negro

No man is to be permitted, on pain of punishment, to argue that slavery is sinful, or that religion condemns it. We are required to go back to the spirit of those days when it was held to be seditious to question, by speech or writing, the idea on which the existing Government was based; to the Tudor and Stuart age of England: the only difference being that while under the old English rule, it was punishable as sedition to question the right divine of Kings, under the new Southern rule, sedition is to be punished when it questions the right divine of slavery. It will be a remarkable experiment, in the nineteeth century, to establish a government upon a principle which will not bear question, or suffer an argument touching its truth or its merits. The despotism of Naples recently went down, crushed by the difficulties and the odium of maintaining, in these modern days, a similar state of things.

The second condition demanded of us is, that the North, before it is admitted to Southern fellowship, shall cast off six of her States; thus curtailing her power and her possessions by the surrender of nearly one-fifth of her population and more than one-fifth of her wealth.

And here discloses itself the Hercules foot of this most audacious scheme. Think of proposing to Great Britain, that she should set Scotland adrift, or to France that she should detach and abandon all Normandy! When was dismemberment ever dreamed of or demanded, except by a victor from a prostrate foe?

And will no other demands be made based on the same relative condition of the contracting parties? The Southern insurrection will have cost its authors a thousand millions, at the least. Can any man doubt that the North, once entrapped into this base compact, will be held to pay her full share of that stupendous sum?-not only to accept as justifiable an insurrection against lawful authority, but to pay what that insurrection cost? And will nothing be included in that cost but the bare expenses of the war? Is it not certain, beyond possible doubt, that there will be thousands upon thousands of claims for damages-for plantations ruined, for dwellings destroyed, for cotton burnt, for hundreds of thousands of slaves lost-from every Southern State that has been reached by our arms? and that these claims will amount to hundreds of millions, exceeding probably the war expenses themselves? On whom is to be imposed the enormous tax that is to pay for these ravages of war? On whom but on those who inflicted them? And when such a tax is levied and paid by you, what acknowledgment can be imagined more practically conclusive of the admission that the so-called insurrection was no insurrection at all, but, on the contrary, a noble war for

liberty and independence, just in its inception, triumphant in its result?

Their hewers of wood and drawers of water we should become; the recorders of their edicts; the submissive agents to execute their good pleasure!

And if we yield now, so should we be! If with half the territory constituting the Slave States virtually in our possession, we accept at the hands of armed enemies the very plan they themselves had chalked out before a cannon was fired, richly shall we deserve our fate! Under such a plan the insurgents would not merely have secured their own independence: conquerors over us, they would have mastered ours. mercy to expect? Woe to the vanquished!

Have we

Let there be no self-deception. If we are to do this thing, let us look it honestly in the face, and make plain to ourselves what it is we are doing. We give up; we surrender; we acknowledge (twenty millions against six) that we are beaten. Yet that is a trifle: the bravest may be defeated; the holiest cause may fail. But we, if we take this step, must consent to repentance as well as to submission. Before the world we must confess our sins. Before the world our acts must declare, that from the first, we were in the wrong and the South in the right. Before the world our acts must declare, that a thousand millions have been squandered-that a hundred thousand brave men have sunk from the battle-field to the grave-all in a disgraceful warfare, all in an iniquitous cause.

And the retrospect, when this war, thus stigmatized as aggressive and faithless, is brought to a shameful close! The scene, when the thinned ranks of a hundred Indiana regiments, whose gallant deeds, untarnished by a single disgrace, have been till now the pride and boast of their State-the scene of bitter humiliation, when these brave and war-worn men shall return to find themselves degraded from patriots to marauders; their labors counted but an outrage, their wounds a disgrace; shall return, to hear their dead comrades spoken of as mercenaries hired by the oppressor, and justly overtaken by the oppressor's fate; shall return, to find the war-made widow pensionless, the soldier's orphan cast helpless on the mercy of the world!

And then the scene-it may be far more terrible yet-when Indiana, base and craven, shall put forth her hand attempting to sign the compact of degradation!

Attempting to sign! Will the attempt ever be consummated? In peace, without bloodshed, without the hand of brother raised against brother, of father against son-never! Until Indiana shall have shared a worse fate than Missouri or

Kentucky, or Virginia; until her fields shall be desolate, her cities spoiled, her substance wasted; until we shall have learned, by sickening experience, the nightly terrors, the daily horrors of civil war-never! Will the men who have stood firm while shot and shell decimated their ranks, turn cowards on their return to their native State, and patiently suffer. it? So sure as God lives, never-never!

Let Indiana, belying the courage she has shown on the battle field, casting from her the last remnant of self-respect, false to her constitutional obligations, blind to a future of abject servility, deaf alike to the warnings of revolutionary wisdom and to the voice of Civilization speaking to-day in her ears-let Indiana, selling Freedom's birthright for less than Esau's price, resolve to purchase Southern favor by Northern dismemberment and the world-wide contempt that would follow it-but let her know, before she enters that path of destruction, that her road will lie over the bodies of her murdered sons, past prostrate cabins, past ruined farms, through all the desolation that fire and sword can work. Let her know, that before she can link her fate to a system that is as surely doomed to ultimate extinction as the human body is finally destined to death, there will be a war within her own borders to which all we have yet endured, will be but as the summer's gale, that scatters a few branches over the highway, compared to the hurricane that plows its broad path of ruin, mile after mile, leaving behind, in its track, a prostrate forest, harvest crops uprooted, and human habitations overthrown.

But the hurricane is of God's sending. Whether the tempest of war, from which He has hitherto mercifully preserved our State, shall now sweep over it, as it has swept over the illfated Southern border, depends, Citizens of Indiana, upon you. Courage, prudence, patriotism will avert it. Faint-heartedness and folly will bring it down upon our heads. If it come, God help the present generation that has to endure it! God help. our children after us, to whom we bequeath a North-West steeped in scandalous dependence, so long as she submits to her masters, and a prey to a second civil war, so soon as she awakes to her true condition, and draws the sword once more, to redeem the errors of the past!

March 4, 1863.

ROBERT DALE OWEN.

But in the Dred Scott case the opinion delivered by the Court was based on principles, the etical application of which appears to establish the right of an owner of slaves to their "service labor" throughout life, no matter where that life may be spent.

Chief Justice Taney, in that opinion, declares: That negroes imported from Africa, were ought here as articles of merchandise;" that in every one of the thirteen colonies which ned the Constitution of the United States, "a negro of the African race was regarded as an cle of property, and held and bought and sold as such," and that, at the time the Constitution adopted, the negro was "treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a it could be made by it." As such Chief Justice regards him.

Dred Scott, the plaintiff in this case, a slave owned in Missouri by Dr. Emerson, had been en by his owner into Illinois, kept there two years, then kept two years in a Territory of the ted States north of the Missouri Compromise line, while that Compromise was in force, and then been brought back to Missouri.

The Court, after reciting that "Scott was a slave when taken into the State of Illinois and e held as such," decided that when brought back to Missouri he remained a slave, inasmuch his status, as free or slave, depended on the laws of Missouri, not of Illinois."

So also of his residence in a Territory declared free by a law of the United States. The Court the law to be unconstitutional and void, because the Constitution recognizes a slave as property, "makes no distinction between that property and any other." And the Court decides that t cannot be liberated under such a law.

l'hough the question did not come before the Court for decision, whether Scott could have been 1 for life as a slave in Illinois, yet it is a fair inference from the above, that that question also ld be decided in the affirmative. Either Scott, while residing with Dr. Emerson in Illinois, his slave or he was not. If his slave, as the words of Chief Justice Taney would imply, then eholders may hold their slaves to service and labor in a Free State. If not his slave, he was a man. But if a freeman, how could any law of Missouri be held again to reduce him to slavery? In the Lemmon case (before the New York Court of Appeals, January, 1860), in which the stion came up, whether slaves owned by a Virginian in transit through the State of New York me free, the Court decided (five against three) in favor of the slaves. But the arguments of counsel (O'Conor) assigned by the State of Virginia for the slaveowner, clearly indicate the acter and extent of Southern claims in this matter, and the principles upon which these are d. He said: "Property in African negroes is not an exception to any general rule. Upon onal principles it is no more local or peculiar than any other property." And he argued that a e has the same right to declare a wife who might be brought within its limits to be "free n all obligations of that condition," as to declare the same thing of a slave.

It is to be conceded that no Court has yet made a decision in conformity with the claims here forth, on behalf of Virginia. But can the nature and extent of the rights demanded by the th be doubted or misunderstood? And whenever a Senate with a perpetual Southern majority I have the control of nominations for Judges of the Supreme Court, is it not morally certain the decision, in the premises, of Judges thus selected will be in favor of Virginia's claims?