That provision, for reasons equally conclusive, will doubtless pass into the Constitution of the Permanent Government. The prohibition, therefore, will no longer be a question of policy, but will be a cardinal principle of the Southern Confederacy. It will not be a question for the several States, in view of any peculiarity in their circumstances and condition, but will be fixed by a paramount power, which nothing but another revolution can overturn. If Texas shall want labor, she must elect whether it shall be hireling labor or slave labor; and if she shall elect slave labor, she must be content with that only which comes from other States on this continent, and at such prices as the States on this continent shall see proper to exact. If Virginia shall not join the Confederacy of the South, she is at least assured of a market for her slaves at undiminished prices; and if there shall be, as there unquestionably is, a vast demand for labor at the South; and if there shall be, as there unquestionably will be, a vast supply of pauper labor from the North and Europe, and States at the South shall be in danger of being overrun and abolitionized, as the States of the North have been overrun and abolitionized, there must be no power in any State to counteract the evil. Democracy is right, for it has the approval of the world; slavery wrong, and only to be tolerated in consideration of the property involved; and while the one is to be encouraged, therefore the other is to be presented in such attitude as to be as little offensive as it may be to the better sentiment of an enlightened world. | seasonable agitation of this question. We were The contest is not between the North and South as geographical sections, for between such sections merely there can be no contest; nor between the people of the North and the people of the South, for our relations have been pleasant, and on neutral grounds there is still nothing to estrange us. We eat together, trade together, and practise yet, in intercourse, with great respect, the courtesies of common life. But the Such I take to be a fair statement of the principles announced in the earliest utterance of the Southern Republic; and I need scarcely say that I deprecate them greatly. I fear their effects upon the present harmony of feeling; I fear their effects upon the fortunes of the Re-real contest is between the two forms of society public; and I will take the liberty of intervening and of presenting reasons why I think we should not take such action at the present time. I may seem presumptuous, but I have a stake too great to scruple at the measures necessary to preserve it. I take a liberty, without permission, in making you the object of this letter; but our personal relations will assure you that I have but the simple purpose, if possible, to be of service to my country; and if, in representing a measure so offensive, I may seem wanting in respect for the "spirit of the age,' I have but to say that I have been connected with the slave trade measure from the start. I have incurred whatever of odium could come from its initiation; I have been trusted by its friends with a leading part in its advancement; and so situated, at a time when prejudice or a mistaken policy would seem to shape our action to a course inconsistent with our dignity and interests, I have no personal considerations to restrain me, and feel that it is within my province to interpose and offer what I can of reasons to arrest it. Nor will I be justly chargeable with an un which have become established, the one at the North and the other at the South. Society is essentially different from government-as different as is the nut from the bur, or the nervous body of the shellfish from the bony structure which surrounds it; and within this Government two societies had become developed as variant in structure and distinct in form as any two beings in animated nature. The one is a society composed of one race, the other of two races. The one is bound together but by the two great social relations of husband and wife and parent and child; the other by the three relations of husband and wife, and parent and child, and master and slave. The one embodies in its political structure the principle that equality is the right of man; the other that it is the right of equals only. The one, embodying the principle that equality is the right of man, expands upon the horizontal plane of pure democracy; the other, embodying the principle that it is not the right of man, but of equals only, has taken to itself the rounded form of a social aristocracy. In the one there is hireling labor, in the other slave labor; in the one, form of pure democracy at the North. The principle that all men are equal and equally right, would have been destructive of slavery at the South. Each required the element suited to its social nature. Each must strive to make the government expressive of its social nature. The natural expansion of the one must become encroachment on the other, and so the contest was inevitable. Seward and Lincoln, in theory at least, whatever be their aim, are right. I realized the fact and so declared the conflict irrepressible years before either ventured to advance that proposition. Upon that declaration I have always acted, and the recent experience of my country has not induced me to question the correctness of that first conception. therefore, in theory at least, labor is voluntary; in the other, involuntary; in the labor of the one there is the elective franchise, in the other there is not; and, as labor is always in excess of direction, in the one the power of government is only with the lower classes; in the other the upper. In the one, therefore, the reins of government come from the heels, in the other from the head of the society; in the one it is guided by the worst, in the other by the best intelligence; in the one it is from those who have the least, in the other from those who have the greatest stake in the continuance of existing order. In the one the pauper laborer has the power to rise and appropriate by law the goods protected by the State when pressure comes, as come it must, there will be the motive to exert it-and thus the ship of State turns bottom upwards. Nor is indignation at such leaders becoming In the other there is no pauper labor with the statesmen at the South. The tendency of power of rising; the ship of State has the bal-social action was against us. The speaker to last of a disfranchised class; there is no possi- be heard must speak against slavery; the bility of political upheaval, therefore, and it is preacher to retain his charge, must preach reasonably certain that so steadied, it will sail against slavery; the author, to be read, must erect and onward to an indefinitely distant write against slavery; the candidate, to attain period. office, must pledge himself against slavery; the office-holder, to continue, must redeem the pledges of the candidate. They did not originate the policy, but they pandered to it; they did not start the current, but they floated on it; and were as powerless as drift-wood to control its course. The great tendency to social conflict pre-existed; it was in the heart of the North-it was in the very structure of Northern society. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that such society should disaffirm a society in contradiction of it. It was not a matter of choice but of necessity that it should approve of acts against it. In possession of power, it flowed to political action on the South, as fluids flow to lower levels. The acts of individuals were unimportant. If I had possessed the power to change the mind of every Republican in Congress, I would not have been at pains to do so. They would but have fallen before an indignant constituency, and men would have been sent to their places whose minds could never change. Nor, in fact, have they been without their use. As the conflict was irrepressible; as they were urged on by an inexorable power, it was important we should know it. Our own political leaders refused to realize the fact. The zealots of the North alone could force the recognition; and I am bound to own that Giddings, and Greeley, and Seward, and Lincoln, parasites as they are, panderers to popular taste as they are, the instruments, and the mere instruments, of aggression, have done more to rouse us to the vindication of our rights than the bravest and the best among us. Such are some of the more obvious differences in form and constitution between these two societies which had come into contact within the limits of the recent Union. And perhaps it is not the least remarkable, in this connection, that while the one, a shapeless, organless, mere mass of social elements in no definite relation to each other, is loved and eulogized, and stands the ideal of the age, the other, comely and proportioned with labor and direction, mind and matter in just relation to each other, presenting analogy to the very highest developments in animated nature, is condemned and reprobated. Even we ourselves have hardly ventured to affirm it-while the cock crows, in fact, are ready to deny it; and if it shall not perish on the cross of human judgment, it must be for the reason that the Great Eternal has not purposed that still another agent of his will shall come to such excess of human ignominy. Such are the two forms of society which had come to contest within the structure of the recent Union. And the contest for existence was inevitable. Neither could concur in the requisitions of the other; neither could expand within the forms of a single government without encroachment on the other. Like twin lobsters in a single shell, if such a thing were possible, the natural expansion of the one must be inconsistent with the existence of the other; or, like an eagle and a fish, joined by an indissoluble bond, which for no reason of its propriety could act together, where the cagle could not share the fluid suited to the fish and live, where the fish could not share the fluid suited to the bird and live, and where one must perish that the other may survive, unless the unnatural union shall be severed- —so these societies could not, if they would, concur. The principle that races are unequal, and that among unequals inequality is right, would have been destructive to the Such, then, was the nature of this contest. It was inevitable. It was inaugurated with the Government. It began at the beginning, and almost at the start the chances of the game were turned against us. If the foreign slave trade had never been suppressed, slave society must have triumphed. It extended to the limits | of New Engand. Pari passu with emigrants from Europe came slaves from Africa. Step by step the two in union marched upon the West, and it is reasonably certain, had the means to further union been admitted, that so they would have continued to march upon the West, that slave labor would have been cheaper than hireling labor, that, transcending agriculture, it would have expanded to the arts; and that thus one homogeneous form of labor and one homogeneous form of society, unquestioned by one single dreamer, and cherished at home and honored abroad, would have overspread the entire available surface of the late United States. But the slave trade suppressed, democratic society has triumphed. The States of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, found an attractive market for their slaves. They found a cheaper pauper labor to replace it; that pauper labor poured in from Europe; while it replaced the slave it increased the political power of the Northern States. More than 5,000,000 from abroad have been added to their number; that addition has enabled them to grasp and hold the government. That government, from the very necessities of their nature, they are forced to use against us. Slavery was within its grasp, and, forced to the option of extinction in the Union, or of independence out, it dares to strike, and it asserts its claim to nationality and its right to recognition among the leading social systems of the world. Such, then, being the nature of the contest, this Union has been disrupted in the effort of slave society to emancipate itself; and the momentous question now to be determined is, shall that effort be successful? That the Republic of the South shall sustain her independence, there is little question. The form of our society is too pregnant of intellectual resources and military strength to be subdued, if, in its products, it did not hold the bonds of amity and peace upon all the leading nations of the world. But in the independence of the South is there surely the emancipation of domestic slavery? That is greatly to be doubted. Our property in slaves will be established. If it has stood in a government more than half of which has been pledged to its destruction, it will surely stand in a government every member of which will be pledged to its defence. But will it be established as a normal institution of society, and stand the sole exclusive social system of the South? That is the impending question, and the fact is yet to be recorded. That it will so stand somewhere at the South I do not entertain the slightest question. It may be overlooked or disregarded now. It has been the vital agent of this great controversy. It has energized the arm of every man who acts a part in this great drama. We may shrink from recognition of the fact; we may decline to admit the source of our authority; refuse to slavery an invitation to the table which she her self has so bountifully spread; but not for that will it remain powerless or unhonored. It may be abandoned by Virginia, Maryland, Missouri; South Carolina herself may refuse to espouse it. The hireling labor from the North and Europe may drive it from our seaboard. As the South shall become the centre of her own trade, the metropolis of her own commerce, the pauper population of the world will pour upon us. It may replace our slaves upon the seaboard, as it has replaced them in the Northern States; but, concentrated in the States upon the Gulf it will make its stand; condensed to the point at which the labor of the slave transcends the wants of agriculture, it will flow to other objects; it will lay its giant grasp upon still other departments of industry; its every step will be exclusive; it will be unquestioned lord of each domain on which it enters. With that perfect economy of resources, that just application of power, that concentration of forces, that security of order which results to slavery from the permanent direction of its best intelligence, there is no other form of human labor that can stand against it, and it will build itself a home and erect for itself, at some point within the present limits of the Southern States, a structure of imperial power and grandeur-a glorious Confederacy of States that will stand aloft and serene for ages amid the anarchy of democracies that will reel around it. But it may be that to this end another retolution may be necessary. It is to be apprehended that this contest between democracy and slavery is not yet over. It is certain that both forms of society exist within the limits of the Southern States; both are distinctly developed within the limits of Virginia; and there, whether we perceive the fact or not, the war already rages. In that State there are about 500,000 slaves to about 1,000,000 whites; and as at least as many slaves as masters are necessary to the constitution of slave society, about 500,000 of the white population are in legitimate relation to the slaves, and the rest are in excess. Like an excess of alkali or acid in chemical experiments, they are unfixed in the social compound. Without legitimate connection with the slave, they are in competition with him. They constitute not a part of slave society, but a democratic society. In so far as there is this connection, the State is slave; in so far as there is not, it is democratic; and as States speak only from their social condition, as interests, not intellect, determine their political action, it is thus that Virginia has been undecided-that she does not truly know whether she is of the North or South in this great movement. Her people are individually noble, brave, and patriotic, and they will strike for the South in resistance to physical aggression; but her political action is, at present, paralyzed by this unnatural contest, and as causes of disintegration may continue-must continue, if the slave trade be not re-opened-as there will still be a market at the South for her slaves-as there will still be pauper labor from abroad to supply their places, and more abundant from industrial dissolutions at the North, and the one race must increase as the other is diminished-it is to be feared that there the slave must ultimately fail, and that this great State must lose the institution, and bend her proud spirit to the yoke of another democratic triumph. In Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, and even Tennessee and North Carolina, the same facts exist with chances of the like result. Nor is it only in the towns the tendency appears. The slaves, from lighter lands within the State, have been drawn away for years for higher prices in the West. They are now being drawn away from rice culture. Thousands are sold from rice fields every year. None are brought to them. They have already been drawn from the culture of indigo and all manufacturing employments. They are yet retained by cotton and the culture incident to cotton; but as almost every negro offered in our markets is bid for by the West the drain is likely to continue. It is probable that more abundant pauper labor may pour in, and it is to be feared that even in this State, the purest in its slave condition, Democracy may gain a foothold, and that here also the contest for existence may be waged between them. And even in this State [South Carolina] the ultimate result is not determined. The slave condition here would seem to be established. There is here an excess of one hundred and twenty thousand slaves, and here is fairly exhibited the normal nature of the institution. The officers of the State are slave-owners, and the representatives of slave-owners. In their It thus appears that the contest is not ended with public acts they exhibit the consciousness of a a dissolution of the Union, and that the agents of superior position. Without unusual individual that contest still exist within the limits of the ability, they exhibit the elevation of tone and Southern States. The causes that have contribcomposure of public sentiment proper to a mas-uted to the defeat of slavery still occur; our ter class. There is no appeal to the mass, for there is no mass to appeal to; there are no demagogues, for there is no populace to breed them; judges are not forced upon the stump; governors are not dragged before the people; and when there is cause to act upon the fortunes of our social institution, there is perhaps an unusual readiness to meet it. The large majority of our people are in legitimate connection with the institution-in legitimate dependence on the slave; and it were to be supposed that here at least the system of slave society would be permanent and pure. But even here the process of disintegration has commenced. In our larger towns it just begins to be apparent. Within ten years past as many as ten thousand slaves have been drawn away from Charleston by the attractive prices of the West, and laborers from abroad have come to take their places. These laborers have every disposition to work above the slave, and if there were opportunity would be glad to do so; but without such opportunity they come to competition with him; they are necessarily resistive to the contact. Already there is the disposition to exclude him; from the trades, from public works, from drays, and the tables of hotels, he is even now excluded to a great extent. And when enterprises at the North are broken up; when more laborers are thrown from employment; when they shall come in greater numbers to the South, they will still more increase the tendency to exclusion; they will question the right of masters to employ their slaves in any works that they may wish for; they will invoke the aid of legislation; they will use the elective franchise to that end; they may acquire the power to determine municipal elections; they will inexorably use it; and thus this town of Charleston, at the very heart of slavery, may become a fortress of democratic power against it. As it is in Charleston, so also is it to a less extent in the interior towns. VOL. II.-Doc. 30 slaves are still drawn off by higher prices to the West. There is still foreign pauper labor ready to supply their place. Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Missouri, possibly Tennessee and North Carolina, may lose their slaves, as New York, Pennsylvania, aud New Jersey have. In that condition they must recommence the contest. There is no avoiding that necessity. The systems cannot mix; and thus it is that slavery, like the Thracian horse returning from the field of victory, still bears a master on his back; and, having achieved one revolution to escape Democracy at the North, it must still achieve another to escape it at the South. That it will ultimately triumph none can doubt. It will become redeemed and vindicated, and the only question now to be determined is, shall there be another revolution to that end? It is not necessary. Slavery within the seceding States at least is now emancipated, if men put forward as its agents have intrepidity to realize the fact and act upon it. It is free to choose its constitution and its policy, and you and others are now elected to the high office of that determination. If you shall elect slavery avow it and affirm it; not as an existing fact, but as a living principle of social order, and assert its right, not to toleration only, but to extension and to political recognition among the nations of the earth. If, in short, you shall own slavery as the source of your authority, and act for it, and erect, as you are commissioned to erect, not only a Southern, but a Slave Republic, the work will be accomplished. Those States intending to espouse and perpetuate the institution will enter your Confederacy; those that do not, will not. Your Republic will not require the pruning process of another revolution; but, poised upon its institutions, will move on to a career of greatness and of glory unapproached by any other nation in the world. But if you shall not; if you shall commence by ignoring slavery, or shall be content to edge it on by indirection; if you shall exhibit care | ed the slave as property, but not slavery as a but for a republic, respect but for a democ- relation. They have treated it as a prostiracy; if you shall stipulate for the toleration of tution, but have never yet espoused it. Their slavery as an existing evil by admitting assumptions to its prejudice and restrictions to its power and progress, you reinaugurate the blunder of 1789; you will combine States, whether true or not, to slavery; you will have no tests of faith; some will find it to their interest to abandon it; slave labor will be fettered; hireling labor will be free; your Confederacy is again divided into antagonistic societies; the irrepressible conflict is again commenced; and as slavery can sustain the structure of a stable government, and will sustain such structure, and as it will sustain no structure but its own, another revolution comes-but whether in the order and propriety of this, is gravely to be doubted. men of intellect have exhibited enlightened views upon this subject, but their politicians who have held the public ear have ever presented it as a thing of dollars, and to be fought for, if need be, but not to be cherished and perpetuated. And it is certain that when better opinions shall prevail; that when they join, if they shall join, a Slare Republic, a Republic to perpetuate the institution, when there shall be less inducement to sell their slaves, and the assurance that when they shall sell them they will fall under the rule of a democracy which must unfit them for association in a Slave Confederacy-the people of these States may not solicit an increase of Slaves? And is it policy to preclude the possibility of such an increase? Is it, then, in the just performance of your of But admit the change may never come, yet fice, that you would impose a constitutional re- against all the evils to result from the slave striction against the foreign slave trade? Will trade these States are competent to protect you affirm slavery by reprobating the means of themselves. The failure of the General Govits formation? Will you extend slavery by in-ernment to preclude that trade by constitutional troducing the means to its extinction? Will provision by no means precludes them from you declare to Virginia if she shall join, that such a prohibition. If they may never want under no circumstances shall she be at liberty them, they may keep them out, without the apto restore the integrity of her slave condition? plication of a Procustean policy to all the other that her five hundred thousand masters with- States of the Confederacy. It may be said out slaves shall continue? that the few slaves that without such general restriction the value she has shall still be subject to the requisitions of their slaves will be diminished in the marof the South and West? that she shall still be kets of the West. They have no right to ask subject to the incursions of white laborers, that their slaves, or any other products, shall be without the slaves to neutralize their social ten-protected to unnatural calue in the markets of dencies? and thus, therefore, that she must certainly submit to be abolitionized, and when so abolitionized, that she must be surely thrown off, to take her fortune with the Abolition States? Will you say the same to Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, and Tennessee? Will you declare to the State of South Carolina that, if the canker of democracy eats into her towns and cities; if her lighter lands are exposed, Is it that the Cotton States themselves reher forms of culture are abandoned, she must quire it? If so, each for itself may adopt the still submit to it? To Texas, that to her im- prohibition. But they do not. The political perial domain no other slaves shall come than leaders of the country are not ready for the those she may extort from older States; and proposition, as they were not ready for the that she must submit to be the waste she is, or measure of secession. Many leaders of the else accept the kind of labor that must demor-South, many men who meet you in Convention, alize the social nature of the State? Will you do this, and yet say that you erect slavery and affirm it, and, in your ministrations at its altar, own it as the true and only source of your authority? Individually, I am sure you will not. I am too well assured of your intelligent perception of the questions at issue, and of your devotion to the great cause you have espoused, to entertain a doubt on that subject; but others may, and that I may meet suggestions likely to arise, I will task your indulgence further. the West. If they persist in regarding the ne gro but as a thing of trade-a thing which they are too good to use, but only can produce for others' uses-and join the confederacy as Pennsylvania or Massachusetts might do, not to support the structure, but to profit by it, it were as well they should not join, and we can find no interest in such association. have been forced to that position by a popular movement they had never the political courage to direct; and so, perhaps, in any case the whole machinery of society must start before the political hands upon the dial plate can indicate its progress; and so, therefore, as this question is not moved-as the members of this Congress are charged to perfect the dissolution of the old Government, but have not been instructed as to this permanent requisition of the new— they may be mistaken, as they would have been Then why adopt this measure? Is it that mistaken, if by chance they had met six months Virginia and the other Border States require it? ago and spoken upon the question of secession. They may require it now, but is it certain they And they are mistaken, if, from any reference will continue to require it? Virginia and the to popular feeling, they inaugurate the action rest have never yet regarded slavery as a nor- now proposed. The people of the Cotton States mal institution of society. They have regard- I want labor; they know that whites and slaves |