Mississippi. If the Union cannot be preserved without crime, it is an eternal truth that nothing good can be preserved by crime. The immense territories of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida, are very likely to be formed into slave States; and every new vote on this side, places the free States more and more at the mercy of the South, and gives a renewed and apparently interminable lease to the duration of slavery. The purchase or the conquest of the Texas, is a favorite scheme with Southerners, because it would occasion such an inexhaustible demand for slaves. A gentleman in the Vir. ginia convention thought the acquisition of the Texas so certain, that he made calculations upon the increased value of negroes. We have reason to thank God that the jeal ousy of the Mexican government places a barrier in that direction.

The existence of slavery among us prevents the recog nition of Haytian independence. That republic is fast increasing in wealth, intelligence and refinement.-Her com merce is valuable to us and might become much more so. But our Northern representatives have never even made an effort to have her independence acknowledged, because a colored ambassador would be so disagreeable to our preju. dices.

Few are aware of the extent of sectional dislike in this country; and I would not speak of it, if I thought it pos sible to add to it. The late John Taylor, a man of great natural talent, wrote a book on the agriculture of Virginia, in which he acknowledges impoverishment, but attributes it all to the mismanagement of overseers. In this work, Mr. Taylor has embodied more of the genuine spirit, the ethics and polítics, of planters, than any other man; excepting perhaps, John Randolph in his speeches. He treats mer chants, capitalists, bankers, and all other people not planters, as so many robbers, who live by plundering the slave-owner, apparently forgetting by what plunder they themselves live.

Mr. Jefferson and other eminent men from the South, have occasionally betrayed the same strong prejudices; but they were more guarded, lest the democracy of the North should be undeceived, and their votes lost. Mr. Taylor's book is in high repute in the Southern States, and its senti. ments widely echoed; but it is little known here.

A year or two since, I received a letter from a publisher who largely supplies the Southern market, in which he as

sured me that no book from the North would sell at the South, unless the source from which it came, were carefully concealed! Yet New-England has always yielded to South. ern policy in preference to uniting with the Middle States, with which she has, in most respects, a congeniality of interests and habits. It has been the constant policy of the slave States to prevent the free States from acting together. Who does not see that the American people are walking over a subterranean fire, the flames of which are fed by slavery?

The South no doubt gave her influence to General Jackson, from the conviction that a slave-owner would support the slaveholding interest. The Proclamation against the nullifiers, which has given the President such sudden popularity at the North, has of course offended them. No person has a right to say that Proclamation is insincere. It will be extraordinary if a slave-owner does in reality depart from the uniform system of his brethren. In the President's last Message, it is maintained that the wealthy landholders, that is, the planters, are the best part of the population;it admits that the laws for raising of revenue by imposts have been in their operation oppressive to the South;-it recommends a gradual withdrawing of protection from manufactures ;-it advises that the public lands shall cease to be a source of revenue, as soon as practicable—that they bo sold to settlers-and in a convenient time the disposal of the soil be surrendered to the States respectively in which it lies; -lastly, the Message tends to discourage future appropria. tions of public money for purposes of internal improvement.

Every one of these items is a concession to the slaveholding policy. If the public lands are taken from the nation, and given to the States in which the soil lies, who will get the largest share? That best part of the population called planters.

The Proclamation and the Message are very unlike each other. Perhaps South Carolina is to obtain her own will by a route more certain, though more circuitous, than open rebellion. Time will show.

CHAPTER V.

COLONIZATION SOCIETY, AND ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY.

It is not madness

That I have utter'd:- -For love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks:
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place;
While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to Heaven;
Repent what's past; avoid what is to come;
And do not spread the compost on the weeds,
To make them ranker.

HAMLET, Act III, Scene 3d.
When doctrines meet with general approbation,
It is not heresy, but reformation.

GARRICK.

So much excitement prevails with regard to these two societies at present, that it will be difficult to present a view of them which will be perfectly satisfactory to all. I shall say what appears to me to be candid and true, without any anxiety as to whom it may please, and whom it may displease. I need not say that I have a decided predilection, because it has been sufficiently betrayed in the preceding pages; and I allude to it for the sake of perfect sincerity, rather than from any idea that my opinion is important.

The American Colonization Society was organized a little more than sixteen years ago at the city of Washington, chosen as the most central place in the Union. Auxiliary institutions have since been formed in almost every part of the country; and nearly all the distinguished men belong to it. The doing away of slavery in the United States, by gradually removing all the blacks to Africa, has been generally supposed to be its object. The project at first excited some jealousy in the Southern States; and the Society, in order to allay this, were anxious to make all possible concessions to slave-owners, in their Addresses, Reports, &c. In Mr. Clay's speech, printed in the first Annual Report of the Society, he said, "It is far from the intention of this Society to affect, in any manner, the tenure by which a certain species of property is held. I am myself a slaveholder, and Ì con

sider that kind of property as inviolable as any other in the country. I would resist encroachment upon it as soon, and with as much firmness, as I would upon any other property that I hold. Nor am I prepared to go as far as the gentleman who has just spoken, (Mr. Mercer) in saying that I would emancipate my slaves, if the means were provided of sending them from the country."

At the same meeting Mr. Randolph said, "He thought it necessary, being himself a slaveholder, to show that so far from being in the smallest degree connected with the abolition of slavery, the proposed Society would prove one of the greatest securities to enable the master to keep in possession his own property.".

In Mr. Clay's speech, in the second Annual Report, he declares: "It is not proposed to deliberate upon, or consider at all, any question of emancipation, or any that is connected with the abolition of slavery. On this condition alone gentlemen from the South and West can be expected to co-operate. On this condition only, I have myself a.tended."

In the seventh Annual Report it is said, " An effort for the benefit of the blacks, in which all parts of the country can unite, of course must not have the abolition of slavery for its immediate object; nor may it aim directly at the instruction of the blacks."

Mr. Archer, of Virginia, fifteenth Annual Report, says: "The object of the Society, if I understand it aright, involves no intrusion on property, nor even upon prejudice.'

In the speech of James S. Green, Esq. he says: "This Society have ever disavowed, and they do yet disavow that their object is the emancipation of slaves. They have no wish if they could to interfere in the smallest degree with what they deem the most interesting and fearful subject which can be pressed upon the American public. There is no people that treat their slaves with so much kindness and so little cruelty."

In almost every address delivered before the Society, similar expressions occur. On the propriety of discussing the evils of slavery, without bitterness and without fear, good men may differ in opinion; though I think the time is fast coming, when they will all agree. But by assuming the ground implied in the above remarks, the Colonization Society have fallen into the habit of glossing over the enormities of the slave system; at least, it so appears to me.

In their constitution they have pledged themselves not to speak, write, or do anything to offend the Southerners; and as there is no possible way of making the truth pleasant to those who do not love it, the Society must perforce keep the truth out of sight. In many of their publications, I have thought I discovered a lurking tendency to palliate slavery; or, at least to make the best of it. They often bring to my mind the words of Hamlet:

"Forgive me this my virtue;

For in the fatness of these pursy times,
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg;

Yea, curb and woo, for leave to do him good."

Thus in an Address delivered March, 1833, we are told, "It ought never to be forgotten that the slave-trade between Africa and America, had its origin in a compassionate endeavor to relieve, by the substitution of negro labor, the toils endured by native Indians It was the simulated form of mercy that piloted the first slave-ship across the Atlantic."

I am aware that Las Cases used this argument; but it was less unbecoming in him than it is in a philanthropist of the present day. The speaker does indeed say that "the infinite of agonies' and the infinite of crime, since suffered and committed, proves that mercy cannot exist in opposition to justice." I can hardly realize what sort of a conscience it must be, that needed the demonstration.

The plain truth was, the Spaniards were in a hurry for gold; they overworked the native Indians, who were inconsiderate enough to die in very inconvenient numbers; but the gold must be had, and that quickly; and so the Africans were forced to come and die in company with the Indians. And in the nineteenth century, we are told it is our duty not to forget that this was a "simulated form of mercy!" A dissimulated form would have been the better expression.

If we may believe slave-owners, the whole system, from beginning to end, is a matter of mercy. They have described the Middle Passage, with its gags, fetters, and thumbscrews, as "the happiest period of a negro's life;" they say they do the slaves a great charity in bringing them from barbarous Africa to a civilized and Christian country; and on the plantation, under the whip of the driver, the negroes are so happy, that a West India planter publicly declared he could not look upon them, without wishing to be himself a slave.