the English people, he says, citing a fine Latin illustration, became quite another people. All mankind were to be compelled to change as England did. By treaties, laws, fleets, force, largesses, and dictatorial importunity, the cotton, coffee, sugar, and rice-growing American countries were to renounce their livelihood. At the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, Castlereagh got the slave trade denounced: Judge Story, in one of his extravagant adjudications, decreeing that to be the law of nations, which enormous contradiction of all history Chief Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court of course overruled. That incredible exaggeration or distortion by an American judge of English abolition occurred while he was in constant correspondence with Lord Stowell, who sent him his decree against it in the case of the slave Grace, which Judge Story wrote to Lord Stowell he entirely concurred in. A very learned and patriotic magistrate while at Washington, Judge Story could hardly help some sympathetic emotions with the abolitionists when at Cambridge, so near their Boston head-quarters. At the Congress of Ghent, sitting simultaneously with that of Vienna, towards the close of the negotiation the American ministers proposed an article stipulating that Indians with their horrible hostilities should not be engaged by either party. That excellent enforcement of the wisest crying humanity was rejected by the British ministers, without a, word, who in its stead substituted the concluding clause in the treaty of Ghent, that the United States.

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should not only suppress, but join Great Britain in suppressing the slave-trade. As Great Britain had for more than a century rejected the many entreaties of the United States for that purpose, putting their propagand apostasy on them by treaty was almost insulting, and certainly strange imposition. Some years later, after they bad been compelled by umpirage of the Emperor of Russia, to pay for negro slaves stolen from the United States by their officers during the war of 1812, the Ashburton Washington treaty superadded that the United States should keep a squadron at an expense of near a million a year on the unhealthy coast of Africa, with the British squadron there; waiving moreover long cherished, bravely and hardly maintained American resistance to what Britain enforced as the right, but Americans repel as wrong, of sea search, since abandoned by England. Mr. Calhoun moved, and the Senate voted unanimously, resolutions against the British violation of all sea law and national comity in the case of some American slaves on board a vessel called the Creole. After easily cajoling Secretary Webster to overlook that insulting wrong (as since acknowledged in London by umpirage under the last treaty, which makes compensation for that latrocinious outrage), that amiable old gentleman Lord Ashburton, almost an American denizen, who might have respected American institutions, even though deemed regrettable, could not take leave without letting fly a Parthian arrow-it, slavery at his farewell dinner in New York. Fox, the British minister here when Lord Ashburton came on his special embassy, interposed with extremely impertinent admonition in the affair of the Spanish slaves on board the Spanish vessel the Amistad, in our waters the sound washing the shores of Connecticut. And this year (1856) it appears by publication in the Brazil newspapers, the British minister at Rio Janeiro has, with most offensive insolence, lectured that government against slavery. Brazil, Spain, Portugal, nations whom Great Britain could overawe, have been bullied or bribed into capitulations of the slaves found indispensable for their sugar and coffee plantations. With overwhelming maritime power, the thirty millions of mighty islanders who sent round the world a squadron of steam vessels, and subdued three hundred millions of Chinese into English license to intoxicate them with opium, duty free, having cowed Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, persuaded France to co-operate in the English universal

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propaganda against negro slavery everywhere, and that slavery alone anywhere. At length by clandestine machinations in Texas and Mexico, English abolition ran foul of a nation which had twice worsted them, once for free taxation, a second time for free trade, and might be provoked to try it a third time, even for negro slavery.

On another occasion I may endeavor to make known the curious history of the Texas controversy and Mexican war caused by European, English, and French combined, intermeddling with American negro slavery, and the cotton supremacy. Suborned by old England to disloyal extremities, then (1844) as in 1812, allowing their passions and prejudices to get the better of their interest and reason, the same portion of New England, now rabid with abortive abolition, was in 1844 as in 1812, by the slave holding and central States constrained to submit to results prosperous for their interest in commerce and manufactures, mortifying their disappointed passions. This cursory tract would not hold a complete narrative of abolition, annexation, foreign intrigue, intestine commotion, and after all, as in the war of 1812, glorious consummation. It was necessary to be in Washington in position near enough to scan close at hand the contrivances which from London, Paris, Boston, Galveston, and the city of Mexico, were employed to frustrate spontaneous annexation of kindred peoples, and compel both of them to abdicate the ownership of negro slaves inherited by French co-operation from English ancestors, together with their brave spirit of lucrative independence love of property, our Anglo-Saxon twin sister of the love of liberty. In 1814-15, a rough slave-holder triumphed at the head of a small force of volunteer slave-holders, not an abolitionist among them, but their entrenchments constructed and wants supplied by negro slaves, and some of their best troops free negroes. As Chateaubriand styled all France a soldier, so Kentucky and Tennessee, then border slave States, were one and all soldiers, volunteering to rush in mass a thousand miles to fight the vanquishers of dethroned Napoleon, whose contumelious and official nickname for border ruffian was Kentuckian, by which they stigmatized the slouching, shabby, gasconading, gigantic, high-spirited gunmen, as Jackson termed the gallant slave-holders of that region and conjuncture, who, snatching the Union from dismemberment, saved Massachusetts from the hostile occupation it was passively undergoing. Like that heroic fugleman of the west,

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many of his rough and hardy followers lived in log huts, fed out of iron spoons, had no fine furniture or clothes, no drawing rooms, water-closets, privies on their half-cleared premises, if even pocket handkerchiefs for some of their secretions. Their wives and daughters often garrisoned block-houses. Their mothers had handled rifles more expertly than modern abolition clergymen.

In tending school or shop, those grotesque and uncouth pioneers, corn-fed and tobacco-scented, indefatigably rolling the vast tide of prodigious settlements from the Atlantic to the Pacific, were excelled and flouted by more refined foreign enemies and squeamish fellow countrymen as Kentuckians, by which term of contemptuous aversion all western frontiermen were then synonymized as border ruffians. But for manhood, probity, honor, enterprise, hardihood, those ultramontane patriots, the genus of which Clay and Jackson wore the beau ideal, would compare not disadvantageously with their revilers. Of that genus General Taylor was another specimen. Seen once, before he had any idea that he ever would be resident there, knocking at the door of the presidential mansion, and no one coming to open it, a passer-by told the simple slave-holding soldier to pull the bell, of which urbane contrivance he had formed no conception in his campaign life of woods and prairies. Negro slavery and land robbery, for which the English subjugators of India, and French of Algeria, combined to indict the United States, elicited a conflict in 1843-4, in which rampant abolition performed an imposing part. Vehemently seconding the foreign powers in their machinations to prevent the annexation of Texas and abolish slavery by one and the same blow, northeastern aversion to southwestern slave-holding aggrandizement confirmed slavery by spontaneous reaction, and secured Texas for the Union. One State already five hundred thousand people strong, together with three pastoral free States