ted to the other side to range themselves under their banners. With untiring and unscrupulous persistence they approached all classes and urged all motives that promised aid. Especially earnest were their appeals to the prejudices and groundless apprehensions of the non-slaveholding whites, who were made to believe that "to emancipate the black man was to enslave the white man." In both the canvass and convention, the rivalry of parties was made to play an important part; the Democrats and Whigs leaving none to doubt their purpose to conciliate and gain the confidence of the Slave Power by concessions and proffered devotion to its interests. Such Whigs as Davis and Dixon made no concealment of their determination to convince the slave-masters that their interests were as safe in the hands of the Whig as of the Democratic party. The history of the other Border States was substantially the same, revealing the same general characteristics and like consequent results; though in no State were cause and effect more marked and intensified than in Kentucky. However explained, none of the border slaveholding States ever exhibited or continued to exhibit, even after emancipation, more of proslavery intolerance and perverseness; in none did the friends of freedom, and of the Union, also, find less sympathy, or meet with more determined and persistent opposition. CHAPTER XVI. BLACK LAWS. - Indifference to human rights. Inhuman legislation. — In Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, and Missouri. Constitutional convention in Indiana. — Promi nent members. Southern influence preponderates. Active canvass of the State. Mr. Colfax. - Similar legislation in Illinois, Iowa, New Mexico, California, Utah, Oregon. Slave Power described. THE slave system in nothing exhibited its callous and calculating insensibility, its utter obliviousness of justice and humanity, its reckless disregard of the commonest principles of social comity and fair dealing, more than in its treatment of free people of color. It exhibited greater cruelty to the slave, and the burden of absolute chattelhood was harder to bear; but it is difficult to imagine anything more heartless and unprincipled than the utter indifference that characterized its treatment of the men and women of African descent. Had the Decalogue never been written, the claim of the moral law could not have been more completely ignored. It doomed a race, and culture and character furnished no protection. Its degrading influences were everywhere felt, and the lines of latitude and longitude afforded no limits to its unjust and insulting discrimination. All this is but too painfully apparent from a reference to the inhuman and cold-blooded laws enacted in the Border States, both North and South. There were in 1847 in the State of Virginia several thousand free negroes. Though they were denied many of the essential rights of citizenship, they were a quiet and law-abiding people. Still they were objects of slaveholding distrust, their presence was regarded as inimical to the interests of slavery, and during that year laws were enacted against their remaining in the State. In the revised constitution of 1851 it was provided that slaves thereafter emancipated, if they re mained in the State more than twelve months, should forfeit their freedom, and be reduced to slavery under such regulations as might be prescribed by law. It provided, also, that the legislature should not have power to emancipate any slave, or the descendant of any slave; that it might impose such restrictions and conditions as were deemed proper on the power of slaveholders to emancipate their slaves; and that it also be empowered to pass any needful laws for the relief of the State of its free negro population, by removal or otherwise. So earnest were its inhabitants to effect this latter object, that only two years later a board of colonization for such removal was established, and a tax was levied on all male free negroes between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-five to defray the expenses of such colonization. More than a quarter of a century before, it had prohibited meetings or schools for teaching free negroes; had passed laws against the preaching of slaves and free negroes; and as early as 1838 it had forbidden free persons of color to leave the State for the purposes of education, except on the forfeiture of all right to return. In 1847 it re-enacted that white persons should be punished for instructing slaves. It also made it the duty of postmasters to give notice to justices of the peace of the presence of antislavery publications, such as they might deem incendiary; and these latter officials were required to burn the offensive matter and punish those to whom it had been sent. Two years later still, a law was passed by the same legislature denying citizenship to free colored men. The same illiberal policy prevailed in Maryland. In 1846 it denied to colored persons the right to testify in cases in which any white person was concerned, although as far back as 1809 it had admitted the testimony of slaves against free negroes. By the new constitution of 1851, the legislature was forbidden to pass any law abolishing the relation of master and slave; but ample powers were given for the government, regulation, and disposition of the free colored population of the State. But while, on the one hand, it was thus hampering the exercise of any movement in favor of emancipation, it was, on the other, departing from its past policy concerning the slave traf fic by abolishing all restrictions and throwing wide open the doors for the unlimited introduction of slaves. In Delaware slavery existed in its mildest forms, and the rule of the Slave Power was less rigorous than in that of any other slaveholding State. And yet its legislation bore the marks and breathed the spirit of the same inhuman and unjust discrimination against the free colored man. In 1851, it prohibited the emigration of free negroes to any State except Maryland. In the same year it enacted that free negroes should not attend camp-meetings or any political gatherings. In 1852 it provided that no free negro should have the right to vote, or "to enjoy any other rights of a freeman other than to hold property, or to obtain redress in law for any injury to his or her personal property." When Missouri was admitted into the Union, her constitution empowered the legislature to prevent free negroes from either entering or settling in the State. But a fundamental condition of her admission was that this provision should never be so construed as to authorize the passage of anylaw excluding the citizens of any State from such privileges and immunities as such citizens should be entitled to under the Constitution. And yet, in spite of this solemn provision and condition, it proceeded to enact most barbarous and revolting statutes. In 1847 it forbade the immigration into the State of any free colored person; enacted that no person should keep a school for the instruction of negroes in reading and writing; forbade any religious meetings of negroes, unless a justice of the peace or constable were present; and declared that schools and religious meetings were "unlawful assemblages." Nor was this inhuman and unjust legislation confined to the slave States. In many of the so-called free States it was hardly less unpardonable and unendurable. It seemed as if the whole country was under an eclipse; and, though it was total only at the South, its dark penumbra rested over all the North. Thus Indiana, in a constitutional convention held in 1851, passed through a similar ordeal, in which the friends of freedom found themselves in a hopeless minority, while the enemies of the black man were successful in securing, both in the convention and afterward in the State, the adoption of provisions unjust, inhuman, and disgraceful in the extreme. The convention assembled in October, 1850, and consisted of one hundred and fifty members. The body contained the leading and representative men of both the Whig and the Democratic parties of the State, the latter constituting two thirds of the convention. Among the leading Democrats were John Pettit, who had been a member of the lower house of Congress, and afterward Senator, a man of acknowledged ability, but one who distinguished himself for his intense proslavery doctrines, put forth in vigorous but often coarse and violent language; Robert Dale Owen, a scholarly gentleman, since a member of Congress and of the Republican party, — an earnest supporter of the war, and author of several contributions to spiritualistic literature; and Thomas A. Hendricks, who was afterward elected to the Senate of the United States, was governor of the State, and became a leading member of his party. Among the Whigs were Schuyler Colfax, then a young and rising statesman, who has since filled a large space in the political history of his State and nation, being almost continuously in public life, three times Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Vice-President of the United States, McKee, Dunn, March, and several others, who took an active part in the proceedings of the convention. The southern portion of Indiana had been largely settled by emigrants from the Southern States, who, though compelled to leave slavery behind, carried with them slaveholding prejudices that constituted a bond of sympathy between the State of their adoption and the States they had left. This, in conjunction with that tidal wave of slaveholding aggressiveness and intolerance which had swept over the country, bearing even Congress itself from its moorings, as indicated by the passage of the compromise measures, and making its influences felt everywhere, became largely apparent in the convention; securing the adoption of provisions in the constitution proposed hardly less censurable and disgraceful than those in the constitutions of the Southern States themselves. Indeed, one of the |