ness

by more than one of the States. . . . The result of such interference, if persevered in, is awful and inevitable. The people of Georgia know and feel strongly the advantages of the federal Union. As members of that Union they are proud of its greatas children born under that Union, they love it with filial affection as parties of that Union, they will ever defend it from foes, internal or external; but they cannot and will not, even for the preservation of that Union, permit their rights to be assailed they will not permit their property to be rendered worthless — they will not permit their country to be made waste and desolate," by those who come among us under the cloak of a time-serving and hypocritical benevolence."... How, then, is this evil to be remedied? Only by a firm and determined union of the people and the States of the South, declaring through their legislative bodies, in a voice which must be heard, that they are ready and willing to make any sacrifice rather than submit longer to such ruinous interference; and warning their enemies that they are unwittingly preparing a mine, which once exploded, will lay our much-loved country in one common ruin. Your committee hope that such a calamity is yet far distant, and that there is still remaining in the Congress of the Union sufficient discretion, intelligence, and patriotism to avert it altogether. With that hope, they deem it unnecessary now to do more than recommend the adoption of the following resolutions:

Resolved, by the Senate and House of Representatives of the State of Georgia, in General Assembly met, That the Congress of the United States have no constitutional power to appropriate moneys to aid the American Colonization Society, or for objects to effect which that Society was established.1 . . .

1 Nothing could show more strikingly the progress of the spirit of apprehension in the South in the decade following the Missouri Compromise than the comparison of this resolution with the commendation, ten years earlier, of the objects of the American Colonization Society, in an editorial in the influential Georgia Journal (January 1, 1817): "If the Government [of the United States] will find means of conveying out of the country such slaves as may be emancipated," it concludes, "and would likewise purchase annually a certain number. . . for transportation, it is believed our black population would soon become harmless,

(d)

RESOLUTION OF THE LEGISLATURE OF

SOUTH CAROLINA

.. Should Congress claim the power to discuss and take a vote upon any question connected with domestic slavery of the Southern States, it is not for your committee to prescribe what course ought to be adopted to counteract the evil and dangerous tendency of public discussions of this nature. The minds of our citizens are already made up that if such discussion appertain as a matter of right to Congress, it will be neither more nor less than the commencement of a system by which the peculiar policy of South Carolina, upon which is predicated her resources and her prosperity, will be shaken to its very foundation. In the opinion of your committee, there is nothing in the catalogue of human ills which may not be preferred to that state of affairs in which the slaves of our state shall be encouraged to look for any melioration of their condition to any other body than the Legislature of South Carolina. Your committee forbear to dwell on this subject. It is a subject on which no subject of South Carolina needs instruction. One common feeling inspires us all with a firm determination not to submit to a species of legislation which would light up such fires of intestine commotion in our borders as ultimately to consume our country.

The distinguished French scholar and statesman Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in 1831, wrote sympathetically of the dilemma with which the South believed itself to be face to face namely, the maintenance of slavery or the ruin of society.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races

if not extinct. To the importance of such an object, the expense will bear no comparison; and a more favorable period than the present for its accomplishment can scarcely be expected.” - A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vol. II, ed. U. B. Phillips, p. 158.

in the Southern States. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and, as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies. In the North, everything facilitated the emancipation of the slaves; and slavery was abolished without rendering the free Negroes formidable, since their number was too small for them ever to claim their rights. But such is not the case in the South. The question of slavery was a commercial and manufacturing question for the slave-owners in the North; for those of the South, it is a question of life and death. God forbid that I should seek to justify the principle of Negro slavery, as has been done by some American writers! I say only, that all the countries which formerly adopted that execrable principle are not equally able to abandon it at the present time.

When I contemplate the condition of the South, I can only discover two modes of action for the white inhabitants of those States; viz. either to emancipate the Negroes, and to intermingle with them, or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races. Such is the view which the Americans of the South take of the question, and they act consistently with it. As they are determined not to mingle with the Negroes, they refuse to emancipate them.

Not that the inhabitants of the South regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the planter; on this point many of them agree with their Northern countrymen, in freely admitting that slavery is prejudicial to their interests; but they are convinced that the removal of this evil would peril their own existence. Hence arises a singular contrast; the more the utility of slavery is contested, the more firmly it is established in the laws; and whilst its principle is gradually abolished in the North, that self-same principle gives rise to more and more vigorous consequences in the South.

...

If it be impossible to anticipate a period at which the Americans of the South will mingle their blood with that of the Negroes, can they allow their slaves to become free without compromising their own security? And if they are obliged to keep that race in bondage in order to save their own families, may they not be excused for availing themselves of the means best adapted to that end? The events which are taking place in the Southern States appear to me to be at once the most horrible and the most natural results of slavery. When I see the order of nature overthrown, and when I hear the cry of humanity in its vain struggle against the laws, my indignation does not light upon the men of our own time who are the instruments of these outrages; but I reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought back slavery into the world.

once more.

Whatever may be the efforts of the Americans of the South to maintain slavery, they will not always succeed. Slavery, now confined to a single tract of the civilized earth, attacked by Christianity as unjust, and by political economy as prejudicial, and now contrasted with democratic liberty and the intelligence of our age, cannot survive. By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case, great calamities may be expected to ensue. If liberty be refused to the Negroes of the South, they will, in the end, forcibly seize it for themselves; if it be given, they will, erelong, abuse it.1

1 This entire passage shows how futile it is for a historian, even if he have the genius of a De Tocqueville, to indulge in prophecy, and especially to prophesy in dilemmas. The negro was set at liberty neither by the act of the master nor by the will of the slave; he probably desired freedom as little, on the whole, as he has abused it; and as for the fundamental dilemma on which the whole discussion of De Tocqueville rests-slavery or amalgamation- the two races have lived side by side for half a century without prejudice to the integrity and supremacy of the whites.

TEXAS. In the House of Lor Lord Brougham introduced the slavery in the following manner

Lord Brougham said that, se head of the Foreign Departmen obtain some information from hi interest at the present time, nam in a state of independence, de f never been acknowledged by M was torn by the events of the re its independence had been so far [England] that we had a treaty w

The importance of Texas co It was a country of the greatest

1 For the fate of the treaty see Mu 2 Lord Aberdeen, Secretary of cabinet of Sir Robert Peel.

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