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tration, relays of horses, prearranged the African Slave-Trade, coinciding

in the absence of telegraphs, conveyed from the deeply interested negro-traders, who were watching the doings of Congress at the national metropolis, to their confederates and agents in the slave-selling districts of the neighboring States, the joyful tidings which insured an advance of twelve to fifteen per cent. in the market value of human flesh, and enabled the exclusive possessors of the intelligence to make it the basis of extensive and lucrative speculations.

with the rapid settlement of the Louisiana purchase and the triumph of the Cotton-Gin, wrought here an entire transformation. When fieldhands brought from ten to fifteen hundred dollars, and young negroes were held at about ten dollars per pound, the newly born infant, if wellformed, healthy, and likely to live, was deemed an addition to his master's wealth of not less than one hundred dollars, even in Virginia or Maryland. It had now become the interest of the master to increase the

number of births in his slave-cabins; and few evinced scruples as to the means whereby this result was attained. The chastity of female slaves was never esteemed of much account, even where they were white; and, now that it had become an impediment to the increase of their masters' wealth, it was wholly disregarded. No slave-girl, however young, was valued lower for having become a mother, without waiting to be first made a wife; nor were many masters likely to rebuke this as a fault, or brand it as a shame. Women were publicly advertised by sellers as ex

Slave-breeding for gain, deliberately purposed and systematically pursued, appears to be among the latest devices and illustrations of human depravity. Neither Cowper, nor Wesley, nor Jonathan Edwards, nor Granville Sharp, nor Clarkson, nor any of the philanthropists or divines who, in the last century, bore fearless and emphatic testimony to the flagrant iniquity of slave-making, slave-holding, and slave-selling, seem to have had any clear conception of it. For the infant slave of past ages was rather an incumbrance and a burden than a valued addition to his master's stock. To raise him, how-traordinary breeders, and commanded ever roughly, must cost all he would a higher price on that account.' ultimately be worth. That it was Wives, sold into separation from cheaper to buy slaves than to rear their husbands, were imperatively them, was quite generally regarded as required to accept new partners, in self-evident. But the suppression of order that the fruitfulness of the

9 Mr. Edward Yates, a zealous and active friend of the Union cause, in "A letter to the Women of England, on Slavery in the Southern States of America," founded on personal observațion in 1855, gives revolting instances of the brutal handling of delicate and beautiful women, apparently white, by slave-dealers and their customers, in Southern sale-rooms. He adds:

"At Richmond and New Orleans, I was present at slave-auctions, and did not see one instance

of a married pair being sold together, but, without | exception, so far as I was able to learn from the negroes sold by the auctioneers, every grown-up man left a wife and every grown-up woman a husband. * * * I saw Mr. Pulliam (of Richmond) sell, to different buyers, two daughters away from their mother, who was also to be sold. This unfortunate woman was a quadroon; and I shall not soon forget the large tears that started to her eyes as she saw her two children sold away from her."

Testimony like this is abundant.

SLAVE-BREEDING-COLONIZATION.

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plantation might not suffer. We hers must share her own bitter and hopeless degradation. It was long ago observed that American Slavery, with its habitual and life-long separations of husband from wife, of parent from child, its exile of perhaps the larger portion of its victims from the humble but cherished homes of their childhood to the strange and repulsive swamps and forests of the far South-West, is harsher and viler than any other system of bondage on which the sun ever shone. And when we add that it has been carefully computed that the State of Virginia, since the date of the purchase of Louisiana, had received more money for her own flesh and blood, regularly sold and exported, than her soil and all that was upon it would have sold for on the day when she seceded from the Union, we need adduce no more of the million facts which unite to prove every wrong a blunder as well as a crime-that God has implanted in every evil the seeds of its overthrow and ultimate de

need not dwell on this new phase of
Slavery, its revolting features, and
still more revolting consequences.
The simple and notorious fact that
clergymen, marrying slaves, were
accustomed to require of them fidel-
ity in their marital relation, until
separated by death, or by inexorable
necessity, suffices of itself to stamp
the social condition thus photo-
graphed with the indignant reproba-
tion of mankind. And when we add
that slave-girls were not only daily
sold on the auction-blocks of New
Orleans, and constantly advertised in
her journals, as very nearly white,
well-educated, and possessed of the
rarest personal attractions, and that
they commanded double and treble
prices on this account, we leave noth-
ing to be added to complete the out-
lines of a system of legalized and
priest-sanctioned iniquity, more gi-
gantic and infernal than heathenism
and barbarism ever devised. For the
Circassian beauty, whose charms
seek and find a market at Constanti-struction.
nople, is sent thither by her parents,
and is herself a willing party to the
speculation. She hopefully bids a
last adieu to the home of her infancy,
to find another in the harem of some
wealthy and powerful Turk, where
she will achieve the life of luxury
and idleness she covets. But the
American-born woman, consigned by
the laws of her country and the fiat
of her owner to the absolute posses-
sion of whomsoever bids most for
her, neither consents to the transfer,
nor is at all consulted as to the per-
son to whom she is helplessly con-
signed. The Circassian knows that
her children will be free and honored.
The American is keenly aware that

The conflicting currents of American thought and action with regard to Slavery-that which was cherished by the Revolutionary patriots, and gradually died with them, and that by which the former was imperceptibly supplanted—are strikingly exhibited in the history and progress of the movement for African Colonization. Its originator was the Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D. D., who was settled as a clergyman at Newport, R. I., in 1770, and found that thriv ing sea-port a focus of Slavery and the Slave-Trade, upon both of which he soon commenced an active and determined war. The idea of coun

teracting, and ultimately suppressing, on it early in the following year.

the Slave-Trade, through a systematic colonization of the western coast of Africa with emancipated blacks from America, was matured and suggested by him to others, even before the outbreak of the Revolutionary war; and its realization, interrupted by that struggle, was resumed by him directly after it had been closed. This was anterior to the British settlement of Sierra Leone, and preceded the appearance of Clarkson's prize essay, commanding public attention to the horrors of the Slave-Trade. Among Dr. Hopkins's European correspondents were Granville Sharp and Zachary Macaulay, who were among the earliest and least compromising of British abolitionists. Through his influence and efforts, three colored youth were educated in New England, toward the close of the last century, with express reference to missionary labor in Africa in connection with the Colonization movement. Two of these ultimately, though at a mature age, migrated to Liberia, where they died soon after. Thirty-eight American blacks emigrated to Sierra Leone in 1815, under the auspices and in the vessel of one of their own number. The initial organization of the American Colonization Society took place at Princeton, N. J., in the autumn of 1816; and that Society was formally organized at Washington, by the choice of officers, on the 1st of January, 1817. Its first attempt at practical colonization was made in 1820 on Sherbro Island, which proved an unfortunate location; its present position on the main land, at Cape Mesurado, was purchased December 15, 1821, and some colonists landed

About one thousand emigrants were dispatched thither in the course of the following seven years, including a small church of colored persons which migrated from Boston in 1826. The additional number dispatched during the succeeding thirty years was not far from eight thousand. The city founded by the original emigrants received the name of Monrovia, and in 1847 the colony declared itself an independent republic under the name of Liberia. That republic still exists, enjoying a moderate and equable prosperity, in spite of its unhealthiness for whites, and for all but duly acclimated blacks, on account of its tropical and humid location.

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But the Colonization movement, though bountifully lauded and glorified by the eminent in Church and State, and though the Society numbered among its Presidents Bushrod Washington, Charles Carroll, James Madison, and Henry Clay, has not achieved a decided success, and for the last twenty years has steadily and stubbornly declined in importance and consideration. It ceased to command or deserve the sympathy of abolitionists, without achieving the hearty confidence, though it has been blessed or cursed with the abundant verbal commendations, of their antagonists. It was soon discovered that, while it was presented to the former class as a safe and unobjectionable device for mitigating the evils, while gradually undermining the existence, of human bondage in our country, it was, at the same time, commended to the favor and patronage of slaveholders as a means of relieving the South of its dangerous free-negro element, and

EMANCIPATION DISCARDED.

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a follower of Garrison and Wendell
Phillips. The constantly and widely
diverging currents of American opin-
ion soon left the Colonization move-
ment hopelessly stranded. The
teachings of the new Southern school
tended palpably toward the extirpa-
tion from the South of the free-negro
anomaly, through
through reënslavement
rather than exile. Legislative efforts
to decree a general sale of free
negroes into absolute slavery were
made in several States, barely defeat-
ed in two or three, and fully success-
ful in one. Arkansas, in 1858-9,
enacted the enslavement of all free
colored persons within her limits,
who should not remove beyond them
before the ensuing 4th of July, and
this atrocious edict was actually en-
forced by her authorities. The ne-

thus augmenting the security and insuring the perpetuity of their beloved institution. Moreover, as the enhanced and constantly increasing market value of slaves obstructed and diminished manumissions with a view to colonization, the class of subjects for deportation to Africa steadily fell off in numbers, and in the quality of those composing it. When, at last, the South, under the lead of Mr. Calhoun, quite generally adopted the novel and extraordinary doctrine of the essential righteousness and signal beneficence of Slavery-when the relation of life-long servitude and utter subjugation to the will of a master was declared the true, natural, and most enviable condition of the laboring class anywhere-the condition most conducive to their happiness,10 moral culture, and social well-being-groes generally escaped; but, if any the idea of liberating individuals or families from this subjugation, and sending them from peaceful, plentiful, and prosperous America to benighted, barbarous, and inhospitable Africa, became, in this view, a transparent absurdity. No disciple of Calhoun could be a logical, consistent colonizationist, any more than

In

remained, they did so in view of the fact that the first sheriff who could lay hands on them would hurry them. to the auction-block, and sell them to the highest bidder. And this was but a foretaste of the fate to which the new Southern dogma was morally certain, in a few years, to consign the whole free colored population of the argument. *** In the general march of human progress, there is no one interest of humanity which has advanced more rapidly than the institution of African Slavery as it is in the Southern States. It has stood the test of every trial. Its mission is to subdue the unbroken regions of the warm and fertile South, and its end is the happiness and civilization of the human race, includ

10 "What disposition God, in His providence, will eventually make of these blacks, cannot be foretold; but it is our duty to provide for our own happiness and theirs as long as we can. dealing with this question, it will not do to be guided by abstract notions of liberty and slavery. We can only judge the future by the past; and, as experience proves that the negro is better off in slavery at the South than in freedom else-ing the race of the slave, in all respects." where, it is the part of philanthropy to keep him here, as we keep our children in subjection for their own good."-De Bow's Review, vol. ii., p. 310.

Mr., Chestnut of S. C., in a long pro-slavery. speech in the U. S. Senate, April 9, 1860, presented his views of the inherent excellence of human bondage, as regards the slaves themselves, as follows:

"But you say, 'I leave out of the consideration the happiness of the race enslaved.' By no It is an important element of the moral

means.

Said Mr. Jas. M. Mason, of Va., in the debate of the following day:

"As to the slave population, I agree with the Senator from South Carolina. if a problem, it has worked itself out; the thing is settled here, so far as the South is concerned, or the opinions and purposes of the South, or their ability to make their opinions and purposes good. It will become, as it has already begun to be, the established policy of the South to have no more emancipation. Let them continue in bondage as they now exist, as the best condition of both races.”

Slave States, had not those States | resisted and protested, but only to been precipitated into their great be overborne by inexorable logic, and Rebellion. Individuals would have even more inexorable majorities.

VII.

THE MISSOURI STRUGGLE.

WHEN the State of Louisiana, previously known as the Territory of Orleans, was admitted into the Union,1 the remainder of the Louisiana purchase, which had formerly borne the designation of Louisiana Territory, was renamed the Territory of Missouri. The people of a portion of this Territory, stretching westward from the Mississippi on both sides of the river Missouri, petitioned Congress for admission into the Union as the State of Missouri; and their memorials were referred by the House to a Select Committee, whereof Mr. Scott, their delegate, was chairman. This Committee reported a bill in accordance with their prayer, which was read twice and committed; but no further action was taken thereon during that session.

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The same Congress reconvened for its second session on the 16th of the following November, and the House resolved itself into a Committee of the whole, and in due time took up the Missouri bill aforesaid, which was considered throughout that sitting and that of the next day but one, during which several amendments were adopted, the most important of which, moved by General James Tallmadge, of Dutchess County, New York, was as follows:

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"And provided, That the introduction of Slavery, or involuntary servitude, be prohibited, except for the punishment of crimes, whereof the party has been duly convicted and that all children born within the said State, after the admission thereof into the Union, shall be declared free at the age of twenty-five years.

On the rising of the Committee, the Yeas and Nays were demanded in the House on the question of agreeing to this amendment; when a division was called, and so much of it as precedes and includes the word "convicted" was adopted by 87 Yeas-all from the substantially Free States except one of the two members from Delawareto 76 Nays, whereof ten were from Free States-Massachusetts (then including Maine) supplying three of them, New York three, with one each from New Jersey, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Illinois. The residue of the amendment was likewise sustained, by the close vote of 82 Yeas to 78 Nays. The bill thus amended was ordered to a third reading by 98 Yeas to 56 Nays, and the next day was passed and sent to the Senate, where the restriction aforesaid was stricken out by a vote of 22 to 16, and the bill thus amended passed without a division, on the last day but one of the session. Being now returned to the House, General Tall

5 New York and New Jersey still held a few slaves, but the former had decreed their manumission.

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