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COLONIAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL.

EDITED BY

ALBERT BUSHNELL HART and EDWARD CHANNING,

OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

NEW YORK:

A. LOVELL & CO.

Published Bi-Monthly. Annual Subscription, 30 cents.

Entered at the New York Postoffice as second-class matter.

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Discussions of the slavery question in speeches, public addresses, and official messages were frequent from 1789 on. In the messages of Governors Lumpkin and Troup of Georgia in regard to the Creek and Cherokee controversies from 1826 to 1829 are to be found distinct intimations of the duty of the Southern States to defend slavery by force if necessary. The discussion was much aggravated, however, after 1830, by three causes : the abolitionists of Boston and New York began to publish violent antislavery newspapers, and to attempt to circulate them in the South; in 1831 the Nat Turner slave insurrection in Virginia caused the death of about seventy white persons, and spread alarm throughout the South; and in 1833 emancipation was enforced by the British government in the British West Indies.

The frame of mind of the Southern leaders is well set forth in the subjoined extracts from a message of Governor McDuffie to the South Carolina Legislature. It is found in the printed Laws of South Carolina, 1836, Journal of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina for the year 1835, pp. 4-10.

SINCE your last adjournment, the public mind, throughout the slave-holding states, has been intensely, indignantly and justly excited by the wanton, officious and incendiary proceedings of certain societies and persons in some of the nonslaveholding states, who have been actively employed in attempting to circulate among us pamphlets, papers and pictorial representations of the most offensive and inflammatory character, and eminently calculated to seduce our slaves from their fidelity, and excite them to insurrection and massacre. These wicked monsters and deluded fanatics, overlooking the numerous objects in their own vicinity, who have a moral, if not a legal claim upon their charitable regard, run abroad, in the expansion of their hypocritical benevolence, muffled up in the saintly mantle of Christian meekness, to fulfil the fiend-like errand of mingling the blood of the master and the slave, to whose fate they are equally indifferent, with the smouldering ruins of our peaceful dwellings. No principle of human action so utterly baffles all human calculation as that species of fanatical enthusiasm, which is made of envy and ambition, assuming the guise of religious zeal, and acting upon the known prejudices, religious or political, of an ignorant multitude. Under the influence of this species of voluntary madness, nothing is sacred that stands in the way of its purposes. Like all other religious impostures, it has power to consecrate every act, however atrocious, and every person, however covered with "multiplying villanies," that may promote its diabolical ends, or worship at its infernal altars. By its unholy creed, murder itself becomes a labor of love and charity, and the felon renegado, who flies from the justice of his country, finds not only a refuge, but becomes a sainted minister, in the sanctuary of its temple. No error can be more mischievous, than to underrate the danger of such a principle, and no policy can be more fatal than to neglect it, from a contempt for the supposed insignificance of its agents. The experience of both France and Great Britain fearfully instruct us, from what small and contemptible beginnings, this ami des noirs philanthropy may rise to a gigantic power, too mighty to be resisted by all the influence and energy of the government; in the one case, shrouding a wealthy and flourishing island in the blood of its white inhabitants; in the other, literally driving the ministry,

by means of an instructed parliament, to perpetrate that act of suicidal legislation, and colonial oppression, the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies. It may be not unaptly compared to the element of fire, of which, a neglected spark, amongst combustible materials, which a timely stamp of the foot might have extinguished forever, speedily swells into a sweeping torrent of fiery desolation, which no human power can arrest or control. In the opinion of the intelligent West India planters, it is because the local authorities, from a sense of false security neglected to hang up the first of these political missionaries that made their appearance on the British Islands, that they are doomed to barrenness and desertion, and to be the wretched abodes of indolent and profligate blacks, exhibiting, in their squalid poverty, gross immorality and slavish subjection to an iron despotism of British bayonets, the fatal mockery of all the promised blessings of emancipation.

Under these circumstances, and in this critical conjuncture of our affairs, the solemn and responsible duty devolves on the legislature, of "taking care that the republic receive no detriment."

The crime which these foreign incendiaries have committed against the peace of the State, is one of the very highest grade known to human laws. It not only strikes at the very existence of society, but seeks to accomplish the catastrophe, by the most horrible means, celebrating the obsequies of the State in a saturnial carnival of blood and murder, and while brutally violating all the charities of life, and desecrating the very altars of religion, impiously calling upon Heaven to sanction these abominations. It is my deliberate opinion, that the laws of every community should punish this species of interference by death without benefit of clergy, regarding the authors of it as 66 enemies of the human race." Nothing could be more appropriate than for South Carolina to set this example in the present crisis, and I trust the Legislature will not adjourn till it discharges this high duty of patriotism.

It cannot be disguised, however, that any laws which may be enacted by the authority of this State, however adequate to punish and repress offences committed within its limits, will be wholly insufficient to meet the exigencies of the present

conjuncture. If we go no farther than this, we had as well do nothing.

The outrages against the peace and safety of the State are perpetrated in other communities, which hold and exercise sovereign and exclusive jurisdiction over all persons and things within their territorial limits. It is within these limits, protected from responsibility to our laws by the sovereignty of the States in which they reside, that the authors of all this mischief, securely concoct their schemes, plant their batteries, and hurl their fiery missiles among us, aimed at that mighty magazine of combustible matter, the explosion of which would lay the State in ruins.

It will, therefore, become our imperious duty, recurring to those great principles of international law, which still exist in all their primitive force amongst the sovereign States of this confederacy, to demand of our sovereign associates the condign punishment of those enemies of our peace, who avail themselves of the sanctuaries of their respective jurisdictions, to carry on schemes of incendiary hostility against the institutions, the safety, and the existence of the State. In performing this high duty, to which we are constrained by the great law of self-preservation, let us approach to our co-states with all the fraternal mildness which becomes us as members of the same family of confederated republics, and at the same time with that firmness and decision, which becomes a sovereign State, while maintaining her dearest interests and most sacred rights.

For the institution of domestic slavery we hold ourselves responsible only to God, and it is utterly incompatible with the dignity and the safety of the State, to permit any foreign authority to question our right to maintain it. It may nevertheless be appropriate, as a voluntary token of our respect for the opinions of our confederate brethren, to present some views to their consideration on this subject, calculated to disabuse their minds of false opinions and pernicious prejudices.

No human institution, in my opinion, is more manifestly consistent with the will of God, than domestic slavery, and no one of his ordinances is written in more legible characters than that which consigns the African race to this condition, as more conducive to their own happiness, than any other of which they are susceptible. Whether we consult the sacred

race.

Scriptures, or the lights of nature and reason, we shall find these truths as abundantly apparent, as if written with a sunbeam in the heavens. Under both the Jewish and Christian dispensations of our religion, domestic slavery existed with the unequivocal sanction of its prophets, its apostles and finally its great Author. The patriarchs themselves, those chosen instruments of God, were slave-holders. In fact the divine sanction of this institution is so plainly written that "he who runs may read" it, and those over-righteous pretenders and Pharisees, who affect to be scandalized by its existence among us, would do well to inquire how much more nearly they walk in the ways of Godliness, than did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That the African negro is destined by Providence to occupy this condition of servile dependence, is not less manifest. It is marked on the face, stamped on the skin, and evinced by the intellectual inferiority and natural improvidence of this They have all the qualities that fit them for slaves, and not one of those that would fit them to be freemen. They are utterly unqualified not only for rational freedom, but for self-government of any kind. They are, in all respects, physical, moral, and political, inferior to millions of the human race, who have for consecutive ages, dragged out a wretched existence under a grinding political despotism, and who are doomed to this hopeless condition by the very qualities which unfit them for a better. It is utterly astonishing that any enlightened American, after contemplating all the manifold forms in which even the white race of mankind are doomed to slavery and oppression, should suppose it possible to reclaim the African race from their destiny. The capacity to enjoy freedom is an attribute not to be communicated by human power. It is an endowment of God, and one of the rarest which it has pleased his inscrutable wisdom to bestow upon the nations of the earth. It is conferred as the reward of merit, and only upon those who are qualified to enjoy it. Until the "Ethiopian can change his skin," it will be in vain to attempt, by any human power, to make freemen of those whom God has doomed to be slaves, by all their attributes.

Let not, therefore, the misguided and designing intermeddlers who seek to destroy our peace, imagine that they are serving the cause of God by practically arraigning the decrees

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