of the whole number of slaveholders hold less than five slaves each-68,820 holding only one each. According to this hypothesis, the slaveholders own 173,024,000 acres, and the non-slaveholders the balance, with the exception of about 40,000,000 of acres, which belong to the General Government. The case may be stated thus:

Area of the Slave States 544,926,720 acres.
Acres owned by slaveholders.. 173,024,000

Estimates Acres owned by the government 40,000,000-213,024,000
Acres owned by non-slaveholders.... ......331,902,720

Now, chevaliers of the lash, and worshippers of slavery, the total value of three hundred and thirty-one million nine hundred and two thousand seven hundred and twenty acres, at twenty-two dollars and seventy-three cents per acre, is seven billion five hundred and forty-four million one' hundred and forty-eight thousand eight hundred and twenty-five dollars; and this is our account against you on a single score. Considering how your villainous institution has retarded the development of our commercial and manufacturing interests, how it has stifled the aspirations of inventive genius; and, above all, how it has barred from us the heaven-born sweets of literature and religion-concernments too sacred to be estimated in a pecuniary point of view-might we not, with perfect justice and propriety, duplicate the amount, and still be accounted modest in our demands? Fully advised, however, of your indi gent circumstances, we feel it would be utterly useless to call on you for the whole amount that is due us; we shall, therefore, in your behalf, make another draft on the fund of non-slaveholding generosity, and let the account, meagre as it is, stand as above. Though we have given

you all the offices, and you have given us none of the benefits of legislation; though we have fought the battles of the South, while you were either lolling in your piazzas, or playing the tory, and endeavoring to filch from us our birthright of freedom; though you have absorbed the wealth of our communities in sending your own children to Northern seminaries and colleges, or in employing Yankee teachers to officiate exclusively in your own families, and have refused to us the limited privilege of common schools; though you have scorned to patronize our mechanics and industrial enterprises, and have passed to the North for every article of apparel, utility, and adornment; and though you have maltreated, outraged and defrauded us in every relation of life, civil, social, and political, yet we are willing to forgive and forget you, if you will but do us justice on a single count. Of you, the introducers, aiders and abettors of slavery, we demand indemnification for the damage our lands have sustained on account thereof; the amount of that damage is $7,544,148,825; and now, Sirs, we are ready to receive the money, and if it is perfectly convenient to you, we would be glad to have you pay it in specie! It will not avail you, Sirs, to parley or prevaricate. We must have a settlement. Our claim is just and overdue. We have already indulged you too long. Your criminal extravagance has almost ruined us. We are determined that you shall no longer play the profligate, and fair sumptuously every day at our expense. How do you propose to settle? Do you offer us your negroes in part payment? We do not want your negroes. We would not have all of them, nor any number of them,

even as a gift. We hold ourselves above the disreputa
ble and iniquitous practices of buying, selling, and own-
ing slaves. What we demand is damages in money, or
other absolute property, as an equivalent for the pecuniary
losses we have suffered at your hands. You value your
negroes at sixteen hundred millions of dollars, and propose
to sell them to us for that sum; we should consider our-
selves badly cheated, and disgraced for all time, here and
hereafter, if we were to take them off your hands at six-
teen farthings! We tell you emphatically, we are firmly
resolved never to degrade ourselves by becoming the
mercenary purchasers or proprietors of human beings. Ex-
cept for the purpose of liberating them, we would not
give a handkerchief or a tooth-pick for all the slaves in
the world. But, in order to show how brazenly absurd
are the howls and groans which you invariably set up
for compensation, whenever we speak of the abolition of
slavery, we will suppose your negroes are worth all you
ask for them, and that we are bound to secure to you every
cent of the sum before they can become free-in which
case, our accounts would stand thus:

Non-slaveholder's account against Slaveholders......$7,544,148,825
Slaveholder's account against Non-slaveholders....

.1,600,000,000

Balance due Non-slaveholders......

$5,944,148,825

Now, Sirs, we ask you in all seriousness, Is it not true that you have filched from us nearly five times the amount of the assessed value of your slaves? Why, then, J do you still clamor for more? Is it your purpose to make the game perpetual? Think you that we will ever continue to bow at the wave of your wand, that we will bring

humanity into everlasting disgrace by licking the hand that smites us, and that with us there is no point beyond which forbearance ceases to be a virtue? Sirs, if these be your thoughts, you are laboring under a most fatal delusion. You can goad us no further; you shall oppress us no longer; heretofore, earnestly but submissively, we have asked you to redress the more atrocious outrages which you have perpetrated against us; but what has been the invariable fate of our petitions? With scarcely a perusal, with a degree of contempt that added insult to injury, you have laid them on the table, and from thence they have been swept into the furnance of oblivion. Henceforth, Sirs, we are demandants, not suppliants. We demand our rights, nothing more, nothing less. It is for you to decide whether we are to have justice peaceably or by violence, for whatever consequences may follow, we are determined to have it one way or the other. Do you aspire to become the victims of white non-slaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night? Would you be instrumental in bringing upon yourselves, your wives, and your children, a fate too horrible to contemplate? shall history cease to citę, as an instance of unexampled cruelty, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, because the world-the South-shall have furnished a more direful scene of atrocity and carnage? Sirs, we would not wantonly pluck a single hair from your heads; but we have endured long, we have endured much; slaves only of the most despicable class would endure more. An enumeration or classification of all the abuses, insults, wrongs, injuries, usurpations, and oppres

sions, to which you have subjected us, would fill a larger
volume than this; it is our purpose, therefore, to speak
only of those that affect us most deeply. Out of our effects
your have long since overpaid yourselves for your negroes;
and now, Sirs, you must emancipate them-speedily eman-
cipate them, or we will emancipate them for you! Every
non-slaveholder in the South is, or ought to be, and will
be, against you. You yourselves ought to join us at once
in our laudable crusade against "the mother of harlots."
Slavery has polluted and impoverished your lands; free-
dom will restore them to their virgin purity, and add from
twenty to thirty dollars to the value of every acre. Cor-
rectly speaking, emancipation will cost you nothing; the
moment you abolish slavery, that very moment will the
putative value of the slave become actual value in the
soil. Though there are ten millions of people in the South,
and though you, the slaveholders, are only three hundred
and forty-seven thousand in number, you have within a
fraction of one-third of all the territory belonging to the
fifteen slave States. You have a landed estate of 173,-
024,000 acres, the present average market value of which
is only $5,34 per acre; emancipate your slaves on Wednes-
day morning, and on the Thursday following the value of
your lands, and ours too, will have increased to an aver-
age of at least $28,07 per acre. Let us see, therefore,
even in this one particular, whether the abolition of
slavery will not be a real pecuniary advantage to you.
The present total market value of all your landed property,
at $5,34 per acre, is only $923,248,160! With the beauty
and sunlight of freedom beaming on the same estate, it