“THE whole conduct of Cambyses,” says Herodotus, the father of history, “towards the Egyptian gods, sanctuaries and priests, convinces me that this King was in the highest degree insane; for otherwise he would not have insulted the worship and holy things of a people.” The coincidence between the conduct of Cambyses, one of the earliest rulers of men, and that of Mr. Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, one of the latest rulers in Time, is singularly striking and remarkable. This King, Lincoln, has been, and now is, endeavoring to overthrow the institutions and ruin the prosperity of fifteen sovereign and independent Southern States: first, by insult, vilification, and contumelious abuse of their social system; then, by direct assault, or gradual encroachment upon their constitutional rights; and lastly, by seeking to slaughter their liberties beneath the iron heel of armed mercenary invaders. Instead of ruling in accordance with the eternal principles of rectitude and benevolence, he has chosen to inaugurate discord, hatred, and civil war, between thirty millions of brothers, and to convert a country smiling with loveliness and beauty, and teeming with wealth and prosperity, into a great Golgotha. He has violated that Constitution which he has sworn to observe and protect; he has made war without right or authority; he has converted free institutions into instruments of despotism; he has prepared armed men for the sack and carnage of great commercial cities, and the waste and desolation of harvest fields—peaceful and happy homes; and the Ocean, which should be the natural bond of love and amity between the Nations, he has changed into a high road of terror for the merchant, and a barracks for his ships of war.

THE historians of future ages, in philosophising upon the unaccountable events of the past, will have to record how the greatest and most favored country upon earth, with the most liberal code of laws that the world had yet witnessed, growing out of the rational theory of individual self-government, was destroyed by the perverse fanaticism of a certain political organization, the chosen chief of which is Abraham Lincoln. The ethics, or doctrines rather, of this party are founded upon the allegation, that negro subordination is contrary to Divine law and revolting to the moral sense of mankind, and that slavery is the creature of local or municipal codes and at war with Nature. Such assumptions are untenable, fictitious, and iniquitous. And before passing over to a review of that cruel question, which more immediately destroys the peace and happiness of the American people, we will proceed with a refutation of these fundamental errors: establishing that slavery is coeval with the dawn of history and civilization, and existed antecedent to all written codes; showing that the subordination of the negro to the Caucasian is not slavery, but, that being of physical and intellectual inferiority of organism, this is his normal condition; and, finally, proving beyond cavil, that such a relation, in social economy, is wise, providential, and beneficient—having elevated the negro to a standard of civilization which he never attained before, and having furnished with labor millions of the superior race, and clothed more than one-half of civilized mankind.

SLAVERY, at the commencement and formation of social and political societies, was universal as civilization; permanent as the free autonomy of nationalities; and constituted an integral element in the progress and greatness of the most remarkable governments that ever existed. It was an Egyptian institution before the Pyramids were built or hieroglyphics invented; so in Syria and Assyria, before Babylon or Nineveh arose in splendor and beauty; and in Palestine long before Abraham first went into Egypt. It was an institution of the Indians and the Chinese—of the the Medes and Persians —of the Greeks and the Phoenicians—of the Romans and the several European Nations; certainly as universal as law or order, and continuing down to the application, or substitution, of the mechanic arts for the performance of that brute labor formerly exacted of man. And this economical and political element of order and civilization in society, was SLAVERY per se—the subjection or constrained obedience of white men, made dependent upon rulers of the same caste and race with themselves: but RADICALLY AND TOTALLY IN CONTRADISTINCTION TO THE SUBORDINATE RELATIONS OF THE NEGRO IN THE SOUTHERN STATES OF AMERICA.

At this remote period of Time, and more especially in a brief and cursory view of the facts, it will be found impossible to present either a full or minute account of the relations which existed between master and slave, in ancient Nations. What we can derive from her hieroglyphic characters, and the paintings upon her tombs and monuments, is the principal means through which we can glance at Egypt's early domestic economy. The preponderance of Egyptian slaves was either purchased from barbarous nations or conquered in war. We behold in one place the king putting them to flight. In another, we see an officer registering, and arranging them into separate classes—adults, women, and minors. That they were generally foreigners we know, from the fact that it was the boast of the Pharaohs, that in the erection of the Pyramids and public monuments no Egyptian hands were employed. And GESCHE (the Goshen of the Bible), of which Heliopolis was the capital, and Moses one of the priests, was the district allotted to the Israelitish bondsmen and their families. The slaves of Egypt were employed in all occupations, agrestic and domestic; nor do they seem to have been cruelly treated; although the master, mistress, and overseer are generally represented as wielding the lash while superintending them. This instrument, however, should be regarded in the unexpressive language of pictorial history, merely as the insignia of authority. For, on the contrary, upon a monument of Thebes, there is a picture copied by Sir Gardner Wilkinson, representing a lady enjoying the luxury of the bath and attended by four female slaves; where kindness on the part of the former, and respectful affection on that of the latter, are clearly delineated. And when the Jews planned their escape from the land of bondage to the land of promise, did they not succeed by false representations, in borrowing from their Egyptian masters, precious vessels, jewelry and gold? That system, if unjust, could not have been very cruel, under which the master lent valuables toward the gratification of his cunning slave.

But these very Jews, at the time that they were transferred from their home into Egypt, and indeed long before this term of their captivity, were slaveholders themselves. And when they returned from bondage under Nehemiah, one-sixth of the people were at once slaves and captives. Abraham had his male slaves and female slaves; and Sarah was the tyrannical and cruel mistress of Hagar. When Rebecca married Isaac she carried to his home her slave-damsels; as did Leah, the wife of Laban, and Rachel, the spouse of Jacob. The Jews reduced the Gibeonites to “hewers of wood and drawers of water;” and whilst the Hebrew slave (unless he selected the contrary) was entitled to release at the year of Jubilee, and to be treated during his bondage as “a servant and sojourner,” the heathen and the stranger, on the other hand, became not only “a bond-man forever,” but the “possession” and “the money” of his master and owner. Even Solomon, reputed to have been the wisest of men, a son of David (who was a man according to God's heart) and a direct ancestor of Christ —according to Matthew, the Evangelist—was, if judged by our modern international law, a common pirate; for his ships on the sea of Tarsus, exported all sorts of merchandise to exchange for “ivory, apes, and Ethiopians.” And, when the Saviour of Mankind was upon earth, inculcating lessons of wisdom in the alleys and dark ways, on the mountains and highways, he not only acquiesced in, but approved of, such institutions, and healed the Centurion's slave; even as the apostle Paul returned to his Christian master the fugitive, Onesimus.

But we feel that it is unnecessary to dwell farther upon this subject. The question of Hebrew slavery has recently been fully and thoroughly examined by the Rev. Dr. Van Dyke, of Brooklyn, N. Y., and by the Rabbi Raphall*

*The influence exercised by abolitionism upon the best minds of the North, is peculiarly mournful. The “Bible View of Slavery,” a sermon preached by Dr. Raphall, on the day of National fast, Jan. 4, 1861, is certainly the most scholarly and conclusive discourse, written by any divine of his section. Yet, after invoking “the Father of Truth and Mercy to enlighten his mind,” in his terror of the anti-slavery Moloch, he utters strange blasphemy. “My friends,” says the sapient Rabbi, “I find, and I am sorry to find, that I am delivering a pro-slavery discourse. I am no friend to slavery in the abstract, and still less friendly to the practical workings of slavery. But I stand here as a teacher in Israel; not to place before you my own feelings and opinions, but to propound to you THE WORD of GOD, the Bible View of Slavery.” A Tammany politician would scorn to stultify himself thus. The Doctor absolutely sets his own wisdom above that of God. Like an obedient, but hypocritical servant, he preaches abroad the word and will of his Master; but he “is sorry” for doing it! Is not this Abolition blasphemy?

SLAVERY assumed in India a religious as well as a political character. The labors of the slave were lightened and alleviated by a spiritual resignation of Faith. He believed that at the creation, although sprung from the Deity, his condition of life was immutably fixed. All men, according to Menu, are divided into four classes; the first of which sprang from the mouth of God and are gifted to rule and to sacrifice. The second, born of His arm, are endued with the strength to fight in defence of the other classes. The third, or the children of His abdomen, are allotted to agriculture, traffic and trade. The fourth were the offspring of His feet and naturally doomed to servitude. But this predestination of the latter does not seem to have been regretted; for to serve a Brahmin was esteemed both laudable and honorable. Aside from this classification, however, there was a Hindoo code under which slaves were made by voluntary sale; by sale of children; by servile birth; by marriage to a slave; by sale for debt; and by captivity in war. So, also, were persons committing crimes against nature or society, (entailing forfeiture of life in other Nations) reduced to slavery. This continued until Mohammedanism predominated, and, as usual with that power, introduced its own innovations; recognizing but two sources of slavery—captive infidels and their descendants. Such slaves were subject to all the laws of sale and inheritance. They could not marry without permission from their masters; nor be parties to a suit; nor bear testimony in Courts of Justice; nor inherit or acquire property; nor be eligible to any office of trust or emolument. But in 1793, British power, through the agency of the East India Company, modified all this, declaring that “Mohammedan law, with reference to Mohammedans, and Hindoo law with reference to Hindoos,” were henceforward to be regarded as the general rules of Indian jurisprudence; thus recognizing by one enactment two systems of slavery in the same country.

IT would be difficult to name a people, no matter of what ethnic origin or affinity, who were not slave-owners; and with whom slavery was not one of the earliest institutions. It seems to have been the natural relation of the weak to the powerful—of the captive to the conqueror—of the dependent to the opulent. It is doubtful whether it was ever founded upon any statutory enactments, but existed rather by prescription; since its origin was antecedent to history or tradition. Thus: It is almost certain, and if not quite certain, decidedly probable, that the primitive inhabitants of Susiana—Elamites, doubtless—were conquered by Hamites and reduced to a condition of servitude. This Hamite race wrested Babylonia from the Median Scyths—a mixture of Japhetic and Turaunian races—twenty-three centuries before Christ. According to Berosus, after a reign of 258 years, these Hamite conquerors were in turn superseded in power by emigrants from Susiana—the founders of the great Chaldean Empire. The captives, as usual, became the servants of the conquerors. It was at this period that the Exodus of Abraham took place—when the Hebrew patriarch, with his household, marched from Chaldea to Palestine—and when the Phoenicians emigrated from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean; each carrying with them the precious institution of slavery. It was at this period that Semitic tribes displaced the Cushite inhabitants of the Arabian peninsula; that Assyria was becoming occupied by the Semitic settlers of Babylonia; and that the eastern frontier of Syria was in course of occupation by Aramæans— all and each of whom had slaves and slavery. And when Arabian supremacy was established in the Chaldean Empire, no less than when the seat of empire, in the 13th century B. C., was again transferred to Assyria—amid all vicissitudes of time, and war, and change, slavery continued the same; no matter what people or race might rule.

The autonomy of the latter, and the greater Assyrian Empire, continued at least during six centuries; and the palaces and temples of Sardanapalus—the palace at Nineveh of Shalmanubar; he of the Black Obelisk—the palace of Sargon, at Khorsabad—the many and magnificent palaces of Esar-haddon; the wonderful hunting palace of his successor—would be, (if we had not the testimony of the Bible even to guide us,) no silent witnesses to the wisdom, extent, importance, utility, skill and intelligence, of that system of labor which mainly contributed toward their execution. The slaves and captives whom it was unnecessary to employ upon the public works were colonized abroad. Thus the Chaldeans were sent into Armenia; the Jews and Israelites into Assyria and Media; and the Babylonians and Susianians, into Palestine. And yet these Assyrian slave-dealers and slave-owners—it will seem incredible to the unenlightened —were in all the elements of civilization and advancement, if we except a barbarous religion and savage passions, very nearly, if not completely, upon a par with our own boasted progress.

Out of the ruin of the Assyrian Empire, it was, that the later Babylonish Empire arose, in brilliant but brief splendor. When Saracus was betrayed by Nabopolassar, his General and the father of Nebuchadnezzar, Josiah, King of Judea, was tributary to the Assyrian; and in the division of the empire between Cyaxares, the Mede, and Nabopolassar, Judea, Syria, Phoenicia, &c., fell to the lot or choice of the latter. Nineveh, of course, was taken and destroyed; the bulk of the people became captives, and were equally divided. With these captives, remarkably advanced in a knowledge of the fine arts, and especially of architecture, it was, that Nabopolassar commenced the magnificent works which Nebuchadnezzar completed. When, however, the Egyptian king, Necho, made war upon the former, defeated Josiah and put his elder brother Jehoiakim upon the throne, Nebuchadnezzar went out against him and drove him back into Egypt. During his absence Nabopolassar died, and Nebuchadnezzar, followed by captive Jews, Phoenicians, Syrians and Egyptians, returned to assume the government. These captives he distributed over various parts of Babylon; the great number of which, however, when added to the prisoners of his father, gave him command of that power which enabled him to consummate those great works that were then among the wonders of the world, and the ruins of which excite the mingled awe and admiration of the present generation. With this slave labor he built the great outer wall which fortified his capital: it was 130 square miles, 80 feet wide, and from three to four hundred feet high—embracing altogether about two hundred millions yards of solid masonry! Inside of this, there was another wall of nearly equal importance. He had built in seventeen days time a splendid palace, the ruins of which are still extant. He had built or rebuilt all the cities of upper Babylonia, and Babylon itself. He had dug immense canals; formed aqueducts; raised pyramidal temples and other sacred shrines; made immense reservoirs; built quays and breakwaters; and constructed the wonderful hanging gardens of Babylon. But during the construction of these works, the Jews revolted three times; and in the reign of one of their kings, Zedekiah, Jerusalem was invested—destroyed—and the bulk of its inhabitants made to swell the captives of Nebuchadnezzar. With this immense additional servile population, he continued to embellish his capital, and to prosecute the construction of works for public utility. After a reign of forty-three years, Nebuchadnezzar died, leaving the crown to his son, Evil-Merodach. The successor of this prince witnessed, doubtless, the opening of that Revolution, which, by the overthrow of Astyages, established the great Persian Empire under Cyrus. At any rate one of his successors, Nabonadius, entered into alliance with Cræsus, the Lydian, which finally resulted in the capture of Babylon, then in charge of Belshazzar; for Nabonadius was at Borsippa. This latter city soon shared the fate of the capital, and with it the old Chaldean Empire fell under the dominion of the victorious Persian; and master and slave alike became the captive property of the victor.

Lydia first arose to importance under the reign of Gyges. It was, however, once previously invaded and overrun by the Cimmerians, who reduced a portion of the inhabitants to a condition of servitude. These Cimmerians were themselves fugitives that fled from before the more victorious Scyths, leaving many of their brethren behind in captivity. But during the reign of Sadyattes, the Cimmerian power in Lydia began to decline; and by Alyattes, his successor, they were either extirpated or reduced to slavery. A war of greater importance soon ensued: Alyattes became engaged with Cyaxares, the Mede, by whom Lydia was invaded. The war continued six years with doubtful issue; but always resulting in slavery to the respective captives. At length an eclipse—supposed to have been that of Thales—put an end to the war; and Alyattes spent the remainder of his reign in peace, or in the erection of his mammoth sepulchre—equal in grandeur to the best Egyptian pyramid—by the hands of his captives and “the tradesmen, handicraftsmen, and courtezans of Sardis.”

The conclusion of this war between the contending powers, was also the commencement of a strict alliance between the Lydians and the Medes. The latter was a branch of the great Arian family, and closely allied in language and lineage to the Persians. Their manners and customs, and still more their institutions, were not radically dissimilar. The Medes under Cyaxares, it is plausibly conjectured, commenced their migration by issuing from Khorasan; passing along the mountain chain south of the Caspian Sea; entering Media; conquering the Scyths; blending with a portion of them, reducing others to servitude, and precipitating the intractable upon the Assyrians; which, finally, resulted in the overthrow and destruction of the empire of the latter. Within eight or nine years of the establishment of his power in Media, Cyaxares was master of Nineveh. In this enterprise he was assisted, as we have seen, by the traitorous General of Saracus, Nabopolassar. Babylon became not only sovereign and independent, but aggressive and conquering—always in alliance with Media; and, by the peace of the latter with Lydia, a triple alliance followed, embracing the Babylonish power. This alliance was cemented by royal intermarriages, and lasted about fifty years. The allied kingdoms, however, continued respectively to absorb some lesser surrounding powers, and to reduce their inhabitants to servitude. At length the Persian irruption under Cyrus came. Babylon was leveled with the dust, and the pride of her allies subdued. Again the proud masters of Babylonia, Media and Lydia, in the uncertainty and vicissitudes of the times, became the captives of the Persian—the slaves, in fact, of the conquering Pasargadæ, Maraphii, and Achæmenidæ; for with them, as with all other dominant races, slavery was a civil and religious institution.

Thus we see, that during the greatest period of the world's history, so long dim and obscure to human knowledge, and only partially and imperfectly revealed to us now, by the light of modern research and criticism, Slavery was the invariable and universal superstructure of all social and political systems.

As with early Greece, so with early Rome;—her social and economical history is shrouded from our penetration in the thick haze of myths, poetry, and tradition. But this much is clear: that from the very foundation of her society—coeval with the regulation of family relations—and long before the birth of her poets and historians, slavery was one of Rome's most valued institutions; and continued so, not only until the Cross was erected upon the ruins of Paganism, but long after the sceptre of Rome had passed beneath the triumphant banner of the stranger and barbarian. Indeed, the immutable principles of justice were so clearly discerned by the inflexible rectitude of the Roman mind, and so sagaciously applied by the wisdom of Roman lawyers, that Christianity, when supreme even in the Empire, approvingly adopted the old Roman statutes. That sacred religion, whose sanctity was sealed by the death of the noblest martyrs, and whose triumph sprang from their blood, naturalized as its own civil ethics, the provisions of the Roman slave code; founded as they were upon the experience and accumulated wisdom of ages. Throughout the “Code” of Justinian there is a full recognition of slavery—a broad and unquestionable distinction made between the free and the servile—and by the acknowledged disqualification for freedom of those who were captured in war; of those who sold themselves or were legally sold into slavery; and of those who were of servile descent—a virtual denial of natural equality.*

*Professor Tayler Lewis, in his “reply” to a sermon of Dr. Van Dyke, noticed already in the text, rises to the sublime of ignorance. “The Roman servitude was bitter enough,” says he, “but still with hope [false cant! the Roman slave had no right to ‘hope;’ in this respect he was not upon a level with the negro slave] remaining at the bottom. Emancipation might speedily restore the doulos, [This, Professor, was a Greek and not a Roman slave, and ‘emancipation’ is as much the privilege of the negro as it was of either the Roman servus or Greek doulos,] or his children, to the level of society. It was, therefore, a better thing (sic) than this Calhoun, (!) Hamitic [This is a mere theological fancy, and not scholarship or erudition, Professor,] bondage, ‘normal,’ endless, hopeless, to which no year of jubilee [Surely, Professor, you ought to know that you now tread upon Hebrew and not upon Roman ground,] shall ever come.”

Now, this is one of the oracles of Northern ignorance. He passes for a great man in New York. We have quoted from him but three sentences; and behold the confusion of facts and ideas! When the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit.

UPON the ruin of the Roman Empire the power and dominion of the Barbarian arose. That Empire once comprehended the largest and fairest portion of the earth. But when Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, was crowned King of Italy, the glory of the Empire may be said to have passed away. Roman dominion, indeed, still prevailed; but only in a religious sense. The Western World was rapidly becoming Christian and Catholic. The bishops and missionaries of the Church were all, or nearly all, of the Latin race, and spoke the Latin tongue. They stood between the rude barbarian and an angry and exacting Deity, as mediators and intercessors—they were regarded as the commissioned advocates of the sinner and the transgressor—men of delegated holiness, whose prayers ascended daily before Seraphim and Cherubim. It was natural that these cultivated men, the sole depositaries of the learning of the times, and the only advance guard of Civilization and Christian humanitarianism, should become the teachers of barbarians and the moulders of their actions. And the spirit of Christianity rendered them bold, fearless and generous. As Agapetus confronted the Emperor Justinian and his courtezan queen—as Silverius defied the frowns, threats and persecutions of Belisarius and his lewd wife, Antonina—and as Pelagius I. stood undismayed before Totila—so did many of these soldiers of the Christian cross peril their lives in the cause of humanity and civilization,—precipitating themselves between savage men and their victims, until by sacred lesson and example they changed or modified the passions of the barbarians. They became the reconcilers of hostile races and the harmonizers of different laws and customs. For the Barbaric codes, like the Roman law, recognized slavery as the ordinary, if not the normal, condition of a portion of mankind. With them, as with the Romans, man was merchandise. But, happily for mankind, the captive in war did not forfeit his life, but his liberty, by defeat; otherwise the wars of the whole world must have been wars of massacre and extermination. The clergy interposed their benign religious influence on behalf of the unfortunate, and soothed or ameliorated their condition by overawing the cruel. But the system of slavery, in all its legal essentials, remained the same. It was too permanently and too universally rooted—too firmly founded upon principles of justice, social, religious and philanthropic necessity—to admit of radical change or perceptible disturbance. The capture and sale of men was a principal branch of commerce along all the shores of Europe. Clovis encouraged the sale of the Alemanni; Charlemagne that of the Saxons, and Henry the Fowler that of the sclaves—captives from whose ethnic name we derive the term slave. Even when the slave was a Christian, if his domestic or family relations were secured or respected by law or usage, the boon was due to religion rather than to any theory of personal rights or humanity. The Lombards acknowledged the sanctity of the marriage contract between slaves; but marriage between those belonging to different owners was strictly prohibited; and by the Salic law, the slave who married without consent of his master was punished by an hundred stripes and a specified mulct. Nearly all the Barbarian codes, like the Roman, prohibited the debasing alliance of free persons with slaves. By the Salic and Ripuarian laws, the freeman who married a slave, forfeited his freedom; and where a free woman married a slave, both were, by the Lombard and Burgundian statutes, condemned to death. The Visigothic code consigned to death the freewoman who married, or even had intercourse, with her slave. The Saxon laws declared the like penalty not only against free persons marrying slaves, but even against those who married persons of inferior rank. Unlike the Roman, the Barbaric codes protected the person of the slave because he was property. All injury done to him was an injury to property rather than to person; and the master, not the sufferer, received the compensation. The edict of Theodoric provided that the murderer of another's slave should furnish the injured master with two slaves instead. Indeed, the power of life and death was in the master's hands; since, according to the codes, he had a perfect right to do away with his own property. The Latin Church zealously labored to reform this savage abuse, by endeavoring to have the Hebrew code, or the more humane edicts of Antoninus, Claudius and Justinian, engrafted upon the barbaric laws. And hence (although the right of life and death over a slave was the unquestioned usage of all German tribes from times immemorial) we find the provisions of the Mosaic law embodied in the Capitularies of Charlemagne; while, under Lothaire, the murderer of a slave was punished by penance and excommunication. The fugitive from labor and servitude became an Ishmael on the face of the earth. It was criminal to conceal him. As by our own common law the owner of property may recover it wherever he finds it, so the master might seize his slave anywhere, and punish him according to pleasure. The churches and the monasteries were large slaveholders; and to harbor or conceal the runaway slave of an ecclesiastic was doubly criminal. Yet fortunate was the fugitive that succeeded in seeking refuge at the altar. Before he was restored, a promise was exacted from the master to remit all punishment. When we add that the Anglo-Saxon Abbott, Alcuin, owned ten thousand slaves, some correct idea may be formed of the extent of ecclesiastical property in slaves. The countrymen of Alcuin furnished the slave market with many of the most precious specimens of that kind of merchandise. The beauty of some Anglo-Saxons, exhibited in the Roman slave mart, excited the compassion of Gregory the Great, and led to their conversion by the great missionary, Saint Augustine. The Irish bought Anglo-Saxon slaves extensively, but manumitted them by a decree of a National Council in 1172—a principle of generous humanity, which England long afterward rewarded, by conquering and enslaving Ireland. The people of Northumberland sold their nearest relatives, often—according to the venerable Bede and William of Malmesbury—their very children. But with the sway of William the Conqueror came Norman vassalage—when the native master and slave were alike compelled to do homage to new lords. At length, but slowly and gradually, the influence of the Latin Church—the amalgamation of races—the relations of different races to each other, growing out of conquest, intercourse, and change of dynasties—the final establishment of the European political system—the attachment of the slave to the soil in the character of serf—and the change in the laws which rendered slaves taxable property, and, therefore a source of oppression and expense; all these influences, together with the advances made in the discovery and application of the mechanic arts, modified the relations of master and servant. Slavery became villeinage. Yet their condition was not much improved by this change. In some cases, villeins might still be sold like cattle. In other instances, they could only be sold with the freehold. They could not always purchase their own liberty. The child followed the condition of the father. Like all other species of property, they were inheritable. They could not be admitted as witnesses in courts of justice. The runaway could be recovered by his master in the same manner as he would recover his horse or his ass. But the lord had not the power of life or limb over his vassal or serf. And when Henry VIII. and his characteristic daughter, Queen Elizabeth, commenced the work of manumission or emancipation, they did so through no philanthropic or religious motive, but simply to replenish their empty treasuries, by selling freedom to their enslaved vassals. Another reason was, that towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, the utility of the negro was discovered; and it is to this discovery that England is largely indebted for her present commercial wealth and ascendancy, as well as for the abolition of villeinage. Upon the negro question we shall soon enter; but whether—if we accept the securities conceded to his rights of person—the condition of the Caucasian vassal has been improved by his enfranchisement may well admit of some doubt.

One country—one people rather—remain to be spoken of—the Moslems. Long before Mohammed was born, slavery was in full force in distracted and divided Arabia —under all of her petty kings and chiefs. But united by Islamism—when the prophet of Allah gave to her the laws of Divine revelation—slavery became firmly fixed, perpetual and sanctified. It was one of the ordinary conditions of society, and it so continues to the present day. The Koran is, when regarded in its religious authoritativeness amongst a people, an eternal edict of servitude. At the time, however, that Mohammed lived, wrote and fought, slavery was an universal institution; founded upon the principles of universal laws; and hence, in the wars of Christian against Moor, many centuries afterward, which were inspired by dogmatic zeal, the system became not only increased, but debased. France and Italy were filled with Saracen slaves. In turn, the Saracen markets were overflowing with Christian captives, offered for sale by Jewish traders. And this example was copied during the German and Slavonic wars. So, Venetian ships were the carriers of slaves; slavery existed in Poland while Poland had life; and when nationally dead, Russia—where serfdom existed from the foundation of the Muscovite Empire— revived the system upon her corpse.

IT was not a sentiment of doctrinal or moral humanity which impelled the masters and owners of men to emancipate the slaves of their own race and lineage. For while villeinage prevailed in England—while feudalism, the maxims of the old Saxon Constitution, and Danish and Norman customs, were yet the law of the land, the Church, her holy fathers, monks and friars—according to the secretary of Edward VI., Sir Thomas Smith— interposed at the confessional, and in the ministry of extreme unction, for the amelioration of the condition of the servile. But on behalf of whom did these holy men so interpose? Was it for a heterogeneous race? Was it in the cause of savages or unreclaimed heathens? Was it on behalf of a people morally and physically repulsive, and intellectually degraded and inferior, whose normal and characteristic condition was that of servitude and subordination? No. It was on behalf of Englishmen who were of the same caste and race with their masters —descendants of Britons, Danes, Saxons, Angles, Picts and Normans—men who were of the same complexion and anatomical structure as their lords, and in whose veins coursed the kindred blood of a kindred lineage—men whose only inferiority was artificial and accidental, resulting from inherited poverty—and men whose progeny were destined in time to develop the most brilliant intellectual faculties in every department that sheds glory, or fame, or immortality, around intellectual life. Yet when emancipation gradually, but systematically commenced, it was founded upon principles of political economy purely. As we have seen, the monarchs sold freedom to their vassals. In the possession of the lord they were taxable property, and, consequently, a source of enormous expense. Philosophy and mechanism were advancing; the policy and necessity of exacting brute labor from man was receding. Each new discovery in science and the mechanic arts gave a fresh impetus to the progress and elevation of the serf, until at length the ethics of public economy found the ingenious susceptibilities, refined mental organism, and inventive genius of the Caucasian, more profitable in guiding the helm of the ship and directing the steam engine through the tunnel and down the rapid grade, than in rudely squandering away his power in a patriarchal manner, whereby the fruit of his labor would sink into comparative infinitesimal insignificance. The Sun of Civilization was rapidly reaching its meridian orbit. The progress made in useful inventions was considerable. The Spanish armada was destroyed. The Dutch broom was soon to be swept from the English channel. Bacon was writing his Novum Organum. Shakespeare was producing his noblest tragedies. Soon the Principia of Newton would produce a revolution in mathematics and astronomy. The Spirit of the Age was marching forward—onward rolled the wheels of progress. A few more years, and the Caucasian will remove the burden from off the shoulders of his brother—the steam engine will perform the labor of a million of toilers—the reaping machine will substitute the harvest hand in the harvest field—the cotton-gin and cotton jenny will daily do the work of hundreds—the sewing machine will strip of half its tragic pathos the “Song of the Shirt”—and international codes will loose their former stern aspect, and appear more gentle and benign. No more shall the captive in war remain the captor's slave; because equality of intellect and race among the peoples of Europe must become a recognized fact of international law; and because the improvement made in war engines and instruments of destruction render the chances of war alike equal and uncertain. It will no more appear wise or rational to retain and support a captured enemy upon an already over-populated soil. Public and political economy alike forbid it.

Nevertheless, the physical condition of the European hirelings and servants of the present day, is but little, if anything, in advance of that of the ancient Villein. Many of them, ragged or barefoot, toil daily for a pittance, not sufficient to provide their half-starved and half-famished families with the scantiest and coarsest food. Circumstances have altered, indeed, the relation of master and servant; but the nature and characteristics of the task-master is still the same. The distance of sympathy, mutual dependence and kindliness, which separates the cotton-spinners of New England and the iron masters of Pennsylvania, from their operatives, is as great as that which separates the lord from his vassal—INFINITELY greater than that which separates the Southern planter from his negro slave. And it is quite natural that this should be so. Property is precious. It is better and cheaper for the employer to hire for a pittance the daily laborer, than risk the life of his valuable slave in the performance of menial or dangerous service. Hence we find the Roman freemen; the Athenian Thêtes, the Spartan Perioïkoi, frequently exchanging their liberties for the protection and security of a master. And, indeed, fortunate would it be for the wretched operatives of the manufacturing towns of England; the coal-miners of Cornwall; and the stone-breaking, ditch-digging, dung-carrying, half-starved, semi-nude, bare-headed, and bare-footed peasantry of Ireland, if such a source of refuge were still left open to them. But no: the condition of the modern laborer differs only in degree, not in effect, from that of the vassal or the slave. He is still a craven dependent. And whatever little advantages he may possess, are the fruits of science and philosophy, rather than of religion or philanthropy in the heart of his master. This will, and indeed must, continue so, until labor is placed, if it ever can be, upon a level with capital. Perhaps, by the observation of particular facts in the general law of physics, some future evangel of science may discover some principle of mechanism, that will place the toiler, socially and politically, upon an equality with the capitalist; but until that day arrives, surely the Caucasian has room enough to exorcise his philanthropy on behalf of his crushed and down-trodden brother, without Quixotically spending his power and his pity on the side of that marked and debased slave of nature and circumstances—the negro.

Yet this is one of the crying errors of the present generation of would-be liberators and philanthropists. They build their arguments upon the false thesis, that all species of mankind had a common origin; and, indeed, were or are the children and lineal descendants of a single pair.*

* “But all this,” the superficial thinker will exclaim, “is contrary to the Mosaic account.” He must really pardon us for differing from him: we are no less Christian than he. Moses never intended to have the negro regarded as a child of Adam and Eve. The Mosaic view of our first parents, their aspect and characteristics, is our view; and is fully and sublimely expressed by the inspired Christian poet— Milton:

Now let the reader imagine, if he can conceive, this as a picture of a negro Adam and Eve; or let him show how a negro race could possibly spring from such parentage. But the reason and philosophy of this question will be hereafter made apparent in the text.

THE great sandy desert, called “Sahara,”—joyless, soundless, lifeless—is not more barren of objects to instruct the naturalist, than is the negro race of incidents interesting to the historian or the philosopher. Having ”never invented a reasoned theological system, discovered an alphabet, framed a grammatical language, nor made the least step in science or art”—as Hamilton Smith expresses it—we have to depend upon observation, and the writings of travellers, naturalists, and men of science, for information relative to it. This much, however, is clear, that in ancient Egypt, two thousand years before the birth of Christ, the negro was there as he is here—as he is and has been every where—the servant of a Caucasian master. “Black people”—writes the eminent English Egyptologist, Sir G. Wilkinson—“designated as natives of the foreign land of Cush, are generally represented on the monuments as captives or bearers of tribute to the Pharaohs.” This distinguished scholar and antiquary, describes also a painting in a catacomb of Thebes, in which Amunoph III. is represented seated on his throne, receiving the homage and tribute of various nations; among them, the black chiefs of Cush or Ethiopia, with presents of rings of gold, bags of precious stones, “cameleopards, panthers, skins, and long horned cattle, whose heads are strangely ornamented with the hands and heads of negroes.” This savage custom, of immolating innumerable victims to turn away the wrath of Deity, or propitiate the anger of a barbarous monarch, as we shall soon see, still prevails in negro-land. As was natural, the contempt of the Egyptians for them was supreme and ineffable. Horus, a King of the nineteenth dynasty, is delineated standing on a platform supported by prostrate negroes; and in a Nubian temple, they are represented as flying in the most abject consternation from the vengeance of Rameses II. But the Egyptian artists were not contented with such displays as these; they chose other symbols to express their contempt for, and the degradation of, the negro. In another Theban painting, he is portrayed in an attitude of servitude, with a salver in his hands; his dress, a scanty apron of the coarsest hide; and the ridiculousness of his tout ensemble heightened by the addition of a bob-tail. Nor was it his good fortune to be more highly esteemed by the Arabs. We know from that incomparably enchanting book, “The Thousand-and-one Nights,” how the negro was regarded by the Moslems, and that he was their slave. “May Allah disgrace the blacks for their malice and villainy,” exclaims Ghânim, the son of Eyoub, upon overhearing Bakheet tell his fellow negroes, that they would “roast and eat” any of the whites who might accidentally fall into their hands. To his inimitable translation, and in particular illustration of this incident, Mr. Lane appended this note: “I am not sure that this is to be understood as a jest; for I have been assured by a slave-dealer and other persons in Cairo, that sometimes slaves brought to that city, are found to be cannibals; and that a proof lately occurred there—an infant having been eaten by its black nurse. I was also told that these cannibals are generally distinguished by an elongation of the os coccygis; or, in other words, that they have tails.”

Thus we see that the negro was equally repulsive to the ancient Egyptian and to the modern Arab—that his animality was sternly asserted by each—and that what the Theban painter pictorially represented, is matter of general belief in Cairo. In fact, the opinion that a certain branch of the negro family was adorned by an elongation and outward curvature of the os coccygis has been seriously entertained by some eminent savans, and denied by many others, among whom we may name the distinguished Soemmerring. But be this as it may—and passing the anatomical conformation of the negro over to the consideration of the subject in the succeeding section—the inferior light in which he was regarded by Arab and Egyptian, will be matter neither of wonder nor surprise, to the observer of the African in the Confederate States. Although his social status is here in advance of any that he has ever before occupied in the history of the world, yet his moral and intellectual degradation, dependence, and subordination, are too patent and persistent to admit of doubt. It is not here, however,—where he is comparatively an advanced and civilized being—that we are to search for the genuine characteristics of the typical negro. To properly understand him, he must be regarded as described by enlightened travellers and naturalists; and the opinions of such, we will extract from quotations made by the great English champion of negro equality—Dr. James Cowles Prichard. The negroes of the Gold Coast around the district of Acra, according to this learned author, “are ever on the watch to sieze the wives and children of the neighboring clans, and to sell them to strangers: many sell their own. Every recess, and every retired corner of the land, has been the scene of hateful rapine and slaughter, not be excused or palliated by the spirit of warfare, but perpetrated in cold blood and for the love of gain.” Now, this is the unwilling testimony of a friend against friends, whose cause he had undertaken to plead and vindicate; whose descent from Adam and Eve he started out with the predetermined resolution of establishing. Not so the Abbate Bernardo de la Fuente. He was a zealous and pious missionary, wholly devoted to the conversion of the heathen and the preaching of the gospel; but, regardless of consequences, accustomed to speak the truth. Speaking of the Pelagian negroes of the Phillippine Islands, and particularly of the Nigta tribe, he exclaims: “This race of negroes seem to bear upon themselves the malediction of Heaven. They live in the woods and mountains like beasts, in separate families, and wander about supporting themselves by the fruits which the earth spontaneously offers. It has not come to my knowledge that a family of these negroes ever took up their abode in a village. If the Mohammedan inhabitants make slaves of them, they will submit to be beaten to death rather than undergo any bodily fatigue; and it is impossible either by force or persuasion to bring them to labor. Not far from my mission at Buyunan, in the Island de los Negros, there was a horde of negro families who had traffic with some barbarous Indian people, and were by these given to understand that I counselled them to receive baptism, in order that the government might force them to pay tribute: in consequence of this I could never reclaim one of them, and I believe very few negroes have been converted; for I only found the name of one in a register containing the baptisms of two hundred years. “This simple and candid statement reflects honor upon the honest sincerity of its author. Had he been one of Exeter Hall's disciples, or still worse, a Yankee missionary, we would have heard annually of the dangers which he had encountered, and of the numerous miraculous conversions that he had wrought; at least the truth would have forever remained hidden from our view. The credulity of the great mass of the American people has long been disgracefully imposed upon in this direction, by the false reports of their religious emissaries abroad. A rational system of theology is intellectually impossible to the negro. Naturally and instinctively he kneels to a Fetiche. Even when, in civilized communities, he adopts a noble and elevated creed, he does so merely as a matter of imitation and formalism; for it is usually beyond the sphere of his reason or metaphysical capacity. But wherever they are placed outside the influence of the surrounding circumstances of civilization, the conversion of negroes is almost an impossibility, and their faith becomes savage and debased. In Western Africa, it is notorious that they worship tigers and other wild animals of prey—trees, beetles, and insects. The best fruit of missionary labor in their midst, according to Father Loyer, is to induce them thus to pray: “My God give me this day rice and yams.” They indulge themselves in human sacrifices even at that. M. Seelgrave was an eyewitness, in Old Kalabar, of a child ten months old having been hanged upon a tree with a living fowl, in order to propitiate the deity and cause a sick king to recover his health. And it may not have escaped the memory of the reader, that the King of Dahomeh sacrificed to his god, out of gratitude for one of his victories, four thousand Fidans, causing their heads to be cut off and piled up together in a pyramidal heap. When this miserable savage died, the same tragedy was reënacted, but upon a still more terrible and gigantic scale.

No less cruel or barbarous are the details of a Cannibal Festival, as detailed in a letter of Rev. Peter W. Bernaske, dated Whydah, (Abomey), November 29th, 1860. “On the eve of the day,” says he, “when the custom was to commence, the whole town slept at King's gate, and got up at 5 o'clock in the morning to weep. And so they hypocritically did. The lamentations did not continue more than ten minutes; and before the king came out to fire guns to give notice to all, more than one hundred souls had been sacrificed, besides the same number of women killed in the inside of the palace. Ninety chief captains, one hundred and twenty princes and princesses—all these carried out separately, human beings, by four and two, to sacrifice for the late king.” On the 1st of August—a few days after this event—the dusky monarch, with a funeral cortege, came out to bury the remains of his father, with the following living things—“Sixty men, fifty rams, fifty goats, forty cocks, drakes, cowries, &c. The men and women soldiers, well armed with muskets and blunderbusses for firing; and when he was gone round his palace, he came to the gate and fired plenty; and there he killed fifty of the poor creatures and saved ten.” Fifteen days after this, the missionary was summoned before his majesty, when he beheld upon the palace gate “ninety human heads cut off that morning, their blood flowing on the ground like a flood, and the heads carefully laid on swish beds for public view.” Three days afterward, he saw “at the same gate, sixty heads laid upon the same place; and on three days again, thirty-six fresh heads in the same position.” The king had four platforms erected in the market place, from which “he threw cowries and cloths to the people, and then sacrificed about sixty souls.” “I dare say,” continues the missionary, that “he killed more than two thousand; because he kills men outside to be seen by all, and women inside privately. Oh! he destroyed many souls during this wicked custom.” Such being the normal religion of the negro, who will wonder that the rational theism of the Abbate Fuente and his predecessors, should have fallen as vainly upon his ears, as the harvest seed doth upon barren rocks?

The Hottentot or Bosjesman tribe—the negro “Bushmen” of South Africa—are described by M. Bory de St. Vincent as forming the transition between man and the genera of Orangs and Gibbons. “These people,” he adds, “are so brutish, lazy, and stupid, that the idea of reducing them to slavery has been abandoned.” To this, the most profound advocate of the “unity of race” theory is constrained to add his testimony. “Without houses or even huts,” writes Dr. Prichard, “living in caves and holes in the earth, those naked and half-starved savages wander through forests, in small companies or separate families, hardly supporting their comfortless existence by collecting wild roots; by a toilsome search for the eggs of ants; and by devouring, whenever they can catch them, lizards, snakes, and the most loathsome insects.” Surely, if consistent and sincere, the self-abasement of this gentleman would border on the sublime; but when we remember that in the fullness of his English pride, he would hardly admit that the Irish Celt was a child of Eve, the fraternal humiliation with which he embraces the degraded Hottentot, and claims for him common origin with himself, is stripped of more than half its poetic fancy. Yet, in matters of veracity, the distance that divides Dr. Prichard from the recent, and somewhat celebrated traveller, Dr. David Livingstone, is painfully astonishing. Sydney Smith it was, we believe, who declared it would take a surgical operation to drive a joke into a Scotchman; and certainly it would require some similar experiment to force the truth out of this Scotch missionary. Does he know of aught debasing or hopeless in the negro character? Having, perhaps, the fear of Exeter Hall before his eyes, it is carefully concealed. If he cannot speak glowingly of his African friends, he will be sufficiently cautious not to speak evil of them. Relative to the manners, customs, and characteristics of the Hottentots, he simply informs us that their “hair” “springs from the scalp in tufts with bare spaces between;” while of the black natives of Basongo, he says, that he was impressed by the strong “resemblance they bore to certain notabilities at home”! There is one tribe, however, in speaking descriptively of which he never seems to weary—the Batoka. “They have,” he says, “a curious taste for ornamenting their villages with the skulls of strangers.” “They follow,” he adds, “the curious custom of knocking out the front teeth at the age of puberty. This is done by both sexes; and though the under teeth, being relieved from the attrition of the upper, grow long and somewhat bent out, and thereby cause the under lip to protrude in a most unsightly way, no young woman thinks herself accomplished until she has got rid of the upper incisors. This custom gives them an uncouth, old-like appearance. Their laugh is hideous.” And again: “The women clothe themselves better than the Balonda, but the men go “in puris naturalibus. They walk about without the smallest sense of shame. They have even lost the tradition of the ‘fig leaf.’ I asked a fine, large-bodied old man if he did not think it would be better to adopt a little covering. He looked with a pitying leer, and laughed with surprise at my thinking him at all indecent; he evidently considered himself above such weak superstition. It was considered a good joke when I told them that, if they had nothing else, they must put on a bunch of grass.” In conclusion: “their mode of salutation is quite singular. They throw themselves on the ground, and, rolling from side to side, slap the outside of their thighs as expressions of thankfulness and welcome, uttering the words ‘kina bomba.’” That we have so much of the truth from Dr. Livingstone, even in so mild and amiable a form, is doubtless due to the facts, that a portion of the Batoka rebelled against his authority, and that a war of extermination was waged against them by his pet negro chieftain, one Sebituane, whose personal narratives are absolutely compared by him to Cæsar's Commentaries!

But to turn to another far different and more reliable source.—M. Lesson, in speaking of the Alforas—a tribe of New Guinea negroes—states that “the custom prevalent among them of putting their prisoners to death and erecting their spoils as trophies, accounts for the difficulty found in observing” their habits and customs even upon their own soil. “But,” he continues, “the Papuas described them to us as of a ferocious character—cruel and gloomy; possessing no arts, and passing their whole lives in seeking subsistence in the forests. An excessive stupidity was stamped upon their countenances. These savages, whose skin is of a very deep, swarthy, dirty brown or dark color, go naked. They make incisions upon their arms and breasts, and wear in their noses pieces of wood nearly six inches long. Their character is taciturn, and their physiognomy fierce; their motion is uncertain and slow.” To the foregoing the enterprising and accomplished Dr. Leyden adds his testimony. It is to him that the world is indebted for the first elaborate and intelligent account of the Alforas. “They are,” says he, “universally rude and unlettered; and where they have not been reduced to the state of slaves of the soil, their habits have a general resemblance. The most singular feature of their manners is the necessity imposed on each and all of them, at some period of life, to imbrue their hands in human blood; and in general, among all their tribes, as well as the Idan, no person is permitted to marry till he can show the skull of a man whom he has slaughtered. They eat the flesh of their enemies, like the Battas, and drink out of their skulls; and the ornaments of their houses are human skulls and teeth, which are consequently in great request among them.” In describing the negroes of Maria and Van Dieman's Islands, Mr. Heron says of them, that “they are without laws or anything like regular government; without arts of any kind, with no idea of agriculture, of the use of metals, or of the services to be derived from animals; without clothes or fixed abode, and with no other shelter than a mere shed of bark to keep off the cold south winds; and with no arms but a club and spear. Although these and the neighboring New Hollanders are placed in a fine climate and productive soil, they derive no other sustenance from the earth than a few fern roots and bulbs of orchises; and they are often driven by the failure of their principal resource, fish, to the most revolting food—frogs, lizards, serpents, spiders, the larvæ of insects, and particularly a kind of large caterpillar, found in groups on the branches of the eucalyptus resinifera. They are sometimes obliged to appease the cravings of hunger by the bark of trees and by a paste made by pounding together ants, their larvae, and fern roots. Their remorseless cruelty, their unfeeling barbarity to women and children, their immoderate revenge for the most trivial affronts, their want of natural affection, are hardly redeemed by the slightest traits of goodness. When we add that they are quite insensible to distinctions of right and wrong, destitute of religion, without any idea of a Supreme Being, and with the feeblest notion, if there be any at all, of a future state, the revolting picture is complete in all its features.” It would be easy, if necessary, to swell this dreary record; but we have already gone over sufficient ground—we have seen the typical negro in at least one-half the latitudes and longitudes of his native home—everywhere we have found him hopelessly lazy, filthy, savage, and degraded unto beastliness. And thus have they lived and perished for untold centuries, Christless and Godless, starving in their huts and kraals, burrowing like rabbits into the earth for shelter, roaming through forests and over mountain sides stark naked, living upon polluted things that even birds and beasts of prey would scorn to touch, and, finally, sinking into earth like decayed vegetable matter—without a name—without a history—without a monument to record that they had ever lived or died. And all their past but symbolizes what shall be their eternal future, unless brought under the complete and unconditional direction and control of the Caucasian race. In this condition of subordination and dependence, the whole negro family might in time become what the four or five millions of them now in the Confederate States of America are—useful, affectionate, well cared for, happy and contented, and semi-civilized servants. But to the distinction of being a self-ruling and self-sustaining people, they never have risen, and never can arise; for their own inherent organism prohibits it. Their normal state is that of servitude and subjection; and their characteristics even when so placed, we will leave the eminent scholar from whom we have already quoted, at the commencement of this section, to relate: “The negro mind [when domesticated] is confiding and single-hearted, naturally kind and hospitable. Both sexes are easily ruled, and appreciate what is good under the guidance of common justice and prudence. Yet where so much that honors human nature remains in apathy—the typical woolly-haired races have never invented a reasoned theological system, discovered an alphabet, framed a grammatical language, nor made the least step in science or art. They have never comprehended what they have learned, or retained a civilization taught them by contact with more refined nations, as soon as that contact ceased. They have at no time formed great political States, nor commenced a self-evolving civilization. Conquest with them has been confined to kindred tribes, and produced only slaughter. Even Christianity of more than three centuries' duration in Congo has scarcely excited a progressive civilization.” And thus are we fortified in our position, by the opinion of one of the most candid and learned of English naturalists—that it is from the so-called institution of “Slavery,” and only from this, can spring the regeneration of the negro race.

How comes it, then, that the negro is, and ever has been, normally savage? He was, from the first, surrounded by the earliest civilization. He came in contact with the greatest people of antiquity. He witnessed the sun of enlightenment and progress irradiating the world around him, as early at least as four thousand years ago; yet he remained, throughout the long ages, stolid, immovable, indifferent, unchangeable, and revolting to the geniality of all superior races, as the burning mountains and sandy deserts of his native land. Memphis and Thebes, Babylon and Nineveh, arose in splendor and magnificence; the pyramids of Egypt and Ethiopia were built for immortality; the Phoenicians were spreading letters and commerce, the Greeks and Romans, liberty and civilization: but upon the remaining monuments of all, the negro is displayed in a condition of abject subjugation, degradation, and slavery; while in no part of all Africa has there been discovered an alphabet, a hieroglyphic, a picture, or a symbol as the remains of his intelligence or ingenuity. We shall endeavor to account for all this. We will undertake to prove that the negro family constitute a distinct and entirely different group of the human species from the Caucasian—that their physical and intellectual organization is radically dissimilar and inferior to that of the white man—and consequently that servitude and subordination, under the supervision of the wiser and governing races, is their natural and unalterable relation in life. In seeking to establish this, we shall hardly hazard an opinion of our own, not substantiated by the experimental demonstrations of the most illustrious anatomists and savants that have ever lived. We do not believe, with M. de St. Vincent, that the negro constitutes the connecting link between man and the Simiæ. That position in natural history more properly belongs to the Gorilla. Of this creature, in a work recently published by him, M. Duchaillu concludes that there is a dissimilarity between the bony frame of man and that of the gorilla, but that there is also “an awful likeness, which in the gorilla resembles an exaggerated caricature of a human being.” The first specimen of this genus seen by him, he describes as “some hellish dream creature—a being of that hideous order, half-man, half-beast, which is found pictured by old artists in representations of the infernal regions.” Upon being shot, he adds, the gorilla uttered “a groan which had something terribly human in it, and yet was full of brutishness.” The negro proper is certainly not so low in the scale of physical*

* In another portion of his work, Du Chaillu gives a frightful account of the cannibalism prevailing among certain negro tribes; particularly the Fans, from which we make a few brief extracts

“On going out one morning, I saw a pile of ribs, leg, and arm-bones and skulls (human) piled up at the back of my house, which looked horrid enough to me. In fact, symptoms of cannibalism stare me in the face wherever I go. Eating the bodies of persons who have died of sickness, is a form of cannibalism of which I had never heard among any people, so that I determined to inquire if it were indeed a general custom among the Fans, or merely an exceptional freak. They spoke without embarrassment about the whole matter, and I was informed that they constantly buy the dead of the Osheba tribe, who, in return, buy theirs. They also buy the dead of other families in their own tribes; and besides this, get the bodies of a great many slaves from the Mbichos and Mbondemos, for which they readily give ivory, at the rate of a small tusk for a body. A party of Fans, who came down on the seashore, once actually stole a freshly buried body from the cemetery, cooked it and ate it; and even the missionaries heard of it, for it happened at a village not far from the missionary grounds. In fact, the Fans seem regular ghouls, only they practice their horrid custom unblushingly, and in open day, and have no shame about it. I have seen here knives covered with human skin, which their owners valued very highly. To-day, the Queen brought me some boiled plantain, which looked very nice; but the fear lest she should have cooked it in some pot where a man had been cooked before—which was most likely the case—made me unable to eat it. On these journeys, I have fortunately taken with me sufficient pots to do my own cooking. They are the finest, bravest looking set of negroes I have seen in the interior, and eating human flesh seems to agree with them.” Certainly the morals of the Fans cannot be far in advance of those of the gorilla.

MANKIND are so constituted that some are honest and consistent, while others are dishonest and inconsistent: between whom there is naturally a perpetual struggle for ascendancy. As in social, so in political life—the ascendancy of evil men upon the abasement of the virtuous, will produce political disasters, or bring society to chaos. Where virtue and integrity have forsaken the bosoms of the majority, no form of Government, however excellent—no system of political expediency—no constitution or written codes—no artificial barriers, erected against tyranny by the wisdom of sages, can withstand the insidious and persistent encroachments of those who are corrupt, and in whose hearts love of country lies dead. There, tyranny and usurpation are the substitutes of justice and moderation; usurpation, like Reynard in the garb of a pilgrim, sits mantled in the purple of the law; the favorite has the place of the patriot; and the obsequious flatterer hurls the statesman from his seat. Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit. The administration of government is wrested from the hands of the trustworthy, and placed at the disposal and uncontrolled pleasure of some one man, who deals with public affairs in accordance with his agreeable caprice, and to the gratification of an army of partisan sycophants. This fortunate individual can gratify vanity and avarice—can reward obedience and subserviency, with honor, office, and emolument—and can cover the opposition of honesty with obloquy, confusion, and dismay. So long as the patriot persists in resisting the march of the tyrant over the ruins of liberty, so long he will be the target of misrepresentation, and the victim of the poisoned tooth of slander—denounced as a demagogue by the venal and the vile—and hounded even as a traitor by the yelping pack of their powerful master. But the moment he succumbs—the moment he betrays the interests of the Nation—that moment he regains his lost influence; he can become a patron and benefactor; his coffers may be enriched with spoils from off the shroud and coffin of his country. His sacrifice of popularity is rewarded with the traitor's purse, and his mission henceforward is to educate the people to relinquish liberty and acquiesce in political profligacy. Who can doubt the truthfulness of this photograph? Let the skeptic reflect upon the fate of such patriots as Breckinridge, of Kentucky, and Vallandigham, of Ohio, in the late Congress of the United States. They manfully resisted the usurpation, and opposed the unconstitutional aggressions, of the sectional tyrant; they were, in return, subjected to the tortures of vilification, insult, outrage, and vulgar abuse. Were they formed of such clay as the recreant Richardson, of Illinois, or the base Scott, who, like Athenian Hippias, endeavored to enslave his mother State, they would have been rewarded by the grimaces of Lincoln's Court, and the fulsome adulations of the general herd: for virtue had forsaken the hearts of the people in that section of our land. The United States had, but a few months previously, a Constitution and a Form of Government, which were wont to be the boast of 30,000,000 of free-men, the admiration of the civilized world, the day-dream of hope to the oppressed nationalities, and the stumbling block of kings and tyrants. But the men of the North, maddened by a pampered prosperity, and impatient of rivalry, eschewed justice and rectitude, refused to grant their partners of the Federal system political equality, and proud in their strength of numbers and in the assertion of an iniquitous abstraction—they trampled upon the Constitution and set the laws at defiance; elected a President pledged to ruin the interests and to confiscate the property of one section of the country; rejected all measures of compromise, concession, or conciliation; insulted and misrepresented the minority, while violating their legally guaranteed rights; and, finally, waged a war of subjugation and extermination, against a people whom they claimed to be still their fellow-citizens—their natural allies—their kindred of blood and lineage—and, surely, their best patrons and supporters. Having been long, and we may add, justly, deprived of the administration of public affairs—pregnant with avarice, and hungering for office and patronage, they beat the rounds of every wind of doctrine in political chance, and triumphed at length upon a platform of anti-slavery fanaticism. Before they had thus succeeded in the elevation of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, they had, for more than twenty-five years, encroached, in many outrageous forms, upon the sovereign independence of the Southern States. The Federal Constitution rendered the restoration of fugitive slaves a moral and political duty; the Northerner observed this injunction by robbing the slave-owner and stealing away the slave—all in the name and for the greater glory of God! Singularly enough, the parents of these moralists—who teach the negro the unapostolic christianity of stealing himself—were those who stole from their homes, and sold for the highest penny, the Angola ancestors of our present slaves. They grew wealthy and powerful by the gigantic commerce, and notwithstanding that, by international law, this traffic has been declared piracy, their offspring still cling to the profitable practice. The slavers which prowl along the coasts of Guinea, are Northern or New England ships, manned by Northern or New England pirates. There is not one of these vessels which lands her human cargo in the coves or corners of Cuba or Florida, that is not owned by a Puritan abolitionist. Having placed the price of his victims to the credit of his account, he seeks to whitewash himself in sight of Heaven and man, by endeavoring to rob the purchaser of the very goods which he had himself previously sold to him; realizing the poet's picture of the hypocrite:

IT is related that Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, and wife to Amphion, King of Thebes, was blessed by Fortune with all the gifts of Nature and every attribute of happiness; from the enjoyment of which she was, however, debarred, by her presuming pride and arrogance. Puffed up with vain-glory and self-conceit, she jealously envied, and professed to despise, Latona, the beautiful favorite of Jupiter—disturbed her religious sacrifices, and boastfully vaunting that her own virtue, wealth, beauty and bounty were unrivalled—proclaimed that the personal charms of her children surpassed those of gods and goddesses. At length her conduct enraged Apollo and Diana—children of Latona—and they resolved to revenge the injuries of their mother, by the humiliation and punishment of Niobe. So, before her eyes, they shot with celestial arrows, first her sons, then her fair daughters, and lastly her husband; upon beholding which, Niobe swooned with grief and despair, and ere recovery could come to her, she was metamorphosed into marble, from which bitter tears forever flow.

The myth of Niobe and Latona is partially, but painfully, symbolical of the relations which have heretofore existed between the South and the North—long patience and endurance, characterizing the history of the former; haughty vindictiveness and outrages, that of the latter. The North was great—artificially; splendidly grand—but in borrowed plumage. Into her lap the whole world poured surprising contributions of wealth, exalting her luxury and perfecting her happiness. All vessels, bound to or from her harbors, and whose whitening canvas sported with the Nereides of the deep, were obsequious missionaries of her rapidly increasing beauty and splendor. Her people increased and multiplied like the promised seed of Abraham—like the stars in the firmament, or the sands upon the beach. Her cities arose out of the wilderness, so rapidly and so magnificently, as to recall the magic miracles of Aladdin's lamp. Banks, insurance offices, and monopolies flourished beneath her aegis. Stage-coaches, steamboats, and railroads, cumbered her wide domains. Her finest commercial emporium rivalled in magnificence and prosperity, as well as in crime and licentiousness, the most famous capitals of antiquity. A mighty current of treasure, surpassing that of golden Pactolus, added daily to the increasing glory of her diadem. From the tobacco plantations of Virginia and Tennessee—from the flowery and fruitful regions of Opelousas—from the sugar lands of Attakapas—from the silver shores of the Mississippi, perfumed by groves of orange and citron—from Alabama and the Carolinas, where the cotton-tree waves its kingly crest in Autumn's zephyrs—from the rich rice fields of the blessed Sea-Island coasts—from a whole Southern Empire of perpetual summer, where the princely prairies and grand savannahs are carpeted by the love-lavish hand of Flora, and over which bend the bluest of heavens—flowed the river of life, which imparted progress, and pomp, and brilliancy to the North. TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-ONE MILLIONS OF DOLLARS was the annual dowry which the South generously cast at her feet. More faithful to what she esteemed a patriotic duty, than that bird which is said to feed her young with her life-blood, this South drained her breasts of untold treasures, to glut the thankless rapacity of her enemy. She consented yearly to the payment of THIRTEEN MILLION OF DOLLARS, as a bounty toward the encouragement of Northern fisheries; EIGHT MILLIONS of which went into the abolition coffers of Massachusetts. She constituted the North her common carrier, and paid THIRTY-SIX MILLION OF DOLLARS in requital of the service. She paid EIGHT MILLIONS, and more, annually, for the shoes of her slaves; and over SIXTY MILLIONS for dry goods, furniture, fish, and other commodities. The wealth of the South being solid rather than artificial, in 1857-8—during the terrible American crisis—she had $35,000,000, in specie, more in her banks than there was at the North, with which she promptly came forward to save the latter from pending ruin. But in proportion as she scattered favors, new exactions were demanded of her. Her sons had laid their heads to rest in love, down in the lap of a Delilah, and they arose from their slumber almost shorn of their strength. Her people consented to have themselves taxed at the rate of twenty-four per cent. for the carpet upon which they stepped—for the apparel which they wore—for the china-ware of their households—for the mirrors and window hangings of their parlors—for the cutlery of their pockets and their tables—for the chairs upon which they sat—and for the boots and shoes which they wore—all for the self-sacrificing purpose of encouraging Northern manufacturers, and offering a premium to Northern ingenuity. They taxed themselves, or consented to be taxed, for the books they bought, and for the paper upon which they wrote. They were taxed at the rate of thirty per centum for the cigars they smoked—for the wines which they drank—and for the pianos of their wives and daughters—in order to stimulate Northern inventions, quackery, and cunning. The South bestowed upon the North a whole empire of territories—freely bestowed them, cheerfully, gracefully, and without murmur—notwithstanding that they were to become Free States, and, necessarily, antagonistic forces. In addition, she helped to widen the rivers, to improve the harbors, to build the light-houses and custom-houses of the North; indeed, the full measure of her generous devotion toward the aggrandizement of a false and ingrate sister, is incalculable, and will ever remain among the unwritten stories of the marvellous.

But how did the North repay all this munificence—all these splendid and princely favors—all such bountiful and prodigal benefits? Much as the infidel wife, of the Arabian tale, returned the loving confidence of the young king of the Black Isles. She was his kinswoman. He had profusely scattered upon her the treasures of his possession. Every wish of her heart was studiously and spontaneously gratified. Their connubial bliss seemed unclouded, and Love's warm blandishments added new charms to their happiness, for a brief term of years. But at length—and when too late—the unhappy prince discovered that the wife of his soul delighted in him no more—discovered that she was a traitor to his bed and enamored with a BLACK. Even when her crime was discovered, and her monster paramour's life saved by magic only—instead of reforming and repenting, she had herself arrayed in garments of sorrow—erected a mausoleum, called by her the “Palace of Tears,” where she daily bewailed the stupefaction of her sable idol—but still nestled in the indulgent bosom of her royal husband, remained the confidant of his state secrets, and partook of his kingly beneficence; until at length he had the temerity angrily to expostulate with her, when the indignant sorceress subjected himself and his people to a cruel persecution, from which they were barely rescued by the intervention of a chivalrous and pious sultan.

The Union of North and South had not long existed, ere the former assumed the arrogant airs of Niobe, and proved recreant to her duty, as the lewd wife of the young king of the Black Isles. Those who assert that the mere accession of Abraham Lincoln, and his friends, to office and patronage, was the sole cause for the secession of the South, either wilfully pervert the truths of history, or completely fail to comprehend the subject. The success of Mr. Lincoln, as an individual, on the contrary, might have been regarded with indifference; but standing, as he did, upon an aggressive and sectional platform—representing incendiary and revolutionary dogmas of government—and the standard-bearer of an organization, which made war upon property, trampled upon constitutional guarantees, and declared eternal enmity against the social and political institutions of a free and independent people—his elevation to the Presidency of the United States, in defiance of the supplications and protests of almost every mother's child in fifteen sovereign States, was the consummation—the capital crime—and the final victory—of an historical and persistent conspiracy. It was, it is true, the immediate blow which severed the cords of Union; but it was only the ripened fruit of a seed long and widely sown. As early as 1787, the North had a revival of conscience. She made, or thought she had made, the discovery that it was sinful to enslave negroes. But, instead of repenting like a pagan—if not like a Christian—instead of doing penance such as Orestes did—for having sold African slaves to the South, she resolved upon being respectable at the expense of the latter. She caused the Ohio river to be designated as the line which should divide her Christianity from the heathenism of the South. By virtue of the famous “Missouri Compromise”—that fatally disgraceful, unconstitutional, and un-American measure—this line of demarcation was so amended, as to admit of no slavery, present or prospective, north of latitude 36 degrees and 30 minutes. Step by step, frequently with the “tract oblique” and “indented wave” of the serpent, but latterly with the brazen front of a Corsair, she encroached upon the rights, privileges, and immunities of the South, until at length the dignity and independence of the latter were on the eve of strangulation. The statesmen, political orators, ministers of the Gospel, and representative men in general, of the North, exhausted the vocabulary of misrepresentation, vilification, and insult, assailing and aspersing the South, until, in the frenzy of vindictive abuse, their mouths became mucilaginous.

Daniel Webster—the most profound of Northern lawyers, but singularly over-estimated as a statesman—wrote in 1850: “From my earliest youth I have regarded slavery as a great moral and political evil; and all pretence of defending it on the ground of difference of races, I have ever condemned;”—[because he was either wilfully or invincibly ignorant of the truth of both theses.] William H. Seward, in 1858, declared that the institution of slavery promoted “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, which meant that the United States should, sooner or later, become either a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.” Salmon P. Chase proposed to “discontinue all action, and repeal all legislation, in favor of slavery at home or abroad, by prohibiting the practice of slaveholding in all places.” John C. Fremont—now the American Haynau of Missouri, but in 1856 “Republican” candidate for the Presidency—proclaimed, in accepting of the nomination, that he was “opposed to slavery in the abstract, and upon principles sustained and made habitual by long-settled convictions.” Senator Wilson, of Massachusetts, asserted that slavery was “hostile to the rights of human nature,” and that there could be no peace between North and South “so long as the foot of an African slave pressed American soil.” “We ask,” said General Banks in 1856, “that the dead weight of human wrong shall be lifted from the continent again.” In the same year, Senator Wade, of Ohio, exclaimed: “there is not a more morbidly suspicious, cruel, revengeful, or lawless despotism, on the face of the earth, than this night-mare of slavery.” Joshua R. Giddings, member of Congress from Ohio, prognosticated that “the torch of the incendiary would light up the towns and villages of the South,” while the North would “mock at her fears and laugh at her calamities.” Anson Burlingame, of Massachusetts, declared in the U. S. House of Representatives, “that slavery had left desolation, ignorance, and death, in its path,” and that the North would insist upon having “an anti-slavery Church, an anti-slavery Bible, and an anti-slavery God!” Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, fanatic, and metaphysician, resolved upon not being outdone as a marvellous slanderer; related to the world how the whip was applied to old men and to tender women—how pregnant women were set in the treadmill for refusing to work—how “men's backs were flayed with cowhides, and hot rum poured on, superinduced with brine and pickle, rubbed in with a corn-husk in the scorching heat of the sun,”—until “the stomach would rise up and curse slavery.”*

* “Father! forgive the foul calumniator; he knows not what he says.”

A GOVERNMENT which does not rest upon the consent of the governed, is necessarily an odious and bad government—bad, because even the benefits it may confer are the fruits of usurpation. If the axiom be true, that the power of governing is but the commission of God to the ruler, the trust is sufficiently onerous and responsible, even when willingly acquiesced in by the governed. But for him that usurps power to rule over a people who despise him, there can be no other name than TYRANT. To govern a people against their will, is a crime against humanity, an insult to reason, and an outrage upon liberty. Such a ruler must, of necessity, be a conqueror. His jurisdiction is maintained by the remorseless ravage of States—by covering his path with death, terror, and desolation—by rendering himself hateful to the virtuous; sacrificing the heroic, and enslaving the free. The bravest of his friends and foes fall together, the victims of his pride, tyranny, and usurpation. Having become himself the first violator of public law, his followers will emulate his evil example, until general crime takes the place of regular order, and the fiercer passions of hatred and revenge, substitute humanity and sociology. By his influence, commerce and agriculture are ruined—the plastic and mechanic arts sink into decrepitude—science, literature, and religion are neglected or forgotten—demoralization becomes contagious—good men are forced, or deluded, into a co-partnership of action with the despicable—villainy and profligacy are licensed to invade the sanctuaries of virtue and purity—and while innocence and industry are stripped of armor and shield, indecency and crime stalk abroad gigantic, unchecked, and unpunished: for these are inevitable consequences of war.

And even when war is justly waged; when it is fortified by principles of humanity and right; when the patriot's sword is unsheathed to defend his country's liberties; its evils are only extenuated, but not obliterated. It brings jealousy and rivalry into the camp of friends; it covers the earth with carnage; it strips the parent of the child; it divorces the husband from his wife; it sets villages and cities in flames; it converts happy homes into temples of misery and mourning; it makes of smiling Ceres a woful Suppliant; and the proudest victory is achieved upon the ruins of a flourishing glory. The martyr's crown, and the praise of history, may reward the patriot who falls in defence of his freedom; but when the sword is drawn to oppress, he who wields it is a murderer and a robber.

But since the world began—since war first cursed earth and degraded man—it would be difficult to discover, in the pages of universal history, the record of so unholy and iniquitous a civil strife, as that into which Abraham Lincoln has plunged the American States. The war which he wages is a bastard begotten of power and arrogance. He, his advisers, and the section of the old Republic to which he belongs, had, during the quarter of a century previous to his inauguration, heaped abuse, and outrage, and wrong, upon the people they are now endeavoring to crush, subjugate, and exterminate. They represented that the South hung, like a mill-stone, round the neck of the Union, retarding her progress and blighting her prosperity. They inculcated in all of their moral teachings and political proclamations—some directly and others indirectly—that she would be “let slide,” or that slavery should be abolished, ere the North could take her proper place among the nations. And, resolved at length to preserve her institutions, protect her property, and bear the responsibility of her own sins and disadvantages, the South separated herself from what seemed to be a dissatisfied partner; but implored a continuance of peace and friendship in parting. Here the North changed front. She declared that the South should not depart; that she should still remain in the Union, but as an inferior, without the protection guarantied by the Constitution, and stripped of her four thousand millions of dollars' worth of slave property.

This is not the language of exaggeration; it is the doctrine promulgated by the Northern press, enunciated by Northern leaders, and practiced and carried out by Northern generals, ever since the godless invasion of the Northern hordes begun. Charles Sumner, in a speech recently delivered by him before the Republican Convention of the State of Massachusetts, declared that slavery should be abolished, and the South conquered. Wendell Phillips, the Belial of this great infernal plot, whose “————tongueDropp'd manna, and could make the worse appearThe better reason,” in language more classical and forcible than that of his rhetorical colleague in crime, maintained that such was the object of this relentless war. Gen. Jim Lane said there would be an army of one color marching into Slave States, and an army of another color marching out. Rev. Dr. Bellows, in consecrating the arms of Northern regiments, invoked God to speed the abolition cause. Rev. Dr. R. J. Breckinridge declared that this rebellion shall be put down, it matters not at what expenditure of money, or what sacrifice of the blood of rebels, or their wives and children! The Rev. Dr. Hitchcock, the Rev. Mr. Goodell, John Jay, Oliver Johnson, and other shining lights of the North, lay and clerical, have gone still farther than Phillips or Sumner. At a public meeting held a few weeks since in the city of New York, convened for the purpose of devising a plan whereby the present fratricidal conflict should be made “short and decisive,” it was resolved that “the speedy and complete liberation of the slaves on the soil,” had become a necessity; that to effect this, “the free colored people of the United States should be encouraged to enlist in the great enterprise;” and that, as Leo X. had said, not only the Christian religion, but Nature, cried out against slavery. “The utmost good nature pervaded the meeting, and the feeling in favor of the immediate abolition of slavery, as a necessity of the war power, was unanimous,” according to the New York Times. This same journal afterwards inculcated, that there could be no peace—no end of war—no compromise—while slavery existed. The Chicago Tribune—understood to be the leading organ of Mr. Lincoln in Illinois—re-echoed the language of the Times, branded the Southern institution as the sum of all villainies, and laid down the axiom, that “whenever a slave is claimed as the property of another, the claimant is a traitor and a rebel.” “In the course of events,” says the Boston Transcript, “the hour has arrived for settling the question, whether the inherent despotism of the slave power, or a republic true to freedom, shall rule from the lakes to the gulf, from ocean to ocean.” “We hold that slavery is the cause of the war,” responds the Delaware (N. Y.) Express, “and that it is the duty of those in whom lie the power, to rid the country of this cause.” “The North is in arms against slavery,” exclaims the Rockland (Me.) Gazette; “it is fighting against the slavery interest and nothing else.” “There cannot and never will be peace again in what formed the United States, so long as slavery exists in the South,” is an apothegm from the Harrisburg (Pa.) Telegraph. The New York World will accept from the South not even “abdication.” “When there is danger,” it adds, “that it shall come to that, let slaveholders beware. The day it is settled that either slavery or the government must perish, that day slavery will be doomed.” And again: “If the North cannot conquer rebellion without emancipation, it will conquer it with emancipation.” “Close the column and let the battle rage with Napoleonic fury; while the earth shall open to receive, heaven will expand to accommodate the spirits of those that shall fall”—shouts the Cincinnati Times, borrowing its theology from Mohammed.

SOON after the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, and the organization of his administration, the Confederate Government deputed an embassy of three commissioners to Washington, authorized to negotiate for the removal of the Federal garrisons from fortresses Pickens and Sumter. Their mission was friendly, humane, and amicable; they were clothed with power, by the seven seceded States, to form a new alliance with what remained of the United States—directed to sacrifice every thing but honor and independence, in order to avoid the horrors of civil war, prevent the shedding of fraternal gore, and perpetuate the blessings of amity to the whole continent. In the discharge of this sacred and philanthropic duty, they promptly addressed a communication, which explained the functions of the embassy and its purposes, to the Federal Secretary of State, William H. Seward.

Now, this professional politician is to diplomacy, what Ahmad Khamàkin, the arch-thief of the Oriental tale— who could break through the outer wall, scale the inner one, and steal Kohl from the eye of the sleeper—was to burglary. He declined to return an official answer to the communication of the Confederate commissioners; because, as he alleged, the political party which elevated him to power (upon the ruins of a broken Constitution and dismembered country), regarded them as “rebels,” and to so treat with them might then seriously embarrass the administration of Mr. Lincoln. His public policy was always founded upon the philosophy of example, from which he did not now depart in resorting to duplicity—he found an inglorious precedent in two strokes of dishonest artfulness, practised during the last days of President Buchanan's administration. Like Seward, Buchanan's life is but the story of an office-seeker, growing rich in his vocation, and finally raised to the highest civic honors, through Southern patronage. Politicians are seldom grateful, and he proved no exception to the rule. Like the traitor son of Carioth, he sought to reward his benefactors by betrayal. When the State of South Carolina seceded, her authorities resolved to take possession of the forts in Charleston harbor. To prevent this and gain time, he promised to negotiate—promised that the existing status of those fortifications should not be disturbed; yet he caused Major Anderson, in the dead hour of night, to steal his men out of Fort Moultrie into Fort Sumter—spiking the cannon, burning the gun carriages, and destroying, generally, the public property in the former fortress, ere it was deserted. From this moment forward, Mr. Buchanan's career became more and more unconstitutional and un-American. Many of his ablest advisers were constrained to withdraw from his cabinet; amongst them, John B. Floyd, Secretary of War. To fill his place, Buchanan selected Joseph Holt, a man born upon Southern soil, but to the South what Benedict Arnold was to the Revolution. When the position of the garrison in Fort Sumter became untenable, he and his master vainly resolved upon secretly reinforcing it. This resolution was not only skilfully concealed from other members of the cabinet, but the Secretary of the Interior—Hon. Jacob Thompson—was positively assured that no such attempt would be made without his knowledge. In a few days, however, after the receipt of such a pledge, and early in the month of January, he learned from the newspapers that a steamship called “The Star of the West,” with provisions, munitions of war, and two hundred and fifty armed men on board, had been dispatched from the harbor of New York upon so infamous a mission!

Although both of these fraudulent measures turned out to be miserable abortions, they were accepted as sufficient precedents to guide and shape the policy of Mr. Seward. But while declining to respond to the Southern embassy, like his predecessors, he affected great depression of spirits in private circles, and whispered that he completely inclined to accede, in due time, to their wishes. In a conversation of this character, with Justice Nelson, of the United States Supreme Court, he pitifully enlarged upon his embarrassments, but asserted his determination to save the sections from an armed collision. The generous and sincere are seldom incredulous or suspicious, and moved by these representations, the former induced one of his colleagues upon the bench—Justice John A. Campbell—to accompany him upon a visit to the latter. The meeting took place—the three alone were present. Mr. Seward's “depression” and oppression, arising from the fact that the Southern Commissioners pressed him for a reply to their message, were made painfully manifest. He gave his visitors the most solemn and positive assurances that his disposition was entirely pacific. He told them that there would be no attempt made to reinforce Fort Pickens. He gave them to understand that in five days' time the Federal troops would be removed from Fort Sumter. Judge Campbell, at the time, held in his hand a draft of a letter which he proposed addressing to President Davis, at Montgomery: “before that letter reaches its destination,” observed the veracious Seward, “Sumter will have been evacuated.” This was on the 15th of March; and with such gratifying assurances, the humane and learned Judge became a voluntary intermediary. He hastened to the room of one of the Commissioners—Judge Crawford—and communicated to him the happy intelligence. The cheering news soon ran from lip to lip, and every face in Washington beamed with gladness and fresh hopes.

But the five days passed, and Sumter was not evacuated; while the officer in command was making repairs and putting it in a condition of aggression and defence. The same intermediary called again upon the Secretary of State, and the latter reiterated his former assurances. These were communicated at once to the Embassy—to President Davis; to Governor Pickens, of S. C.; and to General Beauregard. To rock the South into a more perfect sleep of security, Colonel Lamon—an agent of the Lincoln Government—was sent to Charleston. He informed Governor Pickens that he was authorized to make arrangements for the withdrawal of the Federal troops from Sumter, and proposed a vessel of war as the best means of effecting this; which was, of course, very properly declined. Another confidential agent of Mr. Lincoln's, one Fox, was soon afterwards dispatched to the same city. He requested permission to visit Fort Sumter, solemnly asseverating that his mission was entirely pacific; and through the intervention of a gallant naval officer, Captain Hartstene, his wish was complied with. But Fox shamelessly violated his faith, and reported to Major Anderson a plan agreed upon by the unscrupulous Washington Government, for the forcible reinforcement of the Fort; in accordance with which, a naval fleet was being manned, provisioned and fitted out in the harbor of New York. All these facts having become matter of newspaper notoriety, Judge Campbell addressed a note, on the seventh day of April, to Secretary Seward, to which the latter laconically replied: “FAITH AS TO SUMTER FULLY KEPT—WAIT AND SEE.” And he imparted similar assurances to Mr. Harvey, now his own Minister at the Court of Lisbon. Finally, a Mr. Chew and a Lieutenant Talbot were sent by Mr. Lincoln to Governor Pickens, with a paper informing him that the Fort should be supplied and reinforced! This was the consummation of governmental perfidy, perhaps unparalleled in history, except in the violation of the Treaty of Limerick by William of Orange. Justice Campbell did “wait and see faith as to Sumter” so “fully kept,” that on the 13th of April—on the sixth day after Seward's pledge was given—a hostile Federal fleet menace Charleston—causing Confederate guns to open fire upon the Fortress, and compelling its commander to surrender; without the loss of a single Confederate life, while the fleet made an inglorious retreat.