SLAVERY NO REAL SOURCE OF ALARM.

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and cruelty, and the "slave power" afforded them a ready and an ample theme.

The moral and political consideration, that the States of the Union constituted one country, under one government, agreed to by all; and that to stir up hostility against a part of the States, on account of an existing and ineradicable fact, was to begin a needless and unjust domestic quarrel against the welfare and peace of the whole-suggested to these persons no conscientious scruples; or, if so, they paid such scruples no regard. Morally, they had no more concern with Southern slavery than the rest of the world. Politically, it was a matter of no real consequence to Northern interests, supposing that Northern interests were fairly entitled to regard, separately from the common good; for, in reality, the North far surpassed the South in numbers and political power, to which every year was contributing a large increase. In combination with the outright abolitionists and the antislavery advocates, in general, they deluged the land with lectures and tracts, upon the threatening approaches of this terrific power, which, however boastfully, was yet actually trembling at the time for its own defence; and, doubtless, in many a New England village, crowds of ignorant women clasped their children closer to their bosoms; and men, scarcely better informed, listened with gaping mouths, in vague dread of the advance of a hypothetical monster, gloomy, coiling, and insatiable, which, if not timely resisted, was soon to enclose the common country in its ferocious and fatal embrace.

Is this picture in the least overcharged? Such an idea as the following, presented in a speech by Mr. Seward, delivered at Rochester, N. Y., at a somewhat later date (25th of October, 1858), was well calculated to foster the idea, and stamp deeper the apprehension, and does credit to his rhetorical powers, however it may impress us in the light of philosophy or of fact:

"Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will be ultimately tilled by free labor, and Charleston

and New Orleans become the marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men!" 1

The agitators and alarmists, on the score of "the slave power" hallucination, in general, animated by the vote which they had obtained in the late election, though insignificant in relation to the entire sum, renewed their efforts to stir up popular sentiment. There were other causes, resulting from dissatisfaction in certain quarters, at the postponement or neglect of the claims of competitors for the presidency, on both sides; and especially at the preference accorded to General Taylor by the Whigs. These tended to the promotion of their objects. The new President was held up by Democrats, and by certain of the impracticable Whigs, as "an available candidate" merely; as if his great popularity constituted his only pretensions to the exalted office to which he had been chosen; and as if this well-earned popular favor, due to public acts known to all men, and to plain, but remarkable and admirable characteristics equally well understood, formed a reason against, instead of one of a substantial nature in support of his nomination.*

1 There can be no doubt that this representation had a serious influence upon popular sentiment, except among those who were capable of distinguishing its absurdity. For every one at all familiar with the subject is aware that rice fields cannot be tilled by white men, with any regard to human life, and cotton plantations and sugar plantations certainly to much less advantage than by blacks; while, with respect to the rye fields and wheat fields specified, as to be again surrendered to slave culture, every one knows that they were never so used, except in quite a limited sense. As to the "production of slaves," it was a scandalous imputation without any grounds whatThe climate and nature of their products mainly regulated the kind of labor employed in the two sections. In the South, the blacks were always principally laborers in the country; in the North, they were principally servants in the cities and larger towns.

ever.

2 How far his administration tended to justify the popular choice, during his brief term of office, appears in a very marked manner from the species of eulogy pronounced upon him, at its close, by leading Democrats in Congress,

PLANS OF THE FREESOILERS.

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This presentation of an unexceptionable candidate, of whose election there could be no doubt, was urged as a deviation from true principle: especially by persons who had shown their own regard for principle by abandoning the great national organizations with which they had previously acted, and by connecting themselves in active coöperation with a faction, in the service of which they might hope for more speedy promotion. For, although the Whig party in Massachusetts, for example, had cast more than sixty thousand votes for General Taylor-on the other hand, the Freesoil vote had risen to nearly forty thousand. In the one, the standard for eminent office was yet quite beyond the pretensions of those, whose talents for agitation were repressed, while subject to its law, by the constitutional principles and action of their party associates. In the other, they were well qualified to take the lead; and with such subjects of agitation at hand, and with such an aggregate of numbers already secured, it seemed by no means impossible, that, by active exertions, they might eventually obtain for the Freesoil party an actual plurality of the popular vote of the State. At all events, they were despondent of obtaining the objects of their ambition in the ranks of their own party, and they resolved, therefore, by whatever means, to break it down, and to build up another more conformable to their purposes, upon its ruins. In the mean time, the Whigs lived in a state of false security. They looked upon these factionists very much as Mr. Burke told the electors of Bristol he regarded the rage of his more violent opponents: "The highest flight of such clamorous birds is winged in an inferior region of the air. We hear them, and we look upon them just as you, gentlemen, when you enjoy the serene air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the gulls, that skim the mud of your river,

when it is exhausted of its tide."

as well as leading Whigs. See speeches on the occasion, of Messrs. Webster, Cass, King, Berrien, and others in the Senate; and of Messrs. Conrad, Winthrop, Baker, Hilliard, and others in the House, reported in Congressional Globe, and vol. xvi. of the "Abridgment of Debates."

That profound theologian and philosopher, Bishop Butler, is said to have suggested the idea, that, by possibility, all mankind are mad. Whatever conclusions might be justified by careful speculation upon this point, it seems certain that the main body of a people may become so possessed of a delusion, as to approach very nearly to the confines of insanity. The Northern masses, who gave way to the antislavery excitement, acted upon false premises. A madman's conduct is rational enough upon the grounds which prompt his action. A child mounts a stick, and imagines himself on horseback. The range of a madman's fancies becomes circumscribed, or morbidly enlarged, and he lives within his own circle of thought in relations to that alone. He assumes, for instance, that he is a king, and makes use of the best means at his command to indicate his royal dignity. Under the former inhuman and ignorant mode of treatment practised towards such unhappy patients, he would wrap his tattered blanket around his naked limbs, in guise of a robe of state, and hold up a straw from his pallet for a mimic sceptre. That part of the Northern population, out of whose ignorance and excitable temperament the antislavery agitation was worked up into a wide-spread hallucination, assumed, and was instructed by those who knew better to assume, that negro slavery in the Southern States comprehended all the worst evils and vices of every description of bondage, in every nation and in every age.

It was on this theory that multitudes conceived themselves called upon to spare no pains to extinguish a system of such enormous wrong; and that no human statutes could justly restrain them from the discharge of superior obligations to the "Higher Law." The fault, or misfortune, was, that no real foundation existed for the assumption upon which they proceeded. Of all forms of involuntary restraint, under which one class of human beings is subjected to the control of another class, that exerted by Southern masters and mistresses over their slaves was the mildest and least objection

A POPULAR ERROR EXPLODED.

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able.' The evidence of this fact is complete, from the relations of numerous impartial foreign witnesses; but the negative evidence is still more conclusive; for it is not known that, among the whole four millions of Southern blacks, any one has been found to have complained of grievous wrong from his owner to the armies which have penetrated their country. Indeed, it had always been the practice of Southern families, in their visits to the North, to be attended by their household servants of either sex; and though the fanatics spared no pains to entice them from their masters; and though such was the condition of the law, at the period in question, and the mode of its administration, that freedom, when they were on Northern soil, was really at their own option, the instances were almost unknown of such slaves abandoning the service to which they were accustomed, and to which it may, hence, be assumed, they were attached.

It is equally certain, that the aggregate number of those who were seduced from their homes by the unceasing efforts of the abolitionists, during a series of years, was really inconsiderable. When the troops of the United States took possession of St. Helena, Port Royal, and finally of Beaufort, in South Carolina, early in the war, Northern chaplains wrote home letters, which were published, expressing their surprise that they saw no mulattoes or children of mixed races in that quarter. The statement was grudgingly received by many, who had held up the idea of widely prevalent habits of licentiousness in the Southern States. A little reflection, elevated and instructed by a certain degree of charity, might have led to the conclusion, that where temptations of the kind alluded to had the longest existed, among a Christian people, the social guards would be likely to be the most strict. Allowing for all exceptional cases of the kind, certainly Southern matrons and maids would be far from submitting to the insult implied in any such promiscuous concubinage; and it is well known that white men lost

1 See Webster, 7th March Speech, pamphlet edition, p. 3.