It was on the eastern bank of the Upper Delaware, in easy view of where, on both sides, the rocky hills are separated from the rocky river by the well paid labor of men, who had been sent to us by European misrule and oppression. So—though woes await the oppressor—so good cometh out of evil.

It was a cold morning; and it was made more dreary by the falling, driving, and beating, sleet and snow. In contrast with the almost summer-like weather that had immediately preceded it, for invalids particularly, its character approached almost even to the hideous. But even then and there, a comfortable and thankful little family party was cosily seated around a breakfast table. It was in a small stove-room. Adjoining it was a kitchen, not less comfortable. It was occupied by a neat handed and newly and warmly clad Irish girl,—a good natured and faithful creature. She was one of the survivors of a packed cargo of emigrants from the almost desolated Connaught;—the daughter of a family, by oppression separated for the ever of this world.

The breakfast party consisted of the host, the wife, the sister, two young daughters, and the DOCTOR;—a favorite and friendly guest. He was an old acquaintance of the host; and bad been with him through the hot sands and deep swamps, and many trials and perils in the far South, then perils there were real and not imaginary. In many labors, the Doctor had aided him. In many sorrows, he had wept with him. In many joys he had rejoiced with him. Of course, then, the Doctor was almost more than at home, in the retirement of his friend, on the banks and among the hills of the Delaware. Therefore, naturally and suitably he introduced and opened the following

THE DOCTOR. Taking from his pocket a newspaper:—“Ladies; here is something highly important; and of special interest and concern to yourselves.”

WIFE. In a semi-apparent alarm:—“TO us? How, Doctor?”

DR. “To the women of this country, the noble and the simple women of England,—from duchesses down to plain misses,—address a petition to aid them, in the charitable work of subverting the institution of southern slavery;— or, at least to begin with, so to interfere with it as to prevent its ‘frightful results.’”

SISTER. “What frightful results? Are the negroes starving to death, like the poor people of Ireland and Scotland? and even of England and Germany?”

FIRST DAUGHTER. “Or are they turned out of their cabins, and hunted away from their homes, as our good Peggy says the poor Irish women and children are, by thousands upon thousands; and that they may never get back to them, their poor hovels are all burnt down to the ground?”

SECOND DAUGHTER. In tears: “Oh! I hope my dear old black friends who were so good to me; and Uncle Raphe, who used to carry me before him to school on the poney, are not turned out of doors to suffer!”

HOST. “No fear of that, my daughters; they are no doubt as unsuffering and comfortable this cold morning, as even you could reasonably desire them to be. But, Doctor, let us hear what it really is that the noble ladies of England want of our republican women; and what are the frightful things they have discovered in the condition of our southern slaves?”

THE DR. Having very solemnly read the Address: “Shall I read all these titles and names?”

WIFE. “Certainly, Dr., let us hear them; by all means.”

THE DR. “There then, you have them, ladies; from the Duchess of Sutherland to Mrs. Rowland Hill.”

SISTER. “Mrs. Charles Dickens, inclusive. I wonder if Mrs. Charles Dickens has read Oliver Twist and the Bleak House? They might point her to other work to be done, nearer home, than our Southern States; where there is no poor Oliver ‘to want more,’ nor poor homeless Joe, who could not have had less.”

THE DR. “Mrs. Charles Dickens reads the COURT JOURNAL, and attends the aristocratic opera; and probably, sometimes goes to the Royal Chapel; and she must not therefore be expected to read, or to know any thing about such little dirty and starving humanities as Oliver Twist and poor Joe.”

WIFE. “Of course not. And as her husband insulted our country, it is not wonderful that she should embrace such an illustrious opportunity to add an injury to the insult.”

THE DR. “Well ladies, what is your intention to do In this matter? Of course, so polite a communication on a subject so important, must not be silently neglected.”

HOST. “No fear but that the convention women will have a special general convention, for the express objects of concocting a suitable and learned Reply to the Address of the Convention at Stafford House; and the organizing of a female crusade to unite its power and influence with that of the aristocratic organization on the other side of the water.

VERY pleasant is the memory of having found comfort, where discomfort was expected to be found, and joys, where sorrows were looked for; and happiness, where I had been taught that only misery could dwell. This pleasure of memory is a boon of great value to my declining life, in my almost solitary retirement, in the narrow valley of the upper Delaware. It is usually obedient to my behest, too, to cheer my solitude; and never more pleasant, than when it revives some of the unlooked for scenes of the sunny South, among the joyous children of the Sun in servitude; with whom I had been taught to look for unhappiness alone. Almost twenty years ago, my thoughts were turned towards the South, in the hope of benefit to a constitution impaired by the wear and tear of northern life, to which it was not originally well adapted. By the urgent suggestion of many anxious friends, I should have gone South, long years before; but that from an unfortunate prejudice, I had contracted a loathing dislike of the Southern institution of slavery.

I had seen misery and suffering in many and dreadful forms among the poor; and often with added oppression by the less poor, and by the rich. Often had I seen women and children turned out of doors; and their little furniture sold by the law, to pay the rent of the wretched habitation, from which they had been ejected, and thrown upon the cold charity of a cold world. And, in my frail health, I trembled with the painful apprehension of seeing more cruel things at the South—chains and lashes and mangled limbs—human beings treated as beasts of prey!

Often had I seen the unhappy laborer in a vain and sad pursuit of leave to toil for food and fuel, to save his poor wife and children from hunger and cold; and I have seen the grateful tear bathe his honest and hardy cheek, when gratuitous relief was urged upon him. Recently had I witnessed the sweeping death by cholera, breaking into the abodes of poverty, unresisted; and gorging himself unrebuked, and undisturbed by the also well-fed mortals around—calling themselves Christians!

By some strange and unhappy, but perhaps not uncommon illusion, I had been impressed by the false and injurious notion, that a cruel bondage of the southern slave was an addition to all these sufferings of northern poverty.

It was with neither views nor hopes, of finding relief from the illusion, that, on an early day in November, with trembling reluctance, I stepped on the deck of a ship bound for Charleston; where I looked to witness the very horrors of slavery. Among the passengers,—some going in pursuit of health, and some returning to their homes to enjoy its possession,—there were several agreeable southern ladies; and three southern gentlemen, of characteristics too well marked, to be easily forgotten. One of them was a no mean poet—now a celebrated and favorite author, in both prose and poetry; the others, a father and son, of the best class of planters. The poet had been making a northern tour for amusement, in the primitive meaning of the term. The father had accompanied his charming family, for the improvement of their mental and physical health by travel; and the son, an intelligent, robust, gentle, and joyous young man of twenty, had passed a portion of the season in superintending the work of a piano maker in the erection of an instrument for his own use. He had with him a German teacher of music and mathematics.

So unexpectedly pleasant was our voyage, that some of us, outward bound, would willingly have protracted it. On the third day, having passed “Mason's and Dixon's Line,” the general conversation of the passengers, easily and naturally fell into the discussion of Southern Slavery. Some of us turned away from the subject with deep distaste, as one that should be tabooed in every promiscuous company; lest some super-sensitive philanthropist should perchance be too painfully shocked.

At that time, blinded by a sickly and ignorant prejudice, I should have vied with the rabidest of abolitionists in gloating over the down-trodden law of the land and of all lands, tolerating the abominable thing. This, per se, is not a pleasant memory. It is humiliating, to be obliged to admit, among the happy things of memory, such a justly mortifying recollection of a disgraceful and degrading prejudice. It even makes me shudder to think of it!

But then, I find a miserable comfort—still a comfort— in the knowledge, that far greater, wiser, and better men, have been not less deeply involved in the same palpable darkness. When Wilberforce, and Clarkson, with their illustrious compeers; and the whole body of Friends— among them many wise and excellent persons, come up before my mind's eye;—and when I think of all these, as devoting their lives and talents, and making great personal and pecuniary sacrifices, to abolish negro slavery;—when I remember Johnson's toast of ‘Success to the next Jamaica insurrection;’—when I hear, above the thunder of the Mountain of the Decalogue, the maxim of Dr. Channing—‘Any thing but Slavery!’—and now especially, when the titled, and other excellent women of England, are found weeping over the fictions of negro sufferings, and with bleeding hearts, appealing to the women of America, to aid in the holy cause of softening them; I feel boldness to look back on my former self with less of displacency.

But to return from this digression to the conversation on the ship's deck. It soon became animated, and unexpectedly interesting. My attention was irresistibly arrested by the strangely sounding declaration of the father, before named:—

“Had I my life to live over again, and could I advisedly make my choice, to be either the master of a large number of good slaves, or the slave of a good master, so far as the ease and comfort of life are concerned, I am sure my judgment would prefer the latter. I cannot say I should so choose,” he added; “for pride, or vanity, or some other folly or vice, might influence me to choose less wisely.”

He was one of the most sober, calm, and sensible of men, and from his character and manner, it was impossible to question his sincerity. He was gazed at by many of us with surprise; but not unmingled with reverence; for he had already been received among us as the true and accredited representative of all that is excellent in man:— piety, purity, honesty, and benevolence.

“You present an even stronger case than does the author of the ‘West India Journal,’ M. G. Lewis,” said the poet, “in favor of the negro's condition in slavery.”

“What says the Monk?” said the younger Mr. R. “In 1816, he thus wrote, what, unfortunately, remained till this year, in manuscript, in consequence of his death, on his return voyage two years later:

“If I were now standing on the banks of Virgil's Lethe, with a goblet of the waters of oblivion in my hand, and asked whether I chose to enter life anew, as an English laborer or a Jamaica negro, I should have no hesitation in preferring the latter.”

“That was saying very little in commendation of the condition of the slave,” remarked an English Chartist; “for I would prefer to be of the race of the Baboon, than be of the degenerate race of English laborers,—man, woman, or child,—dwarfed and deformed, as the mass of them are physically; and mentally and morally depraved almost to the level of the brute; and many of the less miserable below, by hunger, hardship, and hatred. But the declaration of Mr. R. surprises me.”

“And some other of our fellow passengers,” respectfully added the poet, “seem to look on your declaration as coming in a questionable shape.”

“It is quite true,” remarked one of the northern invalids, “we have been accustomed to hear slavery spoken of far otherwise than as a desirable condition; and for one, I should feel myself obliged by an explanation of the paradox, that the condition of a good slave of a good master, is happier than that of the good master of a good slave.”

“Such, I believe,” replied the venerable man, “were not my words, exactly; for they would contradict one of my most cherished and favorite principles;—that the truly good are equally happy in all conditions or stations of life. My meaning was,—perhaps not as definitely expressed as it should have been—that, as far as comfort is concerned, the condition of the slave is quite as desirable as that of the master,—the master and man both being what they ought to be in their respective stations. And this may be easily explained and verified; paradox as it may seem, or sound.”

In an aside, by a passenger,—“nothing can make slavery desirable.”

“Yes, comparatively;” in an under tone, said the poet, “and generally, if not always, for the negro race.”

“At my first coming to manhood, I was the only son of my mother, and she a widow. My father had died and left her with four children, myself and three younger sisters. During her life, as the widow of our father, she was to remain in the proprietorship of the estate and head of the family. When their school days were over, so long as they should remain unmarried, my sisters were to aid me in the management of the estate and household, under the eye and approbation of our mother; and when married, with her consent, certain legacies were to be paid them from an accumulated fund, and from the produce of the plantation; but not by infringement on it. It was not to be diminished in size, nor the number of the people, by sale or purchase, to be either diminished or increased.

“It had been the unvarying rule of my father, that no negro child was to be taken from the personal care of its mother until ten years old; and no old man or woman be required to work after seventy. This rule was to be religiously pursued. It has been, and will be; and under it we have a dozen or more old people, all things considered, more comfortable than I expect to be, should I live to their age.

“By a provision in my father's will, the system was to be forever continued, of allotments of land to each family of negroes, equal to an acre for each member, between ten and seventy, with time to work it equal to half a day in every week; that the Lord's day might never be desecrated by secular employment.

IN our pleasant passage of three days to St. Augustine, we witnessed with wonder and delight, the sublime, enchanting, and most gorgeous phenomenon, of the descent of a protracted shower of meteors, which frightened and alarmed so many people on the night of the 13th Nov., 1833. It was a glorious sight beyond any thing our eyes had ever beheld, or ever again are likely to behold in this world.

A brief description of it may not be quite uninteresting. The previous sunset was remarkable, and a fitting herald of the approaching wonder—the coming glories of the night.

As the sun descended to near the horizon of the blue waters of the ocean, it seemed quite shorn of its own radiating beams, and to be set as a crimson picture in a metallic frame of alternate, divergent bars of gold and bronze. In that glorious setting, it seemed to sink slowly, and with majestic beauty and splendor into the azure water. It was to merge on the morrow with added glory.

In the night we were called on deck to behold what seemed much to alarm some of our crew and passengers,— a shower of gold, and silver, and purple fire, falling from a clear blue sky—thousands of meteors, of the kind commonly called falling, or shooting stars; yet varying in color from silver to purple, and in apparent size, from that of an apparent star, to nearly or quite that of a full moon!

They seemed to start from their high home in the very zenith of the heavens, and there to separate, following in their descent the imaginary curved lines of an immense dome. Thus, for hours, these brilliant meteors were constantly descending and flying athwart the horizon.

In the depth of the night, when several of the larger class were in full blaze at the same time, the stars became invisible; and some of the crew declared “they must be stars that are falling.” With gradually diminishing glory, this brilliant phenomenon continued till nearly sunrise. And what a sunrise followed! As he had gone down into it, the glorious orb of day ascended from below the ocean wave, with a majesty well becoming the grandeur of the display which had heralded his advent.

All the works of God are wonderful, sublime, beautiful! but never before had I been so conscious of the full influence of their wondrous sublimity, or of being entranced by their surpassing beauty, as when on that broad ocean of blue, under a sky of blue, pouring forth myriads of such beautiful things.

The scene had well prepared me for the approaching spectacle on shore. A narrow passage, between two long and narrow islands, took our little craft over the bar into the snug harbor of St. Augustine; and there in quiet repose lay before us the old city, embowered in orange trees loaded with their golden fruit. It was a quite novel and most luxurious view;—a foreign scene brought home to our own country. It was a very pleasant surprise. Nor did the pleasure pass away with the surprise. A delightful refuge from the boreal storms, was that old Spanish town;—a soothing rest, it offered to the grieved and care-worn soul and shattered frame. But, alas! in two short years came the killing frost, and the desolating war; and its comforts and its quiet, and, all its goodliness passed away, never again to be restored! An hundred frostless winters may bring back the glorious old trees loaded with twenty barrels each of the rarest varieties of the orange; and the towering oleander may spring up; but the old population, in their old Spanish houses, of various tongues and nations, and all living in loving harmony, and happiness, may never again be hoped for.

Yes, they were indeed happy. Avarice and ambition seemed quite unknown among them; and good-natured simplicity appeared to be the rule of social intercourse, with most rare exceptions. And of all that happy population, the negro slaves seemed most happy.

Not easy to be forgotten, is my first definite vision of the contrast between the two conditions,—negro slavery, as it exists in our South, among the good and generous —a mere quasi bondage, strongly resembling that of the freed-man of ancient Rome,—and of negro freedom—a mere quasi liberty, without the protection of the freedman, —manumitted, but not forsaken;—still under the shielding patronage of his former master.

Besides the prevailing gold and green, and rich aroma of the orange tree, the gardens and hedges were fragrant and brilliant with many colored and sweet flowers. Various birds were singing in all directions. The saucy mocking bird was mimicking all the rest; and occasionally pausing in his song to laugh the caged parrots out of countenance. But the loudest music, was the laughing, and whistling, and singing of the negroes proceeding to their easy tasks of the day.

It was a panoramic vision. It was a delightful morning walk through the old city;—a little exploring ramble, to learn its strange and pleasant peculiarities. My cicerone was an intelligent little boy of twelve summers,—the only son of my host, a principal man of the territory.

We threaded the narrow streets and lanes. We passed through, and around the PLAZA, or public square. We deciphered the marred inscription on the last remaining monument erected in honor of the Spanish constitution, in the centre of the square. This is a simple little obelisk of some ten feet high; but not destitute of historical interest. On his restoration to power, the infamous Ferdinand, with one foot on the constitution, and the other on the necks of his subjects, commanded all memorials of it to be demolished.

The people of Florida were no longer his subjects; and the little monument, carefully and lovingly wrapped up in a nice bit of bunting, with some stars and stripes upon it,—still stands the only memorial of the kind, that the people of Old Spain, some forty years ago, had a paroxysm of love for constitutional liberty!

We passed through the old Castilian gateway, (which ought to have been preserved,) into the spacious court of the antique Spanish Government house, long since replaced by a modern Court-house of fair dimensions, and fronting the plaza; on the opposite side of which stand the markets. On the two other opposite sides, stand an old and spacious Roman Catholic, and a pretty and modern Protestant church. On the square, and around all these public buildings, young negroes, with here and there a young Minorcan, or Spanish boy, were seen at play, or sucking oranges, or sugar cane. And I sighed to think of the hard lot of the thousands of little boys in the North, shivering in the cold and dwarfed by toilsome labor!

But Governor Seymour says, “Our ideal of a respectable man is one who thinks only of his business, and works himself to death.” Under the guidance of such an ideal, if “the boy is” to be “the father of the man,” he must go early to his task, that he may be prepared for such respectability. And thus multitudes are worked to death, to prepare them for working themselves to death! Return we now to our own ramble among a people happily ignorant of our northern “ideal of respectability.”

Through gardens and orange groves, we made our cheerful way. The morning air of that delicious climate acted as a much needed healing balm to both my flesh and spirits. I was happy, and I rejoiced to behold on all hands, unmistakable manifestations of happiness, at every look around me. My little companion and guide seemed to know every body, and every thing; and to enjoy, very highly, the pleasure of answering all my questions; and of pointing out to me every thing rare, curious, and beautiful. I remarked to him, that all the negroes we met, seemed very cheerful and happy. He replied:

“Yes, sir; I believe they are almost always laughing and singing, only when they are eating or slecping.”

“But, William, don't they have to do a great deal of hard work?”

“No, sir; they always seem to make play of their work;—like those fellows yonder in the trees, picking oranges to send to New York, and throwing them at each other's head.”

“On the plantations, William, they say the negroes have very hard work.”

“May be, on some plantations they have to work hard; but I was out to Hanson's the other day to see them making sugar; and all the negroes seemed to make a frolic of cutting and toting the cane. I have seen some poor white men seem to work very hard; but I don't remember to have seen negroes seem to work very hard.”

In the course of our ramble we met a black man who appeared care-worn and gloomy; sad and sorrowful; and not as well clad as were usually the people of his color. And I said, “William, that man looks unhappy. I am afraid he has a hard master.” He replied:

“O sir; he is a free man; and a bad fellow, people say.”

My heart sank within me. A free man; and yet not only worse off, but worse than a slave!

A free man, who is a bad fellow, whether black or white, has indeed a hard master. For some reason, not yet discovered and made clear by Anti-Slavery philosophers, this kind of hard master, who rules with a rod of iron over all bad fellows—all vicious people of all conditions and sexes,—seems the most hard on the poor free negroes. He scourges them without mercy, and without measure. In droves, he sends them, through the cold and dark avenues of vice and crime, to the scaffold, to the penitentiary, to the lunatic asylum; or to die of debauchery, or of cold, or hunger; in a filthy ditch, or a filthier cellar or garret! Poor, unhappy creatures! how cruel to throw upon them the weight of a responsibility, which not one in fifty is found able to walk uprightly under! How less cruel than death towards them are the northern States, which persuade and help them to steal the burthen; and then scourge them from their borders, because they are unable to carry it, and know not what to do with it?

This is a painful subject; and I will only add,—if, to exterminate the African race from our country, be the real object of the Anti-Slavery party, they can adopt no wiser course, than to encourage their flight from their protectors; to resist the fugitive slave law; and to induce the largest possible number of free negroes to stay in, and hang about the cities and villages of the North.

How very strange does it seem, that in Christian lands, and by Christian people, slavery is spoken of as Christianity never speaks of it; and that among the philosophers of our age, the term is limited, as it was not limited by the philosophers of old?

By the Great Teacher, Himself, we are taught that, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant, or slave of sin.” And by the letter and spirit of His religion, though you may scorn to call any man master on earth, you may still be in a galling and a degrading bondage. You may be rich as Croesus, learned as Bacon, and versed in all the knowledge of the profoundest statesman, and able to solve every question, of civil and political liberty, and yet be slaves; and under the sway of a more cruel tyrant than ever wielded an earthly sceptre.

The real slaves among the southern negroes form but a very small proportion of the real slavery of even our own country; the Bible and philosophy being judges. As the Bible teaches, they only are truly free, who, in bondage to Christ,—servants of God,—have and live by this truth, which only can make free indeed—free from sin, free from the bondage of Satan, free from the wretched servitude of the world—all else are slaves indeed; and not merely in name—slaves to their own lusts, to the world, and the devil;—all harder than Egyptian taskmasters.

And what says the wisdom of the wise heathen? “Who is not a slave to lust, avarice, ambition, or fear? No bondage is more grievous than that which is voluntary.” So says Seneca; and the greater Plato, “Count no one free who is intent to indulge wicked passions. They serve more cruel masters, than do slaves by inheritance or purchase who are bound to obedience.”

“All wicked and covetous men are slaves,” says Tully.

Having had strange things brought to my ears on board ship; having seen the slaves of Charleston in the enjoyment of apparent enviable happiness; and having seen but one unhappy negro in St. Augustine, and he a free man, my prejudices against slavery, as injurious to the negro race, were becoming feeble, when I had occasion to make a journey of some days through the interior. I wandered a good deal about the country among villages and plantations; but I found no materials to repair the breaches so unexpectedly made in my tower of anti-slavery, that would at all stand the weather.

I went into the cabins of the slaves, and I found them luxurating on more plentiful and better food than I had ever found general among the laborers of the North— either white or black. In many cases—perhaps every one, of honest thriftiness—their own fowls supplied them with chickens and eggs; and their own cows with milk and butter. Of bush swine—the very best for the far South— some of them had scores.

The Christmas and New Year's holidays were near, and extra preparations were every where being made for distinguishing this great season of festivity. Exclusive of the vicious indulgences which marked the ancient pagan feast, the Christmas season, to the Southern negro, is a real Saturnalia. Only for large pay, or for real love, and then as a special favor, will he lend his aid even to keep the system in motion of his master's household.

“But of what value are all these privileges and pleasures to people deprived of the privileges and pleasures of religion?”

We shall see if such deprivations belong to their condition.

ON the first day of Feb., with some northern friends, I was at the celebration of a double marriage, some thirty miles from St. Augustine, in the interior. The May-like weather had already filled the country with spring flowers and fragrance. From the piney woods, with here and there a little oasis, of oaks, magnolias, palms, or bays,—hiding places of the deer, and wild turkey,—we passed suddenly into an extensive orange grove,—each tree a study of grace, color, beauty, and perfume, beyond the reach of art. The grove was fenced and diversified with long extended hedges of lemon, lime, and other tropical growths.

Through a more lovely avenue, than, on this earth, we shall ever again pass, we came to the cottage built, and modest mansion. It was on the banks of a broad and beautiful river; and almost literally covered with the freshly bloomed rosa multiflora. By many species of the fruit-trees of various climes, in full flower, the buildings and lawns were begirdled and decorated.

With polite cordiality, we were received by the numerous white family; and, as connected in their minds, with the coming happy event, with the most joyous delight by the negroes. All in sleek health and neatly dressed, their joyousness seemed natural and unalloyed.

We arrived in the early morning and passed the day charmingly. Not the smallest of the charms of the day, was that of the pleasure to witness the various delightsome amusements of the sable subordinates of the establishment, to which their superiors contributed in no stinted measure.

In the early deep darkness of the evening, the marriage came off; and no sooner were the solemnities closed in the deepest and most reverential silence, within and without, than the whole outer atmosphere seemed in a blaze of light and beauty, and filled through all its space with sounds of huzzas and of songs of joy and gladness. There was not one present, even of the household, who was not manifestly surprised. It was the entire invention and work of the negroes themselves.

The long evening passed off with unmarred and chastened hilarity. All acted well their parts; but best of all, the black party. The delightful, and gratefully satisfied air with which each one of them saluted the new married pairs,— “Wish you joy, Mis'r Col. and Mas'r Major; wish you joy, Miss Caroline and Miss Leonora; and may the Good Lord bless you all;” though a rather lengthened affair, it was highly and solemnly interesting.

Our enjoyments, in the house, of the evening festivities, were not slight nor tasteless; but still poor and vapid, compared with the apparent, and undoubtedly real pleasures of the negroes on the illuminated lawn, brilliant with the beauties, and fragrant with the sweets of nature and of art.

On the following day, most of the wedding party crossed the broad river on a visit to some interesting relatives of the wedded ones—a very highly respectable old family; who had never sold a slave, though they had a considerable number; nor had the present generation ever purchased one. Their negroes had no more fear of being sold than have our children, nor were they in half the danger of being separated.

They seemed a happy family, and well to deserve to be; but unless all signs fail, and all appearances deceive, the happiness of the negroes was most complete and unqualified. The negroes, on both sides of the river, on the beautiful plantations belonging to very intelligent descendants of old British settlers, were themselves uncommonly intelligent negroes; and no doubt our abolition friends to a man and to a woman, would have pronounced them all well worthy and well prepared for freedom and self-management. But when I think of their happy condition, in contrast with the miserable and life-long struggle for subsistence, of our free negroes of the North, I am hardly able to imagine a more cruel act than it would have been to emancipate them. But of negro emancipation more hereafter.

Making our parting salutations to our agreeable friends, who were all of the Roman Church, we early returned with the wedding party, in order to examine a number of candidates for baptism among the slaves of our host. Through grace, and the enlightened instruction of their pious and excellent master, it was most gratifying to find them all— so far as man may be allowed to judge—unusually well prepared, in spirit and understanding, for the solemn rite. And with a large number of young children and infants, in all more than fifty, they were baptized in the evening.

Had the pious duchesses and ladies of England been so happy as to witness that solemnity,—the master and mistress, in fervent Christian love and devotion, taking on themselves the most solemn obligations of sponsors for their slaves,—I think it would never have come into their imaginations, that the slaves of our South are precluded from the privileges of the Gospel and the church. Alas! the wrongful notion, that at least the plantation negroes are denied religious privileges, is by no means peculiar to the ladies of England

It is rather extensively supposed, that in southern cities, the slaves have some religious privileges; and that a few avail themselves of them; but the question, or an equivalent for it, may often be heard in the North,—“are not the plantation negroes heathens?”

I wish an unqualified negative could be given to that question. But I am afraid that among the country negroes, some of whom are so unfortunate as to have practically heathen masters—but not in a greater proportion than the sons of the North have such fathers,—I am indeed afraid, there are not a few slaves who are little better than heathens, though not altogether, as were their forefathers in Africa.

Yet in all my rambles for thirteen years through our Southern States, I have never found nor heard of, as I can remember,—and assuredly not among the negroes born in our land,—such utter blankness of mind with regard to religion, as is often found in our northern cities among white people; and as found described, as not uncommon, in a large portion of the modern literature of Europe; and,—sorry am I to be obliged to say it— especially of England, whose voice is so loudly heard, calling us to our duty towards our neglected slaves, and to a greater care for their souls.

Both children and slaves are, no doubt, in the North and South, too much neglected; and too few of us care, as we ought, for their souls; but from an extensive personal experience, from correspondence, and from authentic documents, I am confident that the amount of practical heathen infidelity among southern slaves, bears even a very small proportion to that which may be found but too easily, among the population of our cities, and many of our rural districts.

In remarkable and striking coincidence with the developements in England of the brutal atheism of numerous white savages, as described by the late Chancellor of the Exchequer,—some years since, there were reported and published cases in one of our own cities, of persons of various adult ages and of both sexes, who were utterly ignorant of the meaning of religion—without any sense of religious and moral obligation, and who had never heard of the Saviour!

Over the revolting accounts of their beastly characters, let the curtain fall, while we ask the harrowing question, ‘Is the case better now?’ The very latest intelligence from the same city, says, “The increase of the population far outruns the increased means of religious instruction.” And in refence to this very statement, a religious paper of another of our large cities, says,—“Is it better with us?”

Should any one desire to know whether the slaves of the South are spiritually better or worse off, than the tens of thousands of the uncared-for in our cities, and the hundreds of thousands in the greater cities of Europe, let him examine the statistics of crime and degradation in those cities; and then let him inquire of the devoted men employed in the hard and trying work of city missions; and he will learn of cases of heathen darkness in ample abundance, to solve the awful problem of the frightful increase of crimes of the most abhorrent character. Indeed, crimes such as no code of penal laws ever contemplated, have already become so frequent in large cities as scarcely to excite surprise!

Yet, in all our great cities, this terrific state of things is overlooked, and quite lost sight of, by men and women, who organize crusades against an institution afar off, which utterly excludes, and makes impossible such frightful abominations of crime and beastly degradation.

And from the Greater Metropolis of England,—where the uncared for, but by the police, form a population of white savages equal to the whole population of one of our small States—a wailing lamentation comes across the broad ocean, over the condition of our slaves, who are incomparably both better and better off—not merely than her white savages and starving paupers—but than a very large majority of her hard working laborers chained to the block of their cruel fate, and lashed by their wretched condition to perform an amount of toilsome work, the half of which the hardest master never dreams of exacting from a far better fed slave!

And then how unkindly offensive is the calumny that the slaves' souls are uncared for, in connection with the real facts of the case, that in many portions of the South, extending over very large districts, and containing many ten thousands of the colored race, all of them are enrolled by name as belonging to Christian congregations; receiving regular stated instructions; subject to religious discipline; and participating in all gospel privileges. Of the entire population of any of our northern States, there is probably not a greater proportion than among the slaves of the South, in the full enjoyment of those priceless privileges. And what is the proportion of the human beings in London, who are so blest?—or of the great manufacturing towns of Great Britain?

Abolition Authors and Editors; Legislators and Lecturers, hold and teach that slavery makes man a brute; by depriving him of all rights and privileges. Let this be granted, and taken as a true definition of slavery, and what follows? Why, inevitably this follows, that there is a smaller proportion of the Southern negroes in servitude, who are slaves, according to this their true definition, than of this, or perhaps any other country called free; for there is a smaller proportion of them brutalized by vice, crime, and infidelity;—the only true brutalizers—that is, there is a larger proportion of them made “free indeed,” by the TRUTH.

Perhaps, on the face of the whole earth, there may not be found a promiscuous body of people, of equal numbers, having a greater proportion to whom faithful instruction is given in the religion of the Gospel, nor of whom a larger proportion reverently honor its holy ordinances.

I have before me Journals of Conventions in the South, and Reports from various Ecclesiastical bodies, which show that in many parts, the proportion of colored members is greater than that of the whites; and reporting a great number of Christian marriages of slaves, by clergymen who would shrink with horror from desecrating the solemn rite by joining together parties who were in danger, or likely to be sundered by man's arbitrary authority.

With our adversaries, however, all this may go for nothing. All this may be sneered at as not worth the glance of a thought, by the transcendental, or infidel abolitionist, who holds up to our view his own notion of a man—the Lockean two-thirds of a man; the Lord Monboddo man; the featherless biped; or the man of the atheist philosopher, who lacks nothing but himself of being a man—and says, boldly, “If you make him a slave, you make him a brute.”

To pass untouched the questions, how much such man wanted of brutality before, or what he lacked of being a real man; I will propound a somewhat different question, viz.— who may dispute or deny the conclusions of the abolition philosopher, that first allows his premises; and standing on the same platform of materialism, denies that there is a freedom indeed, which no earthly condition can enslave, or affect, for evil or for good?

Of this freedom indeed,—which knows no “higher law,” but the HIGHEST, only; and which is possessed by many thousands of Southern slaves, who pity and pray for their masters, and for all others who are so unhappy as to have it not,—those poor Africans could have known nothing; save for the mysterious, but merciful Providence, which placed them in their condition, so deplorable in the eyes of the ignorant, the faithless, and the fanatical.

Allow it then to be asked of the Christian who duly prizes this highest freedom, to consider of Southern Slavery as a Missionary Institution for the conversion of the heathen. In this light let it be candidly looked on for a passing moment, and you cannot fail to contemplate it for ever hereafter, with other feelings than abolitionism would excite in you.

But, that you may be able to judge, understandingly, of the missionary character of African slavery in our country, you must first learn something of what other efforts have been made, and are being made, to Christianize heathens.

At an expense of more than FIVE MILLIONS of dollars, and of many valuable lives, in the course of more than fifty years, all the Missionary Societies of our country, of all denominations, are able to reckon up in gross, some fifty thousand converted heathen in various parts of the world. If, as we will rejoice in hoping, they are truly emancipated from the slavery of heathen idolatry and superstition, and made free indeed, it is a great and blessed work. May it go on, and without interfering with our home duties.

Look now at what the institution of Southern Slavery has done in this department of Christianizing the pagan portion of mankind.

There may be some hundred thousand or more of the present race of Southern slaves, who come from Africa, involved in the deepest darkness of a brutal paganism;— many of them even cannibals. And still in heathenism, did I never yet find one of that old race; but very many of them, have I known, who were rejoicing in the truth that had made them free. Among them, indeed, I have found some of the most spiritually-minded persons that it has ever been my lot to meet, in any condition of life. Many of them have since gone; and daily are they going to the “rest that remaineth for the people of God.”

Would they have become Christians in their own land? I ask not an answer. God knoweth.

But what of the field of the faith now among the slaves of the South? How many are partaking of, and rejoicing in, its fruits?

Fifty thousands or more?

As many as all the Missionary Societies and Boards of Missions in our whole country, can reckon up converts from heathenism?

Aye, more than double that number can be claimed as converts by each of several of the churches of our country; and from authentic accounts and various statistics, now before me, I have good reason to suppose, that more than half a million of the slaves of our South are regular members of Christian congregations; while of infidel heathens, properly so called, there are probably very few, if any!

What a contrast is here presented! Foreign missionary zeal, at great cost and personal sacrifice, has rescued from heathenism about the tenth part of the number that Southern Slavery has added to the Christian church; at the same time that, of the dead and the living, it has rescued from heathenism, not fewer than a hundred times the whole number of foreign converts!

Let these facts stand by themselves, for more easy examination and scrutiny.

Is it a Paradox? We shall see.

By the millions of the North it may be considered as paradoxical to speak of the pleasures of slavery; and by one hundred and fifty thousand men, and a somewhat greater number of women, it may be denounced as a very gross absurdity. We shall see.

It is not more remarkable than true, that the most, if not all, of good-natured and candid travellers, and sojourners in the southern portion of our great Republic, speak of the slaves as enjoying more of contentment and pleasure than do people in other conditions of life. And such is undoubtedly the fact. That some of them run away, is no more of an argument against their general contentment, than it is an argument against the general contentment of the people of New England, that they sell and leave their pleasant homes to dare the horrors of a voyage round the Horn, Isthmian fever or assassination; or an overland journey to California, in search of gold, and mark the miles with graves and bones instead of milestones, and guide posts.

But not so much of the contentment of the slave, as his pleasure—his joyous pleasure,—something of a higher order than mere contentment, am I now to speak. The Southern slave is a joyous fellow. In willing and faithful subjection to a benignant and protecting power, and that visible to his senses, he leans upon it in complete and sure confidence; as the trusting child holds on to the hand of his father, and passes joyously along the thronged and jostling way, where he would not dare to be left alone. The poor free negro, like the child alone in the tumultuous throng, with no hand to lead and protect him, is usually sad and melancholy. Not so the slave of a good master. His are the thoughts that make glad the heart of the cared—for child, led by paternal hand.

The abolitionists say, they are thoughtless, and therefore gay and joyous. If they mean this literally then are they greatly in error. Of deeply corroding and distracting thoughts, such as make lunatics of multitudes of the free negroes of the North, and not a few of the white races, they may be said to be thoughtless. Generally they have none of these to depress their cheerful and laughing spirits. To have to chew the cud of bitter thought, most rarely befalls them. They have not to think and be anxious about what they shall eat, or what they shall drink, or wherewithal they shall be clothed; or kept from the horrors of pinching frost, when the cold winter comes; or how it may fare with them in the winter of old age, when they can no longer work.

None of these things, which make sad and sorrowful the days, and horrible the nights, of the poor of other lands, ever disturb their minds. How great a contrast between the two conditions in this respect! And hence, of all people in the world, the pleasures of the Southern slaves, seem, as they really are, most unalloyed.

With a visible power to depend on for protection and support, perhaps no other human condition whatsoever can be a more happy one than that of good and virtuous servants to good and virtuous masters and mistresses. At their easy tasks, and in the enjoyment of their varied pleasures, their thoughts are not of anxious cares, but of how happy they are. This is indicated both in their sacred, and in their secular songs; and not seldom in the grateful way of practical sympathy for poor and virtuous white people in their neighborhood.

It was on an early day of the February of that remarkably delightful sunny winter which followed the mysterious shower of blazing meteors; when three gentlemen left St. Augustine for the St. John's river, with the exciting object of making a boat voyage up the stream to Drayton Island, in Lake George.

The morning ride from the ancient city to the noble river, was through sixteen miles of an atmosphere, resonant of vernal music, and perfumed by myriads of flowers, whose coral lips were rapidly opening to the genial sun. A happier little party has rarely passed over that quiet, and almost desert,—not long after made unquiet by the rifle crack of the Indian; and its sand and its flowers stained with the blood of inoffensive travellers, and of its few peaceful inhabiters. Than,—till decoyed into the death—snare by the assurance of peace, when there was no peace,—the cheerful and happy Weedman;—what passer across that plain ever found, any where, more cordial hospitality, than with him and his primitively simple family? Who ever saw any thing in Weedman, or in any one of his Germano-Spanish family, but the most delightful simplicity of goodness? Who ever saw any thing more simply beautiful and picturesque, than that almost immensity of a man—the ever cheerful and loving father, and gentle master, leading afield, or to the cowpen, his numerous happy sons and daughters, and two or three laughing negroes? I never did. But, alas! insatiate war gave that peaceful man, and a portion of his family to the Indian tomahawk; and broke up that happy home, where the weary and the benighted traveller had ever found kind and generous hospitality; and where dwellers in the man-made town were wont to visit, to be refreshed by a draught of nature, where

Should these lines fall under the eye of any survivor of that long gratefully remembered family, let them be accepted as a trifling tribute due to the memory of the murdered father, whom the author esteemed as one of the best and kindest of men; and also as a cordial thank-offering to his household for the many pleasant hours enjoyed among them, in their once cheerfully simple, and therefore happy home, untimely desolated. To others, who have never heard of the Weedmans, nor of their humble home on the Picolala road, far away from the haunts of men, I have only to say, pardon this little detour to drop a tear of memory on the bloody grave of an honest man, a noble work of God;—happy in himself,— happy in his family,—happy in love to his God, and to his kind;—nor less happy in being the master of a few faithful slaves, whose pleasures were not a paradox.

Of the three gentlemen, with their small; crew of black boatmen,—one a dweller in the land of flowers, was the patron, who generously provided the pleasure; one was “the Doctor,” who had been in the South but a few weeks; and the third a sojourner of several months.

The Doctor had visited the South imbued with a northern notion that all the slaves were determinedly biding their time, for any—even the most desperate— chance to free themselves from their condition. Haunted by this absurd notion, and seeing ourselves outnumbered by the slaves, who, as he probably supposed, were only making believe happy and joyous, he secretly expressed some alarm of peril from them, when we might be far away and completely in their power. He was quite right in thinking that, easily they might dispose of us in the broad river, or lake, or on the lonely shore; and with the well appointed craft flee down the river into the open sea, and escape, with scarcely a possibility of detection.

To his great relief, but utter astonishment, he was perfectly reassured by a laugh at his ridiculous fears from the experienced citizen of the country; and his sober declaration that he never felt safer than when surrounded by southern slaves; and that it is a great mistake to suppose them anxious to change their condition; as not one in fifty of them would accept of their freedom, if offered it. In proof of this,—to the Doctor—astounding declaration, he named many instances of such offers, and among them, to two of our own little crew.

“When a good chance offers, of which there will be no lack during our excursion, Dr.” said our friend, “talk with that man George on the black mule, about the condition of the slaves in this country; and particularly get him to tell you his own story of choosing to remain in his present condition. And when we have nothing better to talk about, and we are all in a humor for it, I will tell you some amusing anecdotes of Dick Downing; and especially of his spirited rejection of the boon, for which your northern abolitionists seem so positive that every slave is painfully longing.”

“Thank you;” said the doctor, “I never had any of the furor of the abolitionists about me; for I never could believe the slaves of the South as badly off as our miserable free blacks; but I had somehow imbibed the notion that they were, generally, if not every one, very anxious to be free.”

“It is quite a mistake, Dr., as you will easily find out by staying a few months in the South, with your eyes and ears open.”

“I begin to think so already:” he replied cheerfully. And we rode on quietly, to the tranquil shore, where two years after I “saw another sight.” But let not the tranquil present be disturbed by the future trump of war.

With our fine, roomy and staunch boat, well stowed and stored for a week's voyage, we launched out upon the young Flood. As to a Naiad, or genial fairy Water Sprite, come to their aid, the negroes gave her a melodious song of grateful welcome. In the song, which was any thing but classical, save only in the association, there was nothing like an allusion to the mythological water nymph; which, perhaps, as in their capacity of boatmen, they may have heard her often spoken of by classical passengers, was the more remarkable. It was doubtless a mere natural coincidence. Nature is Nature every where; and the free imagination,— there is none freer than the southern slave's—is ever employed in the poetical work of personifying her works and wonders; not the least striking of which are the tides of her many waters.

After a few hours made easy by her efficient help, we met the retiring tide on the current, when more power was required at the oars. The negroes perspired freely; and our sympathies suggested a landing on an umbrageous and flowery bank, enriched by a native orange grove, in both fruit and blossom. There our watermen, as handy as happy, spread our cloth for dinner, on a gorgeous carpet of the little red lily, and the creeping sensitive plant; in the deep shade of a large magnolia, where the golden fruit would hang over our heads.

The Dr., who had looked to see the men lie down in the shade, to rest their tired limbs, was delighted to find them apparently far less weary than their passengers, and with mirth and high relish, enjoying the much praised refreshment which had been so liberally provided.

On the second day, having been rather disturbed through much of the night, by their songs and laughter around their blazing fire, our sympathies for their toil at the oars was not particularly painful. Indeed every night they seemed by no means so weary as we were; and during the whole excursion, they manifestly enjoyed it as though it had been entered upon and prosecuted for their special gratification. It gave us pleasure, to the full amount of our capacity for enjoyment, but, with all our supposed advantages, the much greater amount of real pleasure very plainly fell to their lot.

What most surprised us in the negroes,—strangers till then to their peculiarities—was their remarkable talent of improvisation. Their extemporaneous songs at the oar, suited to various scenes and occasions and circumstances present, induced the natural feeling that our boatmen were a set of rare geniuses, selected by our generous friend for the purpose of giving us additional pleasure and surprise. It was afterwards found that extemporaneous singing was not uncommon among them.

The negro boatman of the South seems inspired by the improvising muse whenever he seizes the oar; and especially if it be to row a company of agreeable people on a party of pleasure. If there be young ladies of the number, they may be quite sure to be introduced by the muse, and to receive not only compliments, but admonitions.

Farther to pursue this subject, though it may conflict with the unity of the narrative, there may be told a brief story of a case of improvisation, on a subsequent occasion, of a very striking and characteristic nature; and by no means a bad illustration of the scope and power of the poetic muse.

At the time alluded to, there was an unmarried planter of large property in the country, whose character was not at all enviable, as either a Gentleman or a Master; although he had received an education which should have made him a model in both characters.

WHEN we arrived at the beautiful island of our destination, the doctor had become nearly as joyous as the negroes themselves. And then we had the pleasure to look on another phase of the obnoxious system of human brutalization, well adapted to deepen the favorable impression made on his perhaps too susceptible feelings.

For the purpose of propagating several rare and valuable varieties of tropical plants, from the ocean islands and other foreign regions, the proprietor of Drayton Island had placed on it a little colony of two or three families of his own household, under the deputed patriarchal oversight of the senior, and mostly, the progenitor, of the colony; a grave old man, who had been rescued many years before from the cruel tyranny of a savage African master. We landed on the shore of the island at the opposite extremity from the settlement. Hence, we rambled through the plantations and nurseries of tropical plants and trees, defended from ungenial winds by the indigenous forest, bursting into spring beauty and sweetness, and made more paradisiacal by the unrivalled bird-music of the south, mingling with the soothing murmur of the pine leaves— like “the aggregate of many gentle movements of gentle creatures”—and with the ceaseless ripple of the surrounding lake. The little birds that love the ground, hopped along before us; and gorgeously resplendent clouds of ten thousands of paroquets, sailed high over the silvery lake in their everlasting robes of green and gold, reflecting in the blazing sun more than every color of the rainbow.

Entranced by such varied charms, too soon, as we felt, we came to the home of the sable islanders. We had feared to find ourselves there, too rudely precipitated from the height to which our pleasurable emotions had been elevated. Our fears had been groundless. The happy condition of humanity that opened on our view, was but adapted to confirm and make practical, so to say, our previous and pleasant experience. At their easy and pleasing garden work we found these happy people. They smiled upon us a kind greeting from among the orange, lemon, and lime trees; all starred over with white blossoms, relieving most charmingly the deep ground of rich green leaves of every shade of that grateful color.

From their own provision-grounds, which they were planting with corn, okra, potatoes of both kinds, cassada, arrow-root, melons, and other delicious southern vegetables, they had come in to enjoy a luxurious two hours, with the late breakfast, which the southern negro best likes, and especially, as on the present occasion, when he may extend a welcome hospitality to the friendly stranger.

“Well, well,” said the doctor, “this seems to me to realize an ideal of some dream, that some time or other I have had; unless, indeed, I am now dreaming!”

“You are not dreaming, doctor. This scene, and this island, and lake, and life scenery, are all real.”

“I think so. And if so, living in harmony and love, as these people seem to, and in such delightful circumstances, in this genial and lovely climate, if any human condition may be happy, what can interfere with the happiness of these people?”

“Not their condition as slaves, I should think, doctor.”

“No, indeed; for if not slaves, they would have no such paradise of a home—a home, such as any man or woman ought to be ashamed not to be happy in.”

“You are quite right, doctor; and how finely is here illustrated the proposition of our own great Shakspeare, communicating the blessings of a lowly station:

“Yes. 'Tis better; and very graphically, as well as beautifully, it is told by the inimitable poet. For the favored individual 'tis no question better. But to carry on the great scheme of the world's Divine Government, that, in the good time of the Great Ruler, man may again walk uprightly, some must

and some must wear golden,and many more must wear iron sorrows.”

“And when that good time shall come, doctor, will there be any slaves?”

“No; but of God. Nor will there be any starving paupers; nor will there be any imprisoned or punished criminals; nor ignorant and vicious unbelievers, requiring to be taught that ‘doubtless there is a God that judgeth the earth.’ But until that good time shall come, to abolish the institution of slavery, might be no whit wiser or better than to abolish almshouses, penitentiaries, penal laws, schools, and churches.”

“Then, doctor, we must wait and work.”

“We must wait and work; drink of the brook in the way, and seek for a higher good, than yet attained by our race; and learn lessons of wisdom from the pleasures of slavery.”

WHAT is the condition of the negroes in their native Africa?

It would seem that we ought to be able, advisedly and rightly, to answer this question, before too rashly we condemn the Divine Providence, through which a portion of them have been forced away, and held in bondage in other lands. If they are better off than they would have been in their native land, it was then a merciful and a gracious providence which removed them, by whatever agency. If they have been taken from the happy homes which many poets, and some philosophers, would have us believe, then surely a great wrong has been done them. In his late noble colonization speech, Mr. Everett has rather bowed to such poets and philosophers, than to authentic historians, and reliable travellers.

Execrable is even the thought, that we may do evil that good may come; but the Great God, who judgeth the Earth, is able to bring good out of even the extremities of evil. Let it be willingly granted, then, that the slave-trade is at, or very near the extremity of evil; and let us see if the goodness of His power has not been manifested in educing good, to some millions of Africans from this extremity of evil, as, perhaps, in our ignorance of the matter, we may deem it. He seeth not as we see. In passing this only to such as believe in Him, as revealed in the Bible.

The subject shall be introduced by the simple narrative of an incident, which, to several others than myself, was a very deeply interesting one. My readers may also find some interest in it, at second hand; yet no pen—certainly not mine—can at all bring it home to the mind of a reader, with any thing like the thrilling effect experienced by us who were present, with all our senses alive to the scenery, and to the scene

It was in the far off South. On the elevated bank of a noble river, and in full view of both shores, stood a beautiful edifice, erected for the worship of God. In the cool of a Sunday Summer morning, with a few white people of both sexes, there were assembled about an hundred blacks, of ages, from under five, to over sixty. They had come to receive religious instruction in a Sunday school, which had been lately instituted for their special benefit. More than with mere willingness,—gladly had they assembled to meet their kind and devoted teachers. An affectionate address was made to them on the important object in view,—their improvement in Christian knowledge and happiness.

In plain and simple language, suited to their intellects, they were made to understand what was required of them. They were told what advantages and comforts would accrue to them, if they acted well their own easy and delightful part.

I suppose that the outlines of Christianity, as a divine system of grace and morals, known only to such as receive it, are not often better delineated, than they were on that lovely morning, to those children of the Sun. The great truths of the gospel are seldom put with more simple skill of familiar illustration, than they were by the superintendent, or head teacher, of that negro Sunday school. Nor have I ever witnessed an apparently more kindly and feeling reception of them.

They were all slaves; and to help them thankfully to accept of the good which was offered them, in the form of religious instruction, that they might in some degree appreciate it, so as to insure their continuance in well-doing, in the pursuit of the best knowledge, it was thought desirable to induce their thankful contentment with their condition. In no condition of life will the restless and discontented make much progress, in either mental or moral improvement.

They were questioned about their knowledge of their origin; and of how they came to be in their present condition. With the exception of a few old people, who were born in Africa, and brought away in advanced youth, or maturity, they seemed quite in the dark on the subject of their origin, and the land of their ancestry. In language adapted to the occasion, a brief general account was given them of their progenitors coming from Africa, sold into slavery by their own countrymen.

And now, said their friend and teacher, we will see if we cannot make this matter more plain and interesting to you. For this purpose we will try to get the story of his coming to this country from one of these old men, who was born in the country of your forefathers.

Addressing himself to a happy old African, the teacher said, familiarly, Daddy Cudjo,—as he was usually called, —will you tell these people and children, the story of your leaving Africa; and how the people live there? It may be good for them to know how they happen to be here; and that they are better off, as you have before told me, than are the people and children of Africa.

IT seems a very common notion, not at all confined to abolitionists, that the confessedly miserable condition of the African masses at home, has been produced by the slave-trade of civilized nations. Nothing can be more incorrect. The exact reverse seems to be the undoubted truth. The slave system of Africa is either the true mother of all African slavery elsewhere, or, all such authority as the world has ever held to be good authority, is actually good for nothing.

Long years—perhaps thousands—before African slavery was introduced any where in the rest of the world—at least on this continent or the neighboring islands—in Africa itself it existed in its most cruel and loathsome forms.

The foreign slave-trade, perhaps, has never, at any time, penetrated into the far distant central districts of Africa; and yet, there, according to the most trustworthy authorities, reaching back centuries before our era, and especially, according to modern authorities of unquestionable veracity, slavery not only prevails generally, but is of the very character in all its horrors, that some, at least, of our abolitionists seem best to love to think of it as existing in the South.

In Africa, slavery is a system of unqualified, and unfeeling tyranny. It is an oppression in which the slave has not accorded to him, even the immunity which the laws of civilized countries extend to brutes! And what is the proportion of the people in this wretched condition—slaves to the most savage of monsters?

MUNGO PARK, whose truth, I believe, was never called in question, and who had the best of means to know what he stated, estimated the slaves, by hereditary bondage, to be, at least, three-fourths of the whole population.

LANDER says, “four-fifths of the people are slaves.” In these estimates, probably neither of these travellers reckoned the multitudes of women in the harems of the chiefs; whose life, even, is never secure from the capricious tyranny of their savage masters, for a single day. Sometimes scores of them are sacrificed at once for no cause but some ferocious freak of the tyrant; or to indulge his savage appetite for the strong excitement that blood only can allay. When these tyrants perish, naturally or by violence, which is most common, their hundreds of widows, as an English missionary to South Africa calls his slave girls, “are hurried to an untimely end, and their carcasses given to beasts of prey, which tear them limb from limb and drag the bones to their dens;” Wolves and hyenas abound in Africa; and their principal food, as many travellers have supposed, is murdered human flesh! As stated by the last authority—the Rev. Mr. Kay—the chiefs— among the negroes, have entire command of the persons and property of the people, who are not called slaves; and that a man dare not deny even his wife, if demanded by his chief. And let it be remembered, edifyingly, that these accounts of the Africans at home, are given by an English missionary, in relation to tribes of savages in South Africa, and under the protection of the British authorities; and to some extent amenable to British rule. But they are darling negroes, and not vulgar white laborers, and paupers; and so the sceptre of British royalty is laid on them delicately. Mr. Everett says “they are not savages;” but Mr. Kay speaks of “every page of African history” as showing the native African savage as of the very worst character of savages—the numerous tribes and clans continually feeding the vengeful flame, with strifes, contention and bloodshed—the native troops, mustered either to pillage their weaker neighbors, or to retaliate upon some thievish aggressor!—“Such is the estimate of human life, that the death of a female by violence attracts little attention.”

In other and very distant parts of the continent, the same ferocious savagism obtains, as all authorities declare; and that no where human life seems of any appreciable value. Imagination, even, is at fault, in every attempt to add a darker hue to the pictures given us by Mungo Park and other truthful travellers, of the cruel and bloody tyranny of the chiefs, warriors and slave holders in the interior of Africa.

Towns are taken;—the chief ruling family, with all the old, infirm, and unavailable population are slain; and, if not eaten as food by the conquerors, are given to the beasts and birds of prey; and the residue are enslaved. If they find themselves with more slaves than they can employ, and cannot sell them, the surplus are butchered. He speaks thus of the African system of slavery:—“It is evident from its nature and extent, that it is a system of no modern date. How far it is maintained and supported by the slave traffic, which for two hundred years the nations of Europe have carried on with the nations of the coast, it is neither within my province nor in my power to explain. If my sentiments should be desired concerning the effect which a discontinuance of this commerce would produce on the manners of the natives, I should have no hesitation in saying, that, in the present unenlightened state of their minds, my opinion is, the effect would be neither so extensive, or so beneficial, as many wise and worthy persons fondly expect.”

Such are the statements and views of the wise and worthy Mungo Park, of the character and condition of Africans at home. They have certainly not been made worse by a removal to our country. They would hardly be benefitted by finding their way back.

Another, and independent testimony, that the slave-trade of Europe neither introduced slavery into Africa, nor stimulated the ferocity, nor cupidity, of its native savages, is found in the character and customs of

Less than thirty years ago, this numerous and powerful tribe, first saw an individual of the white race. “The King had always thought there was no other land than that which himself and his people inhabited, and that he was the only great King in the world.” So writes Mr. Isaacs, who, with a few other Englishmen, sojourned for several years in the Zoolu country, and became familiar with the King and people. They were cast away, and they lost their vessel on the coast, in about 30 degrees S. Latitude. One of them was an officer of the British Navy, Lieut. King. This gallant and magnanimous young officer, on the 26th of August, 1825, set sail from the Cape of Good Hope, in search, says the Lieut., of “an old friend of mine, a Mr. Farewell, an East India merchant, who had been absent for more than sixteen months, on a very hazardous speculation, to the Eastward, amongst the natives, who, it appeared on my former voyage on the coast, had never seen a white person.”

Mr. Isaacs' book is a journal, embracing a space of nearly seven years. In addition to the accounts of hunts and journeyings through a savage country, abounding with broad and rapid rivers, where boats were unknown and undreamed of, until introduced by his party, to the astonishment of the natives, his Journal contains little less than enumerations of almost daily savage atrocities, the moving spirit of which was mostly the terrible Chief of the tribe,—“an insatiable savage monster of cruelty,” says Lieut. King.

Before the first white man had ever landed on his coast, he had conquered most of the surrounding tribes, and slain all the vanquished, save a few picked men to whom he had given their lives for their services, so long as he might choose to spare them.

This Chaka the Great,—as well may he be styled, in allusion to other conquerors so called,—had never heard of the slave-trade; had never sold a slave, but had murdered them by thousands!

“All the males of his broad dominion were under the most severe military discipline; always under arms; and for the most trifling offences against the King,—no matter at what distance from him—were immediately put to death; and their bodies left to gorge the wolf or hyena; or perchance, if near a river, thrown to the crocodiles and fishes!”

While the King remained at home in his palace, which consisted of a hundred huts, scarcely a day passed without an execution. He had been absent on a campaign in which he had destroyed the last tribe, that for a long time had dared to resist him. Says the Journal, “He appears to have destroyed in this last encounter, nearly every human being of the tribe, man, woman, and child. The King ISSECONYARNA, with a few men alone escaped,—to a pit within the bushes,—secreted until the merciless Zoolus had retired from the field. Isseconyarna had been an inhuman tyrant, and now had received the punishment due for his many vices and cruelties.”

Conscious of growing old, and that the color of his wool was beginning to witness against him, the King was usually melancholy; from the certainty that it could not be long before a successor would be sent by the army to trample his gray hairs in the dust, and give his body to the beasts. Old age on the throne is an abomination to the Zoolus.

But after the feast of blood, with which he had regaled himself in his last campaign, Chaka retained an unusual cheerfulness for several days. The agreeable excitement, however, passed away, and his appetite for human blood returned upon him. He easily, and soon, found means to appease it for a little while.

He suspected, or pretended to suspect, that the purity of his seraglio had been violated in his absence. The dreams and visions being related, by which he was not only certified of the fact, but also of the guilty parties, with savage cunning, he has them all decoyed into a suitable enclosure, and there, to the number of one hundred and seventy, girls and boys, concubines and slaves, barbarously murdered! But the details of this wholesale carnage may not all be omitted.

“The King, at first, beat his aged and infirm mother, with inconceivable cruelty; and to the astonishment of all, as he had even manifested towards her a strong filial affection. He then became in such a violent and savage rage, that, knowing his want of temper to discriminate objects, and apprehending something for my own personal safety, I withdrew to my hut.

“Every thing being ready for the bloody scene, to complete this massacre of unoffending beings, he called his warriors and told them that his heart was sore; and that he had ‘been beating his mother, ‘because she had not taken a proper care of his girls.’

“He ordered the victims to be brought to him. He began by taking out several fine lads, and ordering their own brothers to twist their necks. Their bodies were dragged out and beaten with sticks until life was extinct. After this refined act of cruelty, the rest of the victims were indiscriminately butchered. When all was over for this time, he asked me with a smile of exultation, ‘why I did not assist in killing the UMTAGGARTIES?’—people not fit to live.”

His majesty then addressed his warriors,—squatting on their hams in token of submission:—“You see we have conquered all our enemies, and killed a number of umtaggarties; I shall now consult UMBEAH and find out the rest. To morrow I shall kill all who have offended in my reign; there will then be nothing wanting to make you and me happy.”

“The King then retired to his palace; and the people to their huts to take certain roots, for having killed their relatives: —these they say prevent their grieving; which is punished with death. I have known several instances of people having been suspected of crying for the loss of relations, and by the King's order put to death on the instant.”

This wretched savage had not been hardened by the slave-trade. He had never heard of it.

The day after the slaughter,—“the King appeared much more lively and in better spirits than yesterday.” He told his warriors that “hitherto they had witnessed deaths of common people, but they would soon behold that of chiefs.

“The wolves were to be seen in large droves, making hideous and deafening howls round the kraal, attracted by the blood of the preceding day.”

The entry of the next day says,—“I was disturbed early this morning by the cries of a man knocked down just behind my hut, and taken away to be killed. He was the King's chief domestic. I could hear him distinctly thanking the savage monarch as they were beating him to death!”

By our own Bayard Taylor, the truthful and tireless; the fearless and the faithful African traveller; still bearing the marks, I suppose, of a tropical sun—we are informed that the Shillooks of the White Nile, in Central Africa, comprise a savage negro kingdom of some three millions. They are a nation of robbers and murderers. They have no respect for the rights of others, or for one another, but as such rights are guarded and defended by superior might.

They have gained some notions of civilization from Turkish and European Traders; but it has not improved their morals. That such intercourse with the harpies of civilization is not wont to improve the morals of savages, the people of our Continent require no additional authority, above that of the experience and history of a few ages.

IN poetry, and in other sentimental literature, many fine things are sung and said on happy childhood. But it has been my lot never to have seen it general, save only among the negroes of the South. Children may sometimes be happy elsewhere. Some peculiarly favored ones may be generally happy. I meet with not many, now, so peculiarly favored; and I remember few of the companions of my own childhood of that favored class. Very certain is it, that the children of the immense majority of the people of the North, find sorrow, and trouble, and misery enough, in and beyond, the first decade of their years.

I have seen little girls of five or six years, taking hard lessons in scrubbing, under a northern mistress of high, and allowed, pretensions to benevolence. It was her benevolence that put the little one so early to the scrubbing brush, that she might learn, with facility, to do the toilsome tasks to which she was born:—born among the benevolent, par excellence.

I have seen a little boy of like age, tied on a horse by his father, before sunrise, to guide his way among corn rows! Why was he tied on? That he might not fall asleep and tumble off, or be jerked off by a sudden stop of the plough against a stump or a stone. And was not that kind and fatherly? Certainly. If the poor little white boy must work hard at an age when all the little negroes of the South sleep or play, why then, to be sure they should be kindly bound with cords, to secure them from the danger of being maimed at their work.

“You have seen such things?”

“In abundance, my dear Doctor.”

“And I too, have seen; and ‘part of which I was.’— I have felt the sorrows of childhood.”

“You have felt them, my friend?”

“Aye, sir, I have felt them. And the remembrance is still felt;—felt, sometimes, I fear, sinfully. May I be forgiven, if it be a sin to remember, that in my childhood, I felt that a good right was mine, to lament and sorrow over, if not—but not—to curse,—not the day, only, of my birth—all—almost all, the circumstances of my childhood!”

“My friend!—

“Allow me to proceed. To talk it over, may soften a little the miseries of memory.

“Late in the productive life of my parents, was my birth, in the rear of a host; and therefore very delicate and sensitive, was the organism of my nervous system. Almost every thing that moved not in harmony and love, and gentleness, grated upon, and rasped my sensibilities.

“My father was a generous and kind man to every body outside of his paternal household. To the poor, he was proverbially a father; though, as I remember, he sometimes frowned darkly on their improvidence and follies, at the moment of his supplying their physical necessities. His slaves,—for there were slaves then in Yankee-land—were his most interesting pets. His treatment and general bearing towards them, were well adapted to play the mischief with Dr. Paley's definition of slavery at the moment he was writing it; perhaps thinking of an English press-gang: ‘An obligation to labor for the benefit of the master,’ exclusively, ‘without the consent of the servant.’ This, I am quite sure, was never felt by my father's slaves, even in Yankee-land; and not less sure am I that, in the generous South, it is very rarely so felt, but that they are laboring for the comfort of the household, of which they form a large and important portion.

“The word household, in the South, is used, as we know, in the Scripture sense; including slaves, but not hirelings. My father was kind to his hirelings too; some of whom he employed more for their sake, than his own.”

“Kind to slaves and hirelings; and not to your childhood kind, Doctor, it seems passing strange.”

“I hope, and suppose, indeed, that he never thought of excluding me from his kindness; but he seemed always to expect from me what, to me, was impossible. He often rebuked, and sometimes—not seldom—chastised me for not fulfilling his expectations. My childhood was infirm and feeble; and sensitive exceedingly. And, perhaps, from early caresses and other sorts of flatteries, I became vain, before I knew any thing of the meaning of that miserable vice, of every age. O what skill is required in the management of childhood!”

“If, at the same time, delicate and vain, from slight causes, your sufferings were not slight. A little harshness you felt as a great cruelty.”

“Yes, I suppose the little negroes, who rarely, if ever, have to bear such hardships as fell to my lot, would have borne them better. So far back as memory reacheth, and no doubt beyond, I suffered so intensely from bodily and mental pains as to make life a burthen to me. I wished for death, but it came not. Awaked early to my little, but hard duties, I sighed, and sometimes wept, that I had not been allowed to sleep for ever! And yet,

“Not the least part of my early wretchedness was the horrid fear of death, which infernal nursery tales had scared and corrupted my soul with. I could tell of many circumstances of my early childhood, vividly remembered, in illustration of the misery I endured. Among persons who were kind to me, as I thought, most fresh in my memory are a slave and a poor hireling, who used to take me out with them for a rural ramble on Sunday mornings, and always spoke kindly to me.

“At twelve I was sent away to school, where I was one of an hundred and fifty boys; as well as I can remember, all unhappy! Think of such a number of unhappy boys in one house, and then think of all the thousands of young negroes, under twelve, that you have seen, and whether you can recollect one half of that number, that were less happy than the usual run of white children in the North.”

“Doctor, the story of your own childhood is remarkable; and I trust not common. Yet I must confess, that, save among the Southern slaves, I have rarely found any thing like the general happiness and joy of life, which always ought to prevail among children.

“That pic-nic party, as you called it, of the little negroes of the Island, in the shade of a huge live oak surrounded with orange trees, and profusely decorated by a grape vine, you no doubt remember, Dr.?”

“Yes; and well too, how bitterly the joyous comfort of those little slaves, so called—wrongly, if Paley's definition be right—reminded me of my own joyless childhood.”

“And you have not forgotten that vernal and verdant Sunday morning on the Island?”

“Nor our cheerful walk, before the Sunday services, through the beautiful village; every cabin—as they are called—every beautiful white cottage of the negroes, clean as cleanliness itself, surrounded with cheerful and beautiful shrubbery and flowers, and held rent free, and tax free, by happy tenants; many below, and some above, the age of labor; and all far more comfortable than the average of the whole free population of any country. Indeed it is not so easy a matter to describe a more comfortable home than had those negroes. Well do I recollect the impression made on my mind, by the perfectly happy condition of the old people,—that they appeared to enjoy the rest of old age more completely than I had ever witnessed it, even by old people of considerable property and ample means.”

“But, my dear Dr., you are aware, of course, that it is not deemed respectable to be happy in our present part of the country?

“‘Our IDEAL of a highly respectable man,’ says Governor Seymour, in his noble lecture in New York, ‘is one who thinks only of his business and works himself to death.’”

“The Governor is right. And surely such an Ideal must exclude every rational notion of happiness. Thanks to his Excellency for a key to many a mystery of my life.”

“Do you remember Old King, Dr.?”

“Old King!—a lord of the Isle—with the dignity of a retired field-marshal, and the authority of a patriarch? I shall not soon forget the good and happy old man!”

“And the spacious hospital;—on week days the playhouse and nursery for the children, and all days and nights the asylum for the sick; where ma'am Betsey presided with benignant cheerfulness and skill, and untiring assiduity?”

“She always appeared to be thinking of the southern side of every subject; and to wish to direct the thoughts of others to the sunny side of every thing. An excellent specimen of the nurse was ma'am Betsey.”

“‘Every one born a slave in our country, has a moral and civil right, or legal birthright, not only to food, clothing, and shelter; but to care and support in childhood, in sickness, and in age.’ How fully and generously, under all these circumstances of childhood, sickness, and old age, was this rich birthright recognized, on that lovely Island!”

MASTER.—“King, I come to ask a favor of you.”

KING.—“Well, Master Jacob, what have you come to ask? What can I do for you, Jacob?”

MASTER.—“I wish you to ride over to King-field in the morning, and help the overseer lay it off in tasks.”

KING.—“Can't the overseer do it himself, Jacob?”

MASTER.—“I dare say he might, King; but he is a stranger, you know, on the plantation; and so can't know the field so well as you, who have so many times laid it off. It would save time and not give you so much trouble, I should think, to ride over and show the overseer how to do it right.”

KING.—“If the overseer don't know yet, he had better learn as soon as possible, how to lay off a field into tasks.”

MASTER.—“Yes, King, that's true; and I came to ask you to give him a lesson in laying off King-field.”

KING.—“I'll think about it, Jacob, and let you know in the morning.”

MASTER.—“Very well, King, I hope you will conclude to oblige me in this matter.”

“Oblige the overseer, I suppose you mean, Jacob;” said the old man, as he entered his cottage, with two of the little ones hanging to his long-tailed black coat; fine enough for a parson. King preferred a black coat; and on his Island home, he was not afraid to wear it from apprehension of being asked to preach as a strange clergyman.

She passeth away; and morning comes; bearing on her silken Zephyrs the mingled fragrance of the orange flower, the multiflora, and the jessamine.

The master and servant again meet on the green and spacious lawn, that surrounds both the modest mansion and the picturesque cottage of the respective parties. After the morning salutations, cordial on the part of the master, and on the other part respectful, with a dash of ominous dignity, pass they on to

MASTER.—“Well, King, I have ordered your horse for you to ride to King-field this delightful morning.”

WHO are the man-slayers? Abolitionists say, the slave- holders are the man-slayers. Suppose the charge retorted; and the question tried; how would it be settled? What is the history of the emancipations which have been effected by their efforts? What is the present condition of the emancipated; and of the fugitives which they have forwarded to Canada,—what is it? This subject may be well enough and fitly introduced by

“It was in the chill and gloomy month of November.” May such another never again visit our great Metropolis, threatening the lives of thousands.

Two students of Theology were taking their evening walk, in what then was the suburban portion of the city of New York. A part of their object was needful exercise of body, and an even more excellent part, to seek out proper objects on which to exercise their charity, by ministering to the wants of the ignorant and the afflicted. It was in the early twilight; and the coming night was threatening discomfort to the destitute poor. One of the young men was from the South. He is now, I believe, a devoted and laborious, and loving minister of Christ, to both white and black, in his native State.

As they were passing along their thoughtful way, they observed themselves looked at by a couple of very misera- ble looking black men, as if hoping for an alms. The Southern student said to the other; “Those poor fellows are from the South, and they seem to discern in me a southern man, and to expect my sympathy for them in their evident distress. Poor fellows; I must enquire into their troubles.”

The students stopped and looked towards them, as an encouragement for them to approach. They did approach; and were thus interrogated:

“From the South, boys?”

“Yes, Mas'r,” in a very, sorrowful tone, somewhat peculiar to the negro in great distress.

“Ran away from your Master; did you?”

“O, no, Mas'r; no runaway.”

“How then, were you free men in the South?”

“No, Mas'r; not till old Mas'r die, an' lef us free.”

“From what State do you come?”

“Ole Virginny, Mas'r.”

“So I supposed. Virginia is becoming somewhat famous for deathbed philanthropy; as they call freeing negroes to freeze and starve.”

“But did your Master make no provision for you in his will? Did he leave you nothing to start with in the world, as free men?”

“O, yes, Mas'r. He tell Dr.—, his Zeceter, he must take us to free State, an' give us all money. Ebery man to have 50 dollar, ebery woman 30 dollar, an' ebery chile 10 dollar.”

“Well, that was not so bad. But what have you done with your money?”

“Money all gone, Mas'r; an' we almost starve an' freeze;” said the poor fellow, in tears, and in a tone of deep distress. They had not yet become hardened beggars. The other than the interlocutor seemed unmanned entirely by grief and alarm. They both shivered in the northern cold; and seemed fearful lest the increase of its strength would be quite too much for their weakness.

They had been landed in the city in the spring, and now it was in advanced November.

“Men, women and children, eh! well, where are they?”

“Will Mas'r please go see? Not much far.”

So the two students walked with the two negroes. On the way to their wretched abode, they got out of them that when the money was gone, which they seemed to have thought would last forever; but lasted only through the working season, when they ought to have been earning instead of spending; they made some movement towards getting work, and failed. Neither man nor woman knew how to do any thing, that in the city, was wanted to be done. The students arrived at their hired home; a large rickety hovel of a building, standing by itself, above the then built up city. What a scene presented itself, of loathsome destitution; made more glaring by means of tattered, and torn, and broken finery.

They had sold, since the cold began to find its way through the thin walls and broken windows of the great shell, all the furniture they could sell at any price; but there was remaining, plain indications of what had been done with a good deal of their wasted cash, of the value of which they were as ignorant as children. Scattered about, here and there, sprawling on the floor, or seated on bunks and boxes, and damaged chairs, telling of the life they had been leading, were 'twixt 40 and 50, half clad, filthy, and diseased blacks—men, women, and children! It was a most sorry sight. And yet many a set of white teeth grinned through the grime of their stupid and haggard faces.

In consternation and disgust, the kind-hearted students gazed at each other; and in saddened tones, exclaimed;— “what rude and frightful wretchedness! What a loath- some mass of misery! Poor creatures! What can be done for them!”

Their immediate necessities were not very great; but it could not be long before they would overwhelm them. The students gave them needful aid and counsel, with the promise to see what, if any thing, could be done for them on the morrow.

With a rapidly falling snow, and chill November's wintry blast upon its wings, the morrow comes! The whole city stands aghast! There is a general dreadful apprehension, that winter has really come to shut up the great city within barricades of ice, more than a month earlier than usual; and with no supply of fuel at all adequate to the shortest and mildest winter. All that was to be had was at once monopolized by men of means, and the poor generally left destitute! After much of real and apprehended suffering, the scene changes; the sun comes forth, radiant and warm; Indian Summer, dressed in parti-colored robes of state, rules in place of the late cold and cruel usurper; the rivers flow, and bear on their tide the needful preparatives for a coming Winter, on his easy way;—and to many of the poor is given “leave to toil.” Men and women smile again, and again children laugh and sing.

But what of our poor negroes? How do they get through the short reign of terror? Freezingly and starvingly? Aye, with the best aid the good students can procure for them, at such a time of frozen selfishness, freezingly and starvingly, indeed!

Calamities, and strong apprehensions of personal suffering, freeze up the even kind hearts, with all their usually warm streams of charity, of all, but the highest order of Christian humanity. It is an order of God's nobility; but, alas! nowhere a numerous order.

Of this class are these Gospel students. As the day dawns, they arise from their knees of supplication for mercy, and for “daily bread,” for all the sinful race of man, and go forth into the pelting storm to show mercy; and, if possible, to secure bread and warmth to the poor and unprotected and uncared-for negroes, whom a mock and mad philanthropy had thrown on a pitiless world. They go at once to their wretched abode. Howlings and screams of suffering meet their ears, even at a distance, and sink sorrowfully into their hearts. They find them in all but an utter state of despair. The unlooked-for storm appals them with horror. Some few who have heard not in vain of the mercy of Him who careth for the poor, in their crude way are crying for that mercy; some are profanely execrating their late master's cruelty, in dooming them to such misery; some are grovelling, in stupid and stubborn silence, on the floor, wrapping their rags about them; and the poor children, shivering with cold in their filthy straw, are screaming and sobbing distressfully. The good students, as if good angels, soon succeed in securing quiet, by imparting consolation and hope. They direct the poor creatures to be patient and trustful; and having supplied immediate means of an apology for comfort, they go on their mission of mercy in behalf of the sufferers. They are directed—perhaps by some heartless and wicked wag— to apply for aid and guidance to the ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY. They make the application. They tell the sad tale of sorrow and of suffering. The great Philanthropist, who manages the financial department of the Anti-Slavery Society, hears the tale with an apparently stolid indifference; and as with

The interview terminates with the important intelligence to the students, that “the Anti-Slavery Society has nothing whatsoever to do with such cases.” Its work is already done, when the negro is either emancipated, or, as a fugitive, placed beyond the reach of pursuit. It can do nothing for free negroes. Had the students' proteges run away from their master, they would have been entitled to the protection and care of the Anti-Slavery Society. But they are free;—free to perish of hunger and cold, for aught that the Anti-Slavery Society will do for them.

The young men retire from the office; one of them, chagrined and disappointed; the other, satisfied with his former conceptions of the Anti-Slavery Society, as not a philanthropic institution, in any true sense; but as a sedition club,—heartlessly unfeeling and malignly fanatical.

“What now shall we do? Where now shall we go in quest of aid for those poor creatures, whom the Providence of God has so strangely thrown upon us to care for?”

“Whatever we do, or wherever we go, to aid them, let it be in faith, that it is a summons to an act of love; such as the Priest and the Levite of the parable had served upon them, and would not obey it. Let us obey it, so far as we may be able, as did the hated, but good Samaritan; and we may be sure of help that will not fail us.”

“Certainly,—and, by the way, that is a very fair specimen of preaching for a student in his second year, and on a stormy day, at that. But, while you were preaching so well, I was thinking, wisely, I have no doubt, of our next step. We will go at once to Peter Williams, and lay the case before him.”

“Very wise, unquestionably. I agree with you fully. Peter is a discreet and a kind man. By the way, has not our respect for that worthy black priest, something to do with our solicitude for these black paupers?”

“Very likely, indeed; and so we have a valid claim on his sable reverence, since he, perhaps, though unconsciously, has involved us in this business.”

“But let us not, even to ourselves, seem to treat the matter with any thing like levity. The Rev. Peter has been made the instrument of leading many before in the way of Gospel love and Christian duty.”

“A noble fellow,— pardon me, a good and sensible man, is the Rev. Peter Williams. Do you know his father?”

“The venerable old Tobacconist? Yes indeed, quite well. And I have often found myself speculating in the company of the father and his reverend son, on the providence, that, from a savage African, brought forth a son of the third generation, to become so excellent a minister of the Gospel as Peter Williams. His grandfather was a slave all his life. His father, a slave to a good natured tobacconist, who taught him his business, and set him up in it, as a freeman in middle life, with thrifty habits, and with good religious and honest principles.

“Had his grandfather been a free negro of the class of the present generation, is it probable, that we should find such a clergyman in his grandson?”

“Alas, no; it is not at all probable.”

And by this time the young men are at the door of Peter's study. He receives them with respectful cordiality. They state their errand with simple eloquence, and with deference to the judgment of the colored gentleman. Such was Rev. Peter Williams. He goes with them on the errand of mercy.

Arrived at the scene of woe, he carefully, and anxiously examines into the hard case. The poor creatures had belonged to a man who had lived a godless life. His servants, he had excluded from all the opportunities of religious or moral improvement, that had been repeatedly offered. He had fed and clothed them comfortably, and worked them moderately. But, on his isolated tobacco farm, he had afforded them no means of knowing any thing of either earth or heaven, beyond the lines of his planta- tion, and the aerial canopy above them. On his deathbed, his long-banished conscience forced its way back into his bosom, and stung him into remorse. It was too late to study what was best; and in a horrid anxiety to do something to relieve a long neglected and insulted conscience, he was left to do the worst and most cruel thing he could have done.

The man of God, to his great grief, and with indignation and pity towards him who had died, laying the delusive unction to his soul that he was their friend and benefactor, found the poor creatures generally in utter ignorance of the meaning of either religious or moral obligation; and living together more like beasts than human beings. What could he do? With food, fuel, and blankets, they would have been content. Not so their new friend. But what could he do? As a Christian minister, and as a man, this is what he did do,—alas to little apparent purpose:—God knoweth. He did what he could to make the wretched beings to understand and feel the loathsome, beastly, depravity, into which they had fallen; and that there was an awful call upon them to arouse themselves from their moral torpor, and to strive manfully and obediently to become free indeed, in the faithful service of a better master than he who had suffered them to fall into the slavery of Satan, and then mocked them with the pretence of a worse than worthless freedom.

Difficult was the task; but with admirable tact and ability, he made them understand,—so far as human power could do it,—the meaning of Christian repentance and faith; and how they require obedience, in order to make them available and acceptable. From some penitent eyes, tears found their way, and seemed to cry out, “What shall we do?”

Among other things done for them, they were paired off as they declared their partialities, and solemnly united in holy matrimony; and charged, on the peril of their souls, to be faithful to each other, and to their unfortunate children. For several of them, employment was found among the pitying and the kind, and they were made as decent and comfortable as their wretchedness would permit. But they were generally so incompetent, as not long to retain their places; and a great expense of charity was required to keep them through the long winter. Mr. Williams took the special pastoral charge of them, and made great efforts in their favor. No other man, perhaps, could have done so much. He soon relieved the good students from their cares concerning them, that they might have their hearts and hands free for other work in the service of their Master. They were slaves of Christ.

Some four or five years after, Mr. Williams was enquired of by one of them, how had prospered that portion of his spiritual charge; when he answered, with a sorrowful look and voice, that all had died, excepting about a tenth of their number, and those, children, nearly all in the almshouse.

Such is the murderous philanthropy of abolitionism. By wholesale hale the poor blacks been immolated by cruel and false friends, who have made political and fanatical capital out of them, by coining their blood. The masses of the party, in unfortunate ignorance of the true state of the question, know not what they are doing; and so are rather to be compassionated than blamed. But not so of the political demagogues; and the pursuers of popularity and wealth, through the lecture-room, the pulpit, and the press. They well know what they are doing, and careless of consequences to the poor negroes, they are urged on by ambition, vanity, and avarice.

I have before me a document, by a reverend gentleman of eminence and excellence—a southern man in the North— who, to conciliate, towards the southern, the northern abolition branch of his communion, claims that about 250,000 slaves have been emancipated by the South, at the real personal sacrifice of far more than the British Government, nominally, paid to emancipate the West Indian slaves. He says of it: “It gives me pleasure to remind you.”—He speaks of it with high praise and approbation; and demands the same of others. If I have been rightly informed, himself is one of the number for whom the praise is demanded. He is, I have no doubt, a good, able, and amiable man, and well worthy of praise for many good works and good intentions; but he will please allow me to withhold my unqualified praise for other than good intentions from the manumitters of 250,000 negro slaves, until well assured that it was a “greatest happiness” measure; and not, in general, a cruel abandonment of sacred duties towards helpless incompetency.

Where now are those 250,000 manumitted negroes? To write the question makes me shiver! Where are they now? Are they better off than they would have been in a mild servitude to benevolent masters, capable of making such sacrifices? Or have they mostly perished—fallen into profligacy, and perished,—like one of the Virginia gangs, already noticed, which formed a part of the 250,000?

The late very worthy and much lamented Dr. Parrish was exceedingly happy, that one of his southern patients, on his death-bed, manumitted all his slaves. They formed another item of the 250,000. Could the good Doctor have seen a few years into the future, would the prospect have increased his happiness? Indeed, the good man lived long enough to know—perhaps, to his sorrow did know—what Ohio thought of such accessions to her population; and how there it had fared with the poor negroes, whom he so feelingly congratulated on their manumission.

In the document above alluded to, is found this proposition, of a most important character:

”The men who dwell south of Mason and Dixon's line have done more to convert the heathen, than the whole world beside.”

And this is proved most conclusively, by reference to authentic documentary evidence. But, to me, it does indeed seem unaccountable, that a clear-headed and good- hearted man of God, can dwell, as he does, on the superior religious privileges of the slaves of the South; enumerating Rev. presidents and professors of colleges, devoting their lives to the care of their souls; and knowing, too, the wretched character and condition of the free negroes of the North, and yet manifest so profound a respect, and so ardent a sympathy, for the cause of abolitionism; whose partizans he so anxiously labors to conciliate! He is one of the good men of “dignified moderation,” of whom it is said by the Rev. Dr. Thornwell, they “never venture upon a plea of justification in our defense. . . They curse us in their sympathies.”

V. his sermon—“THE RIGHTS AND THE DUTIES OF BOASTERS. At the dedication of a Church, erected in Charleston, S. C., for the benefit and instruction of the colored population.”

I WISH they could somehow be reached—the tens of thousands of candid, and honest, and good abolitionists, who are such only because they honestly think that Southern slavery is the horrible thing that they have heard it represented to be. If they could be reached, and made to know what it really is, and not what it had seemed to them through a dark glass of imposition, which had been practised upon them, they would see that the horrors of slavery, which had so excited their hatred and sympathy, is abolished already in our country; and that nothing is left but gratuitous mischief for the agitators to do.

That slavery, of which it is said, the man works for nothing, is utterly excluded from the slaves of the South; and it is found in the North only. Here, indeed, it is too sadly true, that among the millions of working people, the number is but small—miserably small, in proportion to the whole, who get for their labor snore than necessary food, clothing and shelter, for themselves and families; and innumerable is the host that fall very far short of the commonest needful comforts of life. Alas, indeed, and in truth, beyond a question, with the single exception of the Southern negroes, in a condition—allocating the abolition definition—falsely called slavery—all over the world, a very large majority of the people who depend on their daily labor for their daily bread, are always, and at this moment, suffering from want of sufficiency of that daily bread, and are frequently met by all the horrors of destitution and famine; and are hurrying on that awful way to the grave—death by starvation.

While the strong voice of the LAW, imperiously forbids the negro slave to be in want of the needful comforts of life; and the kind and gentle voice of true benevolence says to him, in the words of a prophet,—“Go your way, eat the fat and drink the sweet, and send portions to them for whom nothing is prepared;—and they go their way to eat and to drink and to make great mirth.”—What a graphic picture from an inspired pencil of the happy life of the Southern slave of our day—in all parts of the earth besides is found the reverse of this picture,—the poor for very want, “hanging down their heads, with their faces to the ground, and mourning and weeping,” that the most awful of all the miseries of humanity has overtaken them and their helpless children in the haggard and frightful form of a famine of bread. To the poor laborer for daily food, often is it famine in the midst of plenty all around their cabins of destitution, and less frequently, a more general and sweeping evil.

And in view of such facts, is it nothing that the poor in the South are not only a well fed race in general, but that by law, their acknowledged right to plenty of wholesome food is watchfully protected? Whoever thinks it nothing, or of no value as a compensation for any presumed evil of their condition, would do well and wisely to visit the abodes of poverty in our own great cities and overpeopled towns and rural villages, and to pass a few sober hours in reading about famines and their effects. Read in our own newspapers of a few months past, republished accounts of the fearful distresses of the poor, in various parts of Europe, from famine producing disease, desperation, insanity and death; and then, say, if you can, that, when “God openeth His hand and filleth all things living with plenteousness,” He does not dispense the greatest of earthly blessings.

Let your mind's eye fall on large and populous districts of people, “deprived alike of the productions of nature and the fruits of industry;” and, to consummate wretchedness and despair, “whole herds of cattle and sheep killed by disease!” Look at this picture of “the condition of the peasantry in many parts of Germany,” as drawn by an excellent Lutheran clergyman, and try to reckon truly the blessedness of abundance of food.

“All feelings of human nature begin to be more and more convulsed. The most loathsome food, meat infected by murrain,—is eagerly sought after: in some instances dogs have been slaughtered and ravenously devoured by a famishing population.

“In one case in Wurtemberg, a dog buried for some days has been dug up, and what will scarcely appear credible, the flesh in its advanced state of decomposition has actually been made use of as food! To satisfy the cravings of hunger, the last miserable remnant of furniture is not unfrequently disposed of. And what kind is it, which to sustain their mere life and unenviable existence, these wretched people are forced to, and too glad to procure? Wholesome meat is out of the question. Bread made of bran must supply its place. And bran soaked in water in which salt has been dissolved to give it a taste, and the skins of potatoes, and coffee boiled over and over again to extract the last remaining particle of nourishment. * * * Hunger knows of no ties of patriotism, and sauve qui peut! is alas! the anxious cry repeated from village to village by hundreds and thousands in many districts of my native land, and driving them recklessly and helplessly, away from their peaceful home in search of another in foreign and distant countries.”

“Dear Sir,—I cannot give you very definite answers to your queries concerning “Uncle Moreau,” as the old gentleman is rather averse to talking about his early life.

“Uncle Moreau” was born on the banks of the Senegal River, and belonged to the tribe of the Foulahs, a Mohammedan tribe of Africans. His father appears, from his statement to have been a man of wealth and standing among his people. According to Moreau's statements, he was the owner of seventy slaves; and was a candidate for election as chief ruler of the tribe—in which he was defeated. (This is Moreau's statement. I had always thought that this office among these tribes was hereditary.) Slavery was a very mild thing in that country in some respects, as the slaves work but half the day. After his father died, he lived with his uncle at Footah. His uncle was principal officer of state to the ruler of Footah. His elder brother married his uncle's daughter, his first cousin. This brother educated Moreau—their education consisting in learning to read the Koran, and to write in Arabie. Uncle Moreau, when his education was finished, became a teacher, and taught for ten years. Then he became a trader—trading principally in salt.

“He was two years a trader, and then, by some means, was made a slave. He is very dark upon this subject, and asperse to speaking upon it; though he intimates it was by a fault of his own—perhaps a misdemeanor or crime. (“Old Satan make me do bad,” were his words to me.) He arrived in Charleston with only two of his countrymen with him, though the vessel was crowded with captives. He was sold to a planter near Charleston, who treated him harshly, and from whom he soon ran away. He was taken up and put in jail at Fayetteville, N.C., where he was brought to the notice of General—, of this place, his present master. When he came to General—he was still a strict Mohammedan. The first fear he was with him, he observed very strictly the fast of Rhamadan. Some friends brought him a copy of the Koran, which has since been destroyed in the burning of Gen.—'s residence. His master and mistress read the Bible to him often, and talked freely with him about Christ. Seven years after he was purchased by the General, he says he began to soften. He felt that he was lost—gave up Mohammed, and sought peace in the cross of Christ. He was baptized and admitted to the church in Fayetteville.

“Uncle Moreau says, it leas good for him to come to this country—all good—‘Master very good,’ (meaning thereby his Saviour!) ‘MASTER very good.’

“He is now between 83 and 84 years of age—very devout in all his habits, and patiently waiting for the coming of his MASTER.

“I do not know whether I have answered all your questions—but I have given you the substance of all the old man said to me—in reply to my queries. He has written an account of his early life in Arabic, which he has given to Mrs.—, after exacting the promise that it should not be translated during his life.

“When General —returns from Alabama, where he is at present, it is my intention to prepare an extended account of Uncle Moreau for some of our periodicals.

With many thanks and grateful considerations for the writer, and for my friend, his correspondent on the Upper Delaware, I shall look with much interest for the fulfilment of this promise; well assured of its supplying a thrilling and valid testimony that Southern slavery is not always opposed to “the best interests of humanity”— Uncle Moreau says it was good for him to come to this country: “all good—MASTER very good.” And so have said, and still say, thousands of Christianized Africans.

Now, if we are not much mistaken, candid people,—not lashed to parties and prejudices,—will agree to sky, that we have given some strong enough proofs to convince them that “American slavery,” which feeds the hungry, and clothes the naked; instructs the ignorant; reclaims the savage; converts the idolatrous pagan, and the beleaguered Mohammedan, is not opposed “to the spirit and precepts of the Gospel, and to the best interests of humanity;” but that they are the opposers of these interests who allow their own hungry neighbors to go unfed, and to die of starvation; and who suffer them to go unclothed and to freeze to death; and to remain in uninstructed ignorance from generation to generation until they become savages; as found by thousands in Philadelphia, and by tens of thousands in London,—the favored abodes of these Chris tian correspondents, whose pious sympathy seems of the very peculiar cast of not being able to find any thing to exercise itself upon but at a very great distance. In their denunciatory anxiety for the negroes of the South, who are in no need of their aid or interference,—they altogether forget, and lose sight of the real and killing evils at their very doors. Elevated above all considerations of home duty and mercy;—from their balloon of self-righteousness, they can see no Saint Giles; no Baker street; and indeed nothing short of a Southern plantation, and that through a false medium.

The South very meekly complains of the hard words of their Northern Christian Brethren, and a Northern organ and oracle says, “The question is thus pressed to an issue, now whether the great body of Christians at the North sanction the violent measures and vituperative denunciations of a few, who are represented as saying, ‘We have exhausted the argument with the slave-holder and must now try the virtue of cold steel.’” On this point there can be no mistake. Our Southern brethren must know that the great mass of Christians in the non-slaveholding States give no countenance to the mad projects of a few who would “call down fire from Heaven” upon those who will not submit to their dictation. But the mass of Northern Christians—there is not the slightest doubt—and it is but kindness and honesty to our Southern brethren explicitly to say so, they will never say less than that American slavery is opposed to the prescription of the law of God, to the spirit and precepts of the Gospel, and to the best interests of humanity.” This is the lesson sent by the British abolition brethren to the “Northern Christians”—how very modest, and meek exceedingly—and they learn the lesson by heart, and pour it into the ears of the “Southern brethren,” and in “kindness and honesty” explicitly assure them that they shall abide by this teaching of the British abolitionists!

These Northern Christians, who send forth from Philadelphia this hostile missive to the South to be defiantly hurled in the teeth of their Southern brethren, disclaim all connection with the cold steel party. They give no countenance to their mad projects! By no manner of means. Certainly not. Were not this subject so awfully serious, I should be tempted to quote here a thought or two from Coleridge's “Mad Ox.” It is commended to this disciple of British abolitionism.

“Apart”—how far apart we shall see—“apart from the raving of mad fanatics, there is a deep and growing conviction” - it grows just in proportion to the growth of irreverence for the WORD OF GOD, and disloyalty to the Constitution of the Union. “There is a deep and growing conviction of the unutterable abomination of slavery, and an increasing determination not to rest until this foul blot is wiped away from the Church, and a jubilee is proclaimed throughout the land.” Of course, in these meek and modest words, no countenance is given to vituperative denunciations! - no invitation to the fanatical use of cold steel. By no sort of means! O no! But we will proceed with our extract from this gentle Northern Christian—this kind and honest, and most magnanimous philanthropist, whose charity is so far from beginning at home as to forget that it has one, and goes to England for lessons in the art of economising a distant crusade; and in the somewhat more practical and available art of modern fuss-making.

“These are the views, the feelings, and the purposes of a great majority of the wisest and best men in the non- slaveholding States. Our brethren at the South ought to be apprised of this as settled, unchanging truth.” The statistics are his own.

As one of the wisest and best of men, he condescends— as due to the Southern brethren—to tell them this settled, unchanging truth. His condescension is scarcely inferior to his marked and very remarkable modesty. There can be no doubt that this man is a distinguished member of that very polite and courteous class, who take off the hat when speaking of themselves in profound reverence for the subject.

Were I a Southern man, it seems to me that I should feel in no little degree obliged to this modest gentleman— not merely for his very amusing arrogance and presumption, but for his frank manner in removing the curtain to expose the doings of the independent conclave—independent of the cold steel party, I mean—of conspirators against the liberties and immunities of the South. Some irritable people may be not a little nettled by his assuming, that his party comprise “the mass of Northern Christians;” but surely it is not worth while. History supplies abundance of examples of even cliques and cabals indulging in this sort of amusing self-complacency.

Such as this interesting specimen of arrogance—this phenomenon of stupid vanity—have often appeared for a little while above the horizon, presuming that in earth and heaven there remains nothing for them to learn. That there is any thing not known—to say nothing of dreamed of—in their philosophy, never enters even the abode of their imagination. That to reform, according to their notion, some particular branch of moral science, founded on a basis of everlasting truth, might involve the derangement of the universal system of morals, never enters the three by four apartment of their puny intellects; and that any interference devised by them, to improve the scheme of Providence, might turn out to be no better than “a rude jog from the clumsy fist of a clown, who knew nothing of the component parts of the machine;” they are not able even to dream of. It is not given to such to see, that “the wisest are but as fools when measuring themselves against Him whose ways are past finding out, and who oft, amidst

To attempt any thing like a sober discussion of such people's crotchets—to break a lance with such champions of impracticableness, in sober earnest—would be the veriest quixotism imaginable, if not a culpable waste of time in air-beating. But there is something due to the busy, and to the young; who have not time to explore their hollowness, and to measure their shallows; or whose experience is too short to have reached the standard by which to measure their magnitude—or rather—what? Why, in the world, has not Dr. Noah Webster given us minitude, as well as magnitude?

But this little gentleman is a scribe—a sort of amanuensis of his party—as such, what he tells us is to be heeded as such. I don't mean as the sentiments of the “mass of Northern Christians,” but of the pretty numerous party— exclusive of the cold steel party—whom he considers to be the mass of Northern Christians. And when he speaks falsely, and in the very teeth of general experience, of “The working of the system,” as “proved by an experience of more than half a century, to be fraught with the most disastrous consequences—socially, politically and morally - that it is a deadly Upas tree, sending forth putrid and poisonous exhalations in every direction;—that all good men ought to unite in “hewing down and casting it into the fire;”—when thus he proffers the strong hand and the heart of fire to the cold steel party, in the name of his own party, which he dignifies as the mass of Northern Christians—then it is not good sense to smile upon as amusing; but to look gravely on him as the representative and mouth piece of his party, by which the South is thus denounced.

But what is to be done? Let the South, and the friends of the South, learn to distinguish—not between the cold steel party and this party which denounces it while it sustains it, but—between their true friends and such as call them our dear Southern brethren “curse them in their sympathies,”—are very sorry that they are under the stupefying influence upon the conscience of slaveholders, and fear much that they may have, at last, to give up their dear Southern brethren to the cold steel.

“All good men ought to unite in “hewing it down and casting it into the fire!” But this comes from the sympathising party of dear brethren who disclaim the use of vituperative language and Billingsgate denunciation. It is the party whose deliberate, settled, unchanging determination it is to subvert;—as soon as possible to subvert the Southern system of servitude, and so add a few millions to our free black population.

Is it desirable? Is such “a consummation devoutly to be wished?” Would it be a doubtless good for the blacks? Would they continue for any great length of time, as now they are, to be better off; and in all things better, than the free negroes of the North?—The denizens of Anthony street, the Five Points, the Penitentiary, the Lunatic Asylum, in New York? and of Baker street, Moyamensing, the Penitentiary, the Asylum, in Philadelphia? How long would they continue better, and better off, than are those hungry, naked, vicious, miserable beings, with no more care for either their souls or their bodies, than these have had extended to them? With such neglect of the white race they would dwindle away towards extermination.

But elsewhere I have intended, at least, to show the cruelties, and some of the “frightful results” of premature and promiscuous manumissions. As said by Dr. Johnson, that nothing is easier than to ridicule the Bible, so nothing is easier than for shallow recklessness to talk loud and learnedly about the evils of slavery, until every other evil in the human condition is forgotten or lost sight of. When all other evils are removed or remedied, there will remain no longer any difficulty in the removal of this. But so long as the poor are suffered to die of starvation in the midst of plenty, I am not for a war against the smaller evil of negro slavery.

“THE Greeks and Romans, descended from Japheth, conquered Canaan, and whatever relics there were of them any where; for instance, at Tyre, built by the Sidonians; and Thebes, by Cadmus; at Carthage, by Dido;—they were all cut off by the Greeks and Romans. It is observed by Campanell, that “none are descended from Cham, but slaves, and tyrants, who are indeed slaves.” But Mr. Mede's observation is more pertinent: “There hath never yet been a son of Cham, that hath shaken a scepter over the head of Japheth. Shem hath subdued Japheth, and Japheth subdued Shem; but Cham never subdued either. Which made Hannibal, a child of Canaan, cry out with amazement of soul, Agnosco fatum Carthaginis;—‘I acknowledge the fate of Carthage.’ ” (Livy.)

Do not such historical facts, when found also in accordance with the present state of the world, look very much like the corresponding prophecy,—“And Canaan shall be his servant?” And if, HIS Word and Providence are the two witnesses to prove it His decree, is it wise to fight against it?

As in the early Church, it was unlawful for a Christian master to sell a Christian slave, or even a pagan slave, to Jew or heathen; so in our own days, no truly Christian master can be willing to sell a slave to an unbeliever. There are many such masters who would not do it on any consideration, or for any price. Why? The conscientious Christian requires no answer. Others might not understand the true answer, and this therefore is not the place to answer it.

The author of Alton Locke, thus describes some of the miserable classes of proud old England:—“Such a visage as only worn-out poachers, or tramping drovers, or London Chiffoniers carry; pear-shaped, and retreating to a narrow peak above, while below, the bleared cheeks and drooping lips, and peering purblind eyes, perplexed, hopeless, defiant, and yet sneaking, bespeak their share in the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven;—savages without the resources of a savage—slaves without the protection of a master—to whom the cart-whip and the rice swamp would be a change for the better—for there, at least, is food and shelter. Slowly and distrustfully a dripping scarecrow of rags and bones rose from his hiding place.”

This excellent English author, who is trying hard to shame England into something like the decencies of humanity, first exaggerates the condition of slavery, by the introduction of the cart-whip, as if an inseparable adjunct,—did he learn this of Lord Palmerston?—and then declares it preferable to the condition of the poor Briton, even physically, as well as morally degenerate. Did Mr. Kingsley know of the comfortable and happy condition of our southern slaves, —with goodly shares in the inheritance of the kingdom of heaven—would he not say with sorrowful indignation, “Oh, forbear, my country, from condemning an institution which feeds and clothes and protects the poor, and trains many for heaven, and take up a lamentation that you had not rather taxed labor for twenty millions to elevate the con- dition of your own miserables, than to condemn the West Indian slaves to theft, robbery and pauperism!”

MADAM PFEIFFER finds herself quite agreeably disappointed to find the slaves of Brazil in a more comfortable condition than the laborers of Europe. “All work ceases at sunset, when the negroes are drawn up in front of their master's house for the purpose of being counted, and then, after a short prayer, have their supper, consisting of boiled beans, bacon, &c., &c., handed out to them. At sunrise they again assemble, are counted, and after prayers and breakfast go to work.

“I had an opportunity of convincing myself that the slaves are not by far so harshly treated as we Europeans imagine. They are not overworked, perform all their duties very leisurely, and are well kept. Their children are frequently the playmates of their masters' children, and knock each other about as if they were all equal. There may be cases in which certain slaves are cruelly and undeservedly punished; but do not like instances of injustice occur in Europe also?

“I am certainly very much opposed to slavery, and I should greet its abolition with the greatest delight! but, despite this, I again affirm that the negro slave enjoys, under the protection of the law, a better lot than the free fellah of Egypt, or many peasants in Europe—the principal reason of the better lot of the slave, compared to that of the miserable peasant, may perhaps partly be, that the purchase and the keep of one is expensive, and the other costs nothing. After all, slaves are far from being as badly off as many Europeans imagine. They are generally pretty well treated; they are not overworked, their food is good and nutritious, and the punishments are neither particularly frequent nor heavy.—Their lot is less wretched than that of the peasants of Russia, Poland or Egypt, who are not called slaves.”

“A large portion of the crimes punished by law, arise from hunger.” So says a French Abbe already quoted. “They will disappear when the men whom it now besets shall be beyond the reach of its fatal suggestions.”

Are the Abolitionists accelerating that important WHEN? What progress have they made in London, New York and Philadelphia, in the imperative duty of saving the poor— not from ordinary hunger merely but,—from Death, death by starvation?

“I hope to see the day,” said Lord Brougham,—who seemed to have thought the ability to read an excellent substitute for meat—“I hope to see the day when every young man in England shall be able to read Bacon.”

“Better hope for the day,” replied Cobbett, “When every man in England shall be able to eat bacon.”

This reply of Cobbett, Coleridge declared to be “the best speech of the session.”

The southern negroes are able to eat bacon abundantly, though, probably, not always their entire allowance; for I well know a model master in Alabama,—one of the very best of men, whom I love as a brother or a son, whose allowance of bacon, in the working season, is four pounds a week, with all needful accompaniments. How many of abolition England's hard laborers would gladly exchange conditions with these bacon-eating negroes? Under other names, Great Britain has, on her own home islands, more slaves than all our South; and some of them may be able to read, but very few to eat bacon to that amount.

During my residence in the South, a maiden-lady-friend of ours, having arrived at that kindly age when it is plea- sant to have a pet, had the rare good fortune to find among her acquaintance a little negro child of a year old that had lost its mother. She at once secured it to herself as a pet, as a lady might procure a lap-dog. It became a much more interesting pet than any lady's lap-dog ever was. No pet was ever more tenderly cared for, or more highly prized. Had it been the orphan of a princess it could not have been made more comfortable. There was nothing of the Topsy romance in the affair; but there is no occasion to doubt of its being now a far happier negro, than any that can be found among the snow-banks of the GREEN Mountains, where, in 1826, twenty-four out of nine hundred and eighteen were in the Penitentiary!—one in 38 1/4!

A Northern divine, who some seven years ago denounced the Abolition party as extravagant and malignant fanatics,— the “Cold Steel party,”—I wonder if he still does?— wrote this of Southern servitude: ”It has produced unspeakable mischief and misery in the domestic relations.”— And has nothing else done as much and far more, in this way, supposing this false charge to be granted to the full? “It has transferred parental authority to a source that God never designed.” Which is this, modesty, or profane presumption? “It has deprived the ignorant of knowledge, and taken from the defenceless the shield of their protection.” How so? Are not Southern slaves better instructed and protected than are the “Moyamensing blacks or their white companions, or even the poor generally?” “It consigns him to toil as a beast of burden, without any just and adequate remuneration.” He toils less, and he is better remunerated than the free laborers of any country. “The avails of his labor is the property of has master, and cannot be made his own.” Whose are the avails of the labor of the free man, who works far harder, without being able to procure half the comforts of the slave, for himself and family, and in sickness and age is in destitution and beggary, and in danger of DEATH BY STARVATION?

“He is HIMSELF PROPERTY, and of course can own none.”

Could the rank fetor of impiety be chlorinized out of it; so that we might handle it, secure against infection and offence, no doubt there might be found somewhat of psychological interest, together with a vast fund of amusement, in the abolitionistic notion of “the property of man in man.” It is a mental abortion. It is a profane fancy. It is the monster offspring of the infidel mother of a very gross materialism, whose father is an atheist.

“The property of man in man,” says Rev. Dr. Thornwell - “a fiction to which even the imagination cannot give consistency—is the miserable cant of those who would storm by prejudice what they cannot demolish by argument. We do not even pretend that the organs of the body can be said strictly to belong to another. The limbs and members of my servant are not mine, but his—they are not tools and instruments which I can sport with at pleasure, but the sacred possession of a human being, which cannot be invaded without the authority of law, and for the use of which he can never be divested of his responsibility to God.”

So much for this Key stone in the arch of Abolitionism. But, in common parlance—the most figurative of all parlances - and in the view of the carnal-minded materialist, neither is the slave's person or mind, the property of the master. They are both his own property; to which he may, and not unfrequently does, add largely; so as often to be able to command more ready cash than his master is able to command. And by a general public sentiment, stronger than law—without which laws are powerless—the slave's property is as sacred as the masters The property of the master is the obedience of the slave to all his lawful commands. So much, no more. If the master be foolish and wicked enough to be a tyrant; and the slave to disobey lawful commands, they will be as unhappy as many foolish and wicked fathers and sons.

In St. Augustine, my excellent host, in his generous kindness, appropriated to my use and comfort, a servant boy of some fourteen years old, and as black as a jet. Peter was a good, amiable, and attentive boy. With the entire approbation of the master,—though I had been taught that an attempt of the kind would peril my life,— I taught Peter to read the Bible.

In my pleasant quarters, I was much alone with Peter, and had a good deal of talk with him; and at no time, for many years, did I ever hear Peter express the shadow of a wish to be freer than he was, in his easy and well compensated servitude. How great would be the increase of comfort if all services were as well paid. When he attained to the ability to read the Bible a little, so as to understand, in easy passages, something of its meaning, Peter's happiness, in the shadow of an orange tree, might have been envied by a prince or a poet.

Are the Abolitionists happy? I met one in travelling through Ohio, who so raved and foamed, while denouncing slavery, as to frighten women and children. He could not have been happy. Happiness never takes that frightful form. Calmness and elevation are the attributes of that Truth which is the source and mother of happiness; and the child though sometimes joyous exceedingly, and sometimes indignant, never foams at the mouth.

As if a hopeless evil, if not the only one of any account in the world, Mrs. Stowe had intended to keep silent on the painful subject of slavery, until “she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation,” of the passage of the fugitive slave law, as if it were a quite new and unheard of, and unparalleled abomination. Then her senses of duty awakened her to the irksome task of teaching the people of the North “what slavery is. From this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality.”

What a miserable pity that she had not been consulted at an early day by the Government; and especially, by Clay, Webster and Cass!

Though often sufficiently revolting to all sober and reverent minds, the grotesque absurdity of the abolitionists' perversions of Scripture, are sometimes irresistibly ludicrous. It is a pity that they are not always as innocently simple as that of the Scotch mother and her good boy Sawney. The good mother and the good son were together hoeing their potato patch. The day was hot and thirsty. The ground was hard and foul. And long before the task was done, the poor boy, though “a lad o'grace”—felt as though he could stand it no longer without water from the burn. The good mother was strongly bent on its completion before leaving it; and so she delved away lustily, and with a good heart. She said many and cheering words of praise, encouragement and comfort to her boy, who sadly began to lag. He had often asked leave of her to go to the “burn” for a drink; but the burn was a good way off, and so poor Sawney was not permitted to leave the potato patch, lest it might not be finished so soon as desired. We'll ha' done it, Sawney, my bairn in a wee bit; and then the burn will luik beautifu' Sawney, darlin'; an' it'll sing ye a bit ditty, my lad, ay' gie ye a stoup o' its drink sweetened, Sawney, ay', my bairn, sweetened.”

“But, guid mither, I'm muckle drouthy. Au', mither, does na' the guid buik say, ‘gi' drink unto the drouthy?’ ”

“Aye, mi bairn, and so saith it sure. That's unco true mi ain Sawney; but na' till the patch is done, Sawney.”

“An' where, mither mine, does the guid buik say ony thing o' that like?”

“Aye, Sawney! Sawney! I could a wal be greetin' that ye shud forget that the Bible saith—Ho, every ane that thirsteth.”

Sawney too was much distressed that he had forgetten it; and he hoed away lustily till the patch was finished. That Scotch wither no doubt raised up on her knees many a Bible expositor to do credit to her nurture.

With the mere amusing expositions of the abolitionists we ought not, perhaps, to find fault, unless they be also profane;—then indeed they would not be merely amusing. But when a learned divine of the dignifiedly moderate class of abolitionists, takes upon himself so flatly to contradict Holy Writ as to declare that “masters cannot render to their servants that which is just and equal,” he seems to extort rebuke for his impious presumption.

“Masters cannot render to their servants that which is just and equal,” says a Philadelphia divine. Let him settle that with the apostle who commands it.

Among negro slaves,—as often among white freemen,— there are found occasionally vicious fellows who are never safe—out of prison—from harm or harming. These are found out and bought up by the negro traders,—who sometimes corrupt them for the purpose—and taken off to New Orleans, or elsewhere.

So from London, men and women have been transported on the oaths of such as have led them into crime from selfish and sinister motives.

What this has to do with my subject, no one will guess, but such as have hearts with eyes in them. Is it a large class? I don't know. Some people think it a very large class; and some people think it a very small one. I cannot decide. I dare not. The truth, perhaps, lies between them, where it is usually found,—as it is said,—between extremes.

Is it not a bright particular gem? Where did I get it? Why it came to me rolled up in a fresh copy of the CHRISTIAN WITNESS, of Feb. 11, 1853. How it found me,— away up here between the hills and beside the river, I am sure I don't know;—all the way from Boston. What a nice thing it would be—wouldn't it—to be able to enjoy and help to support such papers, that send out such nice things for the promotion of wisdom and happiness? Perhaps so. I don't know. It might be a nice thing; or it might not. It would be a blessing that might be abused. I hope it is right for me to think it best as it is.

How the Anti-Slavery authorities reconcile all their arguments against Southern Slavery is no affair of mine. But that their notion, which happens to be a true one, that slave labor is less profitable than free labor, can be reconciled with their oft repeated assertion, that the slave gets nothing for his work, is a question which might gravel even the philosophy of the Hons. Greely and Sumner. To be consistent as a Socialist, Greely ought to feel kindly towards Slavery, as approaching nearer to Socialism, than any thing else, on a large scale, that he is likely ever to see in this world. And, indeed, in very many instances of this species of Socialism, the slaves know themselves to have the best of it; and the conscientious and grateful among them, often show, that they know and feel it, by kind and generous exertions to ameliorate the circumstances of their masters. Very many beautiful cases of this character might easily be catalogued, to the no doubt great surprise and wonder, not only of Abolitionists, but of the illiberal and selfish of all classes, who ought to blush, if able, that in real excellency of character they are inferior to many a slave.

It is one of the usual arguments against the happiness of the negro slave, that sometimes they run away! And what an argument! As if people in all conditions of life were not generally discontented. Why are the overland routes to California lined with graves of New Englanders, fled from homes that would have been happy homes, but for the very bitter ingredient that makes not only negroes run away, but also apprentices, and sons, and even daughters, and occasionally, a husband, or a wife? Many a white man, and woman, too, have changed their condition, by removal, and otherwise, who would gladly change back again. And so is it with the Southern slave, who runs away. Many of them get back to their happier home than they find elsewhere; and many more would gladly retrace their steps, but are not able. From one plantation, with which I was well acquainted, two negroes ran away; and in a few months were right glad to find themselves at home again. They were both thoroughly cured of their discontent; and were, and still are, as recently I have learned, more faithful and happy than before they tried the unsatisfactory experiment. “A few cold days in New York, among the free negroes of Anthony Street,” Dick Downing used to say, “would be enough to content any Southern fellow with his own lot.” Dick had never been in the Baker Street of another city.

St. Paul put a letter into the hand of a runaway slave, and sent him back to his master.

A reverend New England divine put a Colt's revolver into the hands of a runaway slave, with a charge to use it with effect on the person of the first man who should dare to call or treat him as a slave; and afterwards he boasted of it in the pulpit!

What employment would they find, by which to earn their subsistence, in so crowded a population, and where “leave to toil” is granted as a special favor, should British abolitionism succeed in its zealous endeavors to ruin our cotton growing population, by insane intervention with its rights? And how then would England get on with her pauper difficulties?

Anomalies varied as rainbow colors, are found every where; but the strangest of all anomalies are those of British policy, and British public morals. Heaven grant that this anomalous state of things may not be a true fore- shadowing of a swift coming event of deplorable evil to our race!

There may be no people on earth, of their number, so secure against fearful accidents, disasters, calamities and violence, as are the colored peasantry of the South. They are very rarely exposed to great dangers of any kind. Steamboat explosions and collisions, and railroad crashes; and shipwrecks, and fires, and floods, and highway robbers, and assassins, and incendiaries, find few victims among them.

Is there no happiness in this? Read the newspapers, and then ask the maimed, and the mourning, and the dying, and the desolated,—and then answer me!

“All things are double, one against another.” So saith the wise; and that it is so let me submit and be thankful.

What charming little dishes of whipt sillabub are often found served up by English writers for the benefit of our negroes. Look at and taste of this.

“Take an extreme case.; Take the case of the slaves on American plantations. I dare say they are worked hard. I dare say they don't altogether like it. I dare say their's is an unpleasant experience on the whole.”—Bleak House.

I dare say, Mr. Skimpole Dickens, you know very little about it. I dare say, that English writers who meddle with our affairs in this way, would often appear less ridiculous and damage their own country less, if they would try honestly to know more and write less about what they are shamefully and it seems blissfully ignorant. In their stolid ignorance of us, which shuts them out from even as much knowledge of our geography, as they ought to have of the geography of the moon, I dare say, on examination, it would be found that in their mind, there is mixed up the horrors of a piratical slave-trade, with the condition of the slaves on American plantations. And I dare say, if they would examine honestly into the truth of the matter, they would find the slaves on our plantations, as much better off than English farm laborers, as these are better off than were the cruelly treated galley slaves of the Dey of Algiers, when that dignitary reckoned it among his highest duties and dearest privileges, to torture the “Christian dogs” which his piratical corsairs had captured. I dare say that all this is so. The English seem rapidly to be getting to where they were in 1694 when Bishop Patrick said “they seemed to take pleasure in being ignorant of the most important truths.” Let us hope better things of them, and that they only seem in love with error.

Now a closing word for the author. In charity with all, to all he would do good, and evil to none. If a little harshly he has sometimes chided, it has not been from hate, but love. Some things are not very praisworthy, and he has not praised them. Some notions have done great evil. They cannot be good notions. With plainness of speech he has said so. For the holders of them he has charity. In return he asks theirs for himself; but not for any of his false notions. To the abolitionists at home and abroad, he has shown where they may employ their means to better than revolutionary ends. He has shown that the southern slave is in a happier condition than the negro in Africa,— than the free blacks here—than the suffering poor of all countries. He would gladly have done it better. He did what he could. He now concludes his task in the loving hope for all hereafter, of better counsels find kinder sympathies.