Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

Young's Point there were 2100 in miserable tents, huts, and hovels. The sickness and death were most frightful. During the summer from thirty to fifty died in a day, and on some days as many as seventyfive. At De Soto, so well known from its position opposite to Vicksburg, there were 275 old men and women to whom the government undertook to furnish rations, but "none had been received for more than two weeks preceding Mr. Yeatman's visit." At Natchez there was a camp of 2100 freedmen hutted without light or ventilation; seventy-five died in one day. Numbers returned to their masters on account of suffering. The first question asked by the negroes of Mr. Yeatman was always, "Are you a doctor?" One camp, which numbered 4000 at the time of his visit, was reduced to 2100. "A sad tale to tell," he writes; "but whoever will ride along the levee from Millikin's Bend to De Soto, as I did, and see the numerous graves along the way, for the distance of twenty-five miles, cannot doubt it." Even Mr. Yeatman, a Northern partisan from the Western States, and chief of an abolition society, is compelled to say that the negroes "are in a state of involuntary servitude worse than that from which they have escaped."

"Such are the results Mr. Bright exults in; such, he hopes, will be rapidly extended. Old men and women left to starve; the ablebodied worked hard by pitiless taskmasters for little or no pay. No clothing; no medical comforts; instruction intrusted to the decrepid and the helpless; and honest Bostonians

amassing fortunes by the compulsory labour of liberated negroes! As democracy has become the most extreme tyranny in the States, so the "liberty" of the negro has assumed the form of the most heartless and most merciless slavery. We desire the freedom of every slave throughout the world, but not such a freedom as this."

MOCK PHILANTHROPY; OR CANTERISM.

INSTEAD of adopting the use of the means referred to in the preceding communication, nothing would satisfy our religious war crusaders, such as Cheever, Beecher, Sloane, Tyng, Conway, Mrs Stowe, and Miss Dickenson, but an appeal to the arbitement of the sword. Blood, blood, blood, is their hoarse and melancholy cry-spoliation, confiscation, extermination, rather than the Union should be dismembered! And although Wm. Loyd Garrison, Esq., the founder and head of the Abolition party in America, at one period contemplated with horror the termination of slavery by insurrection, or a servile war, and solemnly pledged himself to reject the use of all carnal weapons in seeking to promote the emancipation of the slave, whilst with the deepest and broadest emphasis he exclaimed :—

"Not by the sword shall your deliverance be,
Not by the shedding of your master's blood,
Not by rebellion, nor foul treachery,

Upspringing suddenly like swelling flood,

Revenge and rapine ne'er did bring forth good."

Although such were the expressed feelings and sen

timents of Mr Garrison, now a change has come over the spirit of his dreams-his doctrines of non-resistance have been exchanged for the shout of the warrior, and garments rolled in blood; and the "revenge and rapine which ne'er did bring forth good," are to produce the most astounding miracles of mercy and love-the hurricane of blood and ruin which is now sweeping across our land is to be succeeded by an imperial heritage of privilege and blessing, which is to make America the envy of the world! Nor do the above class of men lack sympathisers or supporters in this country, in their ruinous and detestable policy.

Mr George Thomson, to whom we have already referred, in a lecture which he delivered in the City Hall, Glasgow, April 3d, 1860, when commenting on on the plea used by Frederick Douglas, "That to dissolve the Union would be to do just what the slaveholders would like to have done," observed, "On this subject the testimony of slaveholders themselves will be regarded as the best that can be given; and I will bring before you three passages out of many that might be selected, and leave you to draw your own conclusion on which side the weight of authority lies, and who are doing most to advance the overthrow of slavery-those who support the constitution which is the bulwark of slavery, and who would draw the cords of the Union closer; or those who would withdraw from the constitution would annul it as a compact in oppression, and would dissolve the Union between the slave-holding States." Then follow his

authorities. "The editor of the Marysville (Tenessee) Intelligencer, in an article on the character and condition of the slave population, says :-"We of the South are emphatically surrounded by a dangerous class of beings-degraded, stupid savages, who if they would but entertain the idea that immediate and unconditional death would not be their portion, would re-enact the St Domingo tragedy. But the consciousness with all their stupidity, that a tenfold force, superior in discipline, if not in barbarity, would gather from the four corners of the United States and slaughter them, keeps them in subjection. But to the non-slaveholding States particularly, we are indebted for a permanent safeguard against insurrection. Without their assistance the white population of the South would be too weak to quiet that innate desire of liberty which is ever ready to act itself out with every rational creature."

"In the debate in Congress on the resolution to censure John Quincy Adams for presenting a petition for the dissolution of the Union, Mr Underwood of Kentucky said :-"They, the South, being the weaker portion, were in a minority. The North could do what they pleased with them; they could adopt their own measures. One thing he knew well, that the State which he in part represented had, perhaps, a deeper interest in this subject than any other, except Maryland, and a small part of Virginia. And why? Because he knew that to dissolve the Union, and separate the different States composing this confederacy,

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »