very common, in which a mother and her children are of fered either in a lot, or separately, as may suit the purchaser. In one of these advertisements, I observed it stated that the youngest child was about a year old.* The captives are driven by the whip, through toilsome journeys, under a burning sun; their limbs fettered; with nothing before them but the prospect of toil more severe than that to which they have been accustomed.† The disgrace of such scenes in the capital of our republic cannot be otherwise than painful to every patriotic mind; while they furnish materials for the most pungent satire to other nations. A United States senator declared that the sight of a drove of slaves was so insupportable that he always avoided it when he could; and an intelligent Scotchman said, when he first entered Chesapeake Bay, and cast his eye along our coast, the sight of the slaves brought his heart into his throat. How can we help feeling a sense of shame, when we read Moore's contemptuous couplet, "The fustian flag that proudly waves, In splendid mockery, o'er a land of slaves?" The lines would be harmless enough, if they were false; the sting lies in their truth. Finally, I have described some of the horrors of the slavetrade, because when our constitution was formed, the government pledged itself not to abolish this traffic until 1808. We began our career of freedom by granting a twenty years' lease of iniquity-twenty years of allowed invasion of other men's rights-twenty years of bloodshed, violence, and fraud! And this will be told in our annals-this will be heard of to the end of time! While the slave-trade was allowed, the South could use it to advance their views in various ways. In their represen tation to Congress, five slaves counted the same as three freemen; of course, every fresh cargo was not only an increase of property, but an increase of political power. Ample time was allowed to lay in a stock of slaves to supply the * In Niles's Register, vol. xxxv, page 4, I find the following: "Dealing in slaves has become a large business. Establishments are made at several places in Maryland and Virginia, at which they are sold like cattle. These places are strongly built, and well supplied with thumbscrews, gags, cowskins and other whips, oftentimes bloody. But the laws permit the traffic, and it is suffered." In the sugar-growing States the condition of the negro is much more pitiable than where cotton is the staple commodity. new slave states and territories that might grow up; and when this was effected, the prohibition of foreign commerce in human flesh, operated as a complete tariff, to protect the domestic supply. Every man who buys a slave promotes this traffic, by raising the value of the article; every man who owns a slave, indirectly countenances it; every man who allows that slavery is a lamentable necessity, contributes his share to support it; and he who votes for admitting a slave-holding State into the Union, fearfully augments the amount of this crime. CHAPTER II. COMPARATIVE VIEW OF SLAVERY, IN DIFFERENT AGES AND NATIONS. "E'en from my tongue some heartfelt truths may fall; These wrongs in any place would force a tear; "Oh, sons of freedom! equalize your laws— BETWEEN ancient and modern slavery there is this remarkable distinction-the former originated in motives of humanity; the latter is dictated solely by avarice. The ancients made slaves of captives taken in war, as an amelioration of the original custom of indiscriminate ́slaughter; the moderns attack defenceless people, without any provocation, and steal them, for the express purpose of making them slaves. Modern slavery, indeed, in all its particulars, is more odious than the ancient; and it is worthy of remark that the condition of slaves has always been worse just in proportion to the freedom enjoyed by their masters. In Greece, none were so proud of liberty as the Spartans; and they were a proverb among the neighboring States for their severity to slaves. The slave code of the Roman republic was rigid and tyrannical in the extreme; and cruelties became so common and excessive, that the emperors, in the latter days of Roman power, were obliged to enact laws to restrain them. In the modern world, England and America are the most conspic uous for enlightened views of freedom, and bold vindication of the equal rights of man; yet in these two countries slave. laws have been framed as bad as they were in Pagan, ironhearted Rome; and the customs are in some respects more oppressive ;—modern slavery unquestionably wears its very worst aspect in the Colonies of England and the United States of North America. I hardly know how to decide their re spective claims. My countrymen are fond of pre-eminence, and I am afraid they deserve it here-especially if we throw into the scale their loud boasts of superiority over all the rest of the world in civil and religious freedom. The slave codes of the United States and of the British West Indies were originally almost precisely the same; but their laws have been growing milder and milder, while ours have increased in severity. The British have the advantage of us in this respect-they long ago dared to describe the monster as it is; and they are now grappling with it, with the over. whelming strength of a great nation's concentrated energies. -The Dutch, those sturdy old friends of liberty, and the French, who have been stark mad for freedom, rank next for the severity of their slave laws and customs. The Spanish and Portuguese are milder than either. I will give a brief view of some of our own laws on this subject; for the correctness of which, I refer the reader to Stroud's Sketch of the Slave Laws of the United States of America. In the first place, we will inquire upon what ground the negro slaves in this country are claimed as property. Most of them are the descendants of persons kid. napped on the coast of Africa, and brought here while we were British Colonies; and as the slave-trade was openly sanctioned more than twenty years after our acknowledged independence, in 1783, and as the traffic is still carried on by smugglers, there are, no doubt, thousands of slaves, now living in the United States, who are actually stolen from Africa.* A provincial law of Maryland enacted that any white woman who married a negro slave should serve his master during her husband's lifetime, and that all their children should be slaves. This law was not repealed until the end of eighteen years, and it then continued in full force with regard to those who had contracted such marriages in the intermediate time; therefore the descendants of white women so situated may be slaves unto the present day. The doctrine of the common law is that the offspring shall follow the condition of the father; but slave law (with the above temporary exception) reverses the common law, and provides * In the new slave States, there are a great many negroes, who can speak no other language than some of the numerous African dialects. that children shall follow the condition of the mother. Hence mulattoes and their descendants are held in perpetual bondage, though the father is a free white man. "Any person whose maternal ancestor, even in the remotest degree of distance, can be shown to have been a negro, Indian, mulatto, or a mestizo, not free at the time this law was introduced, although the paternal ancestor at each successive generation may have been a white free man, is declared to be the subject of perpetual slavery." Even the code of Jamaica, is on this head, more liberal than ours; by an express law, slavery ceases at the fourth degree of distance from a negro ancestor and in the other British West Indies, the estab lished custom is such, that quadroons or mestizoes (as they call the second and third degrees) are rarely seen in a state of slavery. Here, neither law nor public opinion favors the mulatto descendants of free white men. This furnishes a convenient game to the slaveholder-it enables him to fill his purse by means of his own vices;-the right to sell one half of his children provides a fortune for the remainder.— Had the maxim of the common law been allowed,—i. e. that the offspring follows the condition of the father,—the mulattoes, almost without exception, would have been free, and thus the prodigious and alarming increase of our slave population might have been prevented. The great augmentation of the servile class in the Southern States, compared with the West India colonies, has been thought to indicate a much milder form of slavery; but there are other causes, which tend to produce the result. There are much fewer white men in the British West Indies than in our slave States; hence the increase of the mulatto population is less rapid. Here the descendants of a colored mother never become free; in the West Indies, they cease to be slaves in the fourth generation, at farthest; and their posterity increase the free colored class, instead of adding countless links to the chain of bondage. The manufacture of sugar is extremely toilsome, and when driven hard, occasions a great waste of negro life; this circumstance, together with the tropical climate of the West Indies, furnish additional reasons for the disproportionate increase of slaves between those islands and our own country, where a comparatively small quantity of sugar is cultivated. It may excite surprise, that Indians and their offspring are comprised in the doom of perpetual slavery; yet not only is t |