CHAPTER X.

FACTS AND ARGUMENTS BY THE WAYSIDE.

FINDING that we shall have to leave unsaid a great many things which we intended to say, and that we shall have to omit much valuable matter, the product of other pens than our own, but which, having collected at considerable expense, we had hoped to be able to introduce, we have concluded to present, under the above heading, only a few of the more important particulars.

In the first place, we will give an explanation of the

reason

WHY THIS WORK WAS NOT PUBLISHED IN BALTIMORE.

A considerable portion of this work was written in Baltimore; and the whole of it would have been written and published there, but for the following odious clause, which we extract from the Statutes of Maryland :—

"Be it enacted by the General Assembly of Maryland, That after the passage of his act, it shall not be lawful for any citizen of this State, knowingly to make, print or engrave, or aid in the making, printing or engraving, within this State, any pictorial representation, or to write or print, or to aid in the writing or printing any pamphlet, newspaper, handbill or other paper of an inflammatory character, and having a tendency to excite discon

tent or stir up insurrection amongst the people of color of this State, or of either of the other States or Territories of the United States, or knowingly to carry or send, or to aid in the carrying or sending the same for circulation amongst the inhabitants of either of the other States or Territories of the United States, and any person so offending shall be guilty of a felony, and shall on conviction be sentenced to confinement in the penitentiary of this State, for a period not less than ten nor more than twenty years, from the time of sentence pronounced on such person."--Act passed Dec. 1831. See 2nd Dorsey, page 1218.

Now so long as slaveholders are clothed with the mantle of office, so long will they continue to make laws, like the above, expressly calculated to bring the non-slaveholding whites under a system of vassalage little less onerous and debasing than that to which the negroes themselves are accustomed. What wonder is it that there is no native literature in the South? The South can never have a literature of her own until after slavery shall have been abolished. Slaveholders are too lazy and ignorant to write it, and the non-slaveholders-even the few whose minds are cultivated at all—are not permitted even to make the attempt. Down with the oligarchy! Incligibility of slaveholders-never another vote to the trafficker in human flesh !

LEGISLATIVE ACTS AGAINST SLAVERY.

In his Compendium of the Seventh Census, Mr. DeBow has compiled the following useful and highly interesting facts:

"The Continental Congress of 1774 resolved to discontinue the slave trade, in which resolution they were anticipated by the Con

ventions of Delegates of Virginia and North Carolina. In 1789 the Convention to frame the federal Constitution, looked to the abolition of the traffic in 1808. On the 2nd of March, 1807, Congress passed an act against importations of Africans into the United States after January 1st, 1808. An act in Great Britain in 1807 also made the slave trade unlawful. Denmark forbid the introduction of African slaves into her colonies after 1804. The Congress of Vienna, in 1815, pronounced for the abolition of the trade. France abolished it in 1817, and also Spain, but the acts were to take effect after 1820. Portugal abolished it in 1818.

"In Pennsylvania slavery was abolished in 1780. In New Jersey it was provisionally abolished in 1784; all children born of a slave after 1804 are made free in 1820. In Massachusetts, it was declared after the revolution, that slavery was virtually abolished by their Constitution, (1780). In 1784 and 1797, Connecticut provided for a gradual extinction of slavery. In Rhode Island, after 1784, no person could be born a slave. The Consti tutions of Vermont and New Hampshire, respectively, abolished slavery. In New York it was provisionally abolished in 1799 twenty-eight years' ownership being allowed in slaves born after that date, and in 1817 it was enacted that slavery was not to exist after ten years, or 1827. The ordinance of 1787 forbid slavery in the territory northwest of the Ohio."

Besides the instances enumerated above, slavery has been abolished in more than forty different parts of the world within the last half century, and with good results everywhere, except two or three West India islands, where the negro population was greatly in excess of the whites; and even in these, the evils, if any, that have followed, are not justly attributable to abolition, but to the previous demoralization produced by slavery.

In this connection we may very properly introduce the testimony of a West India planter to the relative advantages of Free over Slave Labor. Listen to Charles Petty

john, of Barbadoes, who, addressing himself to a citizen of our own country, says :—

“In 1834, I came in possession of 257 slaves, under the laws of England, which required the owner to feed, clothe, and furnish them with medical attendance. With this number I cultivated my sugar plantation until the Emancipation Act of August 1st, 1838, when they all became free. I now hire a portion of those slaves, the best and cheapest of course, as you hire men in the United States. The average number which I employ is 100, with which I cultivate more land at a cheaper rate, and make more produce than I did with 257 slaves. With my slaves I made from 100 to 180 tons of sugar yearly. With 100 free negroes I think I do badly if I do not annually produce 250 tons.

If, in the forty and more instances to which we have alluded, the abolition of slavery had proved injurious in a majority of cases, the attempt to abolish it elsewhere might, perhaps, be regarded as an ill-advised effort; but, seeing that its abolition has worked well in at least four teen-fifteenths of all the cases on record, the fact becomes obvious that it is our duty and our interest to continue to abolish it until the whole world shall be freed, or until we shall begin to see more evil than good result from our acts of emancipation.

THE TRUE FRIENDS OF THE SOUTH.

Freesoilers and abolitionists are the only true friends of the South; slaveholders and slave-breeders are downright enemies of their own section. Anti-slavery men are work ing for the Union and for the good of the whole world proslavery men are working for the disunion of the States, and for the good of nothing except themselves. Thax

such men as Greeley, Seward, Sumner, Clay, and Birney, the South can have no truer friends-nor can slavery have more implacable foes.

For the purpose of showing that Horace Greeley is not, as he is generally represented by the oligarchy, an inveterate hater of the South, we will here introduce an extract from one of his editorial articles in a late number of the New York Tribune-a faithful advocate of freedom, whose circulation, we are happy to say, is greater than the aggregate circulation of more than twenty of the principal proslavery sheets published at the South :

"Is it in vain that we pile fact upon fact, proof on proof, showing that slavery is a blight and a curse to the States which chersh it? These facts are multitudinous as the leaves of the forest; conclusive as the demonstrations of geometry. Nobody attempts to refute them, but the champions of slavery extension seem determined to persist in ignoring them. Let it be understood, then, once for all, that we do not hate the South, war on the South, nor seek to ruin the South, in resisting the extension of slavery. We most earnestly believe human bondage a curse to the South, and to all whom it affects; but we do not labor for its overthrow otherwise than through the conviction of the South of its injustice and mischief. Its extension into new Territories we determinedly resist, not by any means from ill will to the South, but under the impulse of good will to all mankind. We believe the establishment of slavery in Kansas or any other Western Territory would prolong its existence in Virginia and Maryland, by widening the market and increasing the price of slaves, and thereby increasing the profits of slave-breeding, and the consequent incitement thereto. Those who urge that slavery would not go into Kansas if permitted, wilfully shut their eyes to the fact that it has gone into Missouri, lying in exactly the same latitude, and is now strongest in that north-western angle of said State, which was covertly filched from what is now Kansas within the last twenty years. Even if the growth of hemp, corn