coffin-makers may calculate upon good times. With death come mourning and lamentation, and weeds of wo.' Dealers in crape will doubtless secure a handsome patronage. Lawyers may hope to profit by the demise of those who possess property. Indeed, almost every class in community must, to a greater or less extent, feel the beneficial effects of this philanthropic but novel experiment. The blood, taken from the veins of the blacks, may be transfused into our own, and the general pulse acquire new vigor. Supposing a majority of the patients should recover, three other classes will thrive by their expulsion—namely, ship-builders, merchants and seamen. As our vessels are all occupied in profitable pursuits, new ones must be built-freights will riseand the wages of seamen be proportionably enhanced.—But a truce to irony. The American Colonization Society, in making the banishment of the slaves the condition of their emancipation, inflicts upon them an aggravated wrong, perpetuates their thraldom, and disregards the claims of everlasting and immutable justice. The language of its most distinguished supporters is, Emancipation, with the liberty to remain on this side of the Atlantic, is but an act of dreamy madness' Emancipation, without removal from the country, is out of the question '—' All emancipation, to however small an extent, which permits the person emancipated to remain in this country, is an evil’—‹ They cannot be emancipated as a people, and remain among us.' Thus the restoration of an inalienable right, and an abandonment of robbery and oppression, are made to depend upon the practicability of transporting more than one sixth portion of our whole population to a far distant and barbarous land! It is impossible to imagine a more cruel, heaven-daring and Goddishonoring scheme. It exhibits a deliberate and perverse disregard of every moral obligation, and bids defiance to the requisitions of the gospel. Listen to the avowal of Mr Mercer of Virginia, one of the main pillars and most highly extolled supporters of the Society The abolition of slavery was no object of desire to him, unless accompanied by colonization. So far was he from de : siring it, unaccompanied by this condition, that he would not live in a country where the one took place without the other'? This language may be correctly rendered thus: 'I desire to see two millions of human beings plundered of their rights, and subjected to every species of wrong and outrage, ad infinitum, if they cannot be driven out of the country. I am perfectly willing to live with them while they are treated worse than cattle,―ignorant, vicious, and wretched,—and while they are held under laws which forbid their instruction; and not only am I willing thus to live, but I am determined to practise the same oppression. But, if they should be emancipated with liberty to remain here, and placed in a situation favorable to their moral and intellectual improvement—a situation in which they could be no longer bought and sold, lacerated and manacled, defrauded and oppressed-I would abandon my native land, and never return to her shores." And this is the language of a philanthropist! and this the moral principle of the boasted champion of the American Colonization Society! Whose indignation does not kindle, whose astonishment is not profound, whose disgust is not excited, in view of these sentiments ? But this is not the acme of colonization insanity. The assertion is made by a highly respectable partisan, and endorsed by the organ of the Society, that it would be as humane to throw the slaves from the decks in the middle passage, [i. e. into the ocean,] as to set them free in our country'!!! And even Henry Clay, who is an oracle in the cause, has had the boldness to declare, that the slaves should be held in everlasting servitude if they cannot be colonized in Africa!! And this sentiment is echoed by another, who says, Liberate them only on condi tion of their going to Africa or Hayti'! I will not even seem to undervalue the good sense and quick' perception of the candid and intelligent reader, by any farther endeavors to illustrate the sacrifice of principle and inhumanity of purpose which are contained in the extracts under the present section. With so strong an array of evidence before him, no one, who is not mentally blind or governed by prejudice, can fail to rise from its perusal with amazement and abhorrence, and a determination to assist in overthrowing a combination which is based upon the rotten foundation of expediency and vio lence. The Colonization Society expressly denies the right of the slaves to enjoy freedom and happiness in this country; and this denial incontestibly tends to rivet their fetters more firmly, or make them the victims of a relentless persecution. THE AMERICAN SECTION VIII. COLONIZATION SOCIETY IS THE DISPAR AGER OF THE FREE BLACKS. THE leaders in the African colonization crusade seem to dwell with a malignant satisfaction upon the poverty and degradation of the free people of color, and are careful never to let an opportunity pass without heaping their abuse and contempt upon them. It is a common device of theirs to contrast the condition of the slaves with that of this class, and invariably to strike the balance heavily in favor of the former! In this manner, thousands are led to look upon slavery as a benevolent system, and to deprecate the manumission of its victims. Nothing but a love of falsehood, or an utter disregard of facts, could embolden these calumniators to deal so extensively in fiction. What! the slaves more happy, more moral, more industrious, more orderly, more comfortable, more exalted, than the free blacks! A more enormous exaggeration, a more heinous libel, a wider departure from truth, was never fabricated, or uttered, or known. The slaves, as a body, are in the lowest state of degradation; they possess no property; they cannot read; they are as ignorant, as their masters are reckless, of moral obligation; they have no motive for exertion; they are thieves from necessity and usage; their bodies are cruelly lacerated by the cart-whip; and they are disposable property. And yet these poor miserable, perishing, mutilated creatures are placed above our free colored population in dignity, in enjoyment, in priviJege, in usefulness, in respectability!! There is a class, however, more numerous than all these, introduced amongst us by violence, notoriously ignorant, degraded and miserable, mentally diseased, broken-spirited, acted upon by no motives to honorable exertions, SCARCELY REACHED IN THEIR DEBASEMENT BY THE HEAVENLY LIGHT; yet where is the sympathy and effort which a view of their condition ought to excite? They wander unsettled and unbefriended through our land, or sit indolent, abject and sorrowful, by the "streams which witness their captivity." Their freedom is licentiousness, and to many RESTRAINT WOULD PROVE A BLESSING. To this remark there are exceptions; exceptions proving that to change their state would be to elevate their character; that virtue and enterprise are absent, only, because absent are the causes which create the one, and the motives which produce the other.'-[African Repository, vol. i. p. 68.] * * * Free blacks are a greater nuisance than even slaves themselves.' They knew that where slavery had been abolished it had operated to the advantage of the masters, not of the slaves: they saw this fact most strikingly illustrated in the case of the free negroes of Boston. If, on the anniversary celebrated by the free people of color, of the day on which slavery was abolished, they looked abroad, what did they see? Not freemen, in the enjoyment of every attribute of freedom, with the stamp of liberty upon their brows! No, Sir; they saw a ragged set, crying out liberty! for whom liberty had nothing to bestow, and whose enjoyment of it was but in name. He spoke of the great body of the blacks; there were some few honorable exceptions, he knew, which only proved what might be done for all.'—[African Repository, vol. ii. p. 328.] * * * 'Although there are individual exceptions distinguished by high moral and intellectual worth, yet the free blacks in our country are, as a body, more vicious and degraded than any other which our population embraces.' 'If, then, they are a useless and dangerous species of population, we would ask, is it generous in our southern friends to burthen us with them? Knowing themselves the evils of slavery, can they wish to impose upon us an evil scarcely less tolerable? We think it a mistaken philanthropy, which would liberate the slave, unfitted by education and habit for freedom, and cast him upon a merciless and despising world, where his only fortune must be poverty, his only distinction degradation, and his only comfort insensibility.' * * * 'I will look no farther when I seek for the most degraded, the most abandoned race on the earth, but rest my eyes on this people. What but sorrow can we feel at the misguided piety which has set free so many of them by death-bed devise or sudden conviction of injustice? Better, far better, for us, had they been kept in bondage, where the opportunity, the inducements, the necessity of vice would not have been so great. Deplorable necessity, indeed, to one borne down with the consciousness of the violence we have done. Yet I am clear that, whether we consider it with reference to the welfare of the State, or the happiness of the blacks, it were better to have left them in chains, than to have liberated them to receive such freedom as they enjoy, and greater freedom we cannot, must not allow them.' * There is not a State in the Union not at this moment groaning under the evil of this class of persons, a curse and a contagion whereever they reside.' The increase of a free black population among us has been regarded as a greater evil than the increase of slaves.'-[African Re pository, vol. iii. pp. 24, 25, 197, 203, 374.] * * 6 'Mr. Mercer adverted to the situation of his native State, and the condition of the free black population existing there, whom he described as a horde of miserable people-the objects of universal suspicion; subsisting by plunder.' -[Idem, vol. iv. p. 363.] They leave a country in which though born and reared, they are strangers and aliens; where severe necessity places them in a class of degraded beings; where they are free without the blessings and privileges of liberty; where in ceasing to be slaves of one, they have become subservient to many; where, neither freemen nor slaves, but placed in an anomalous grade which they do not understand and others disregard; where no kind instructer, no hope of preferment, no honorable emulation prompts them to virtue or deters from vice; their industry waste, not accumulation; their regular vocation, any thing or nothing as it may happen; their greater security, sufferance; their highest reward, forgiveness; vicious themselves and the cause of vice in others; discontented and exciting discontent; scorned by one class and foolishly envied by another; thus, and WORSE CIRCUMSTANCED, they cannot but choose to move. [Idem, vol. v. p. 238.] * * , Of all the descriptions of our population, and of either portion of the African race, the free people of color are, by far, as a class, the MOST CORRUPT, DEPRAVED, AND ABANDONED. The laws, it is true, proclaim them free; but prejudices, more powerful than any laws, deny them the privileges of freemen. They occupy a middle station between the free white population and the slaves of the United States, and the tendency of their habits is to corrupt both.' * That the free colored population of our country is a great and constantly increasing evil must be readily acknowledged. Averse to labor, with no incentives to industry or motives to self-respect, they maintain a precarious existence by petty thefts and plunder, themselves, or by inciting our domestics, not free, to rob their owners to supply their wants. * * * 'If there is in the whole world, a more wretched class of human beings than the free people of color in this country, do not know where they are to be found. They have no home, no country, no kindred, no friends. They are lazy and indolent, because they have no motives to prompt them to be industrious. They are in general destitute of principle, because they have nothing to stimulate them to honorable and praise-worthy conduct. Let them be maltreated ever so much, the law gives them no redress unless some white person happens to be present, to be a witness in the case. If they acquire property, they hold it by the courtesy of every vagabond in the country; and sooner or later, are sure to have it filched from them.'-[Idem, vol. vi. pp. 12, 135, 228.] : The existence, within the very bosom of our country, of an amomalous race of beings, THE MOST DEBASED UPON EARTH, who neither enjoy the blessings of freedom, nor are yet in the bonds of slavery, is a great national evil, which every friend of his country most deeply deplores. Tax your utmost powers of imagination, and you cannot conceive one motive to honorable effort, which can animate the bosom, or give impulse to the conduct of a free black in this country. Let him toil from youth to age in the honorable pursuit of wisdom-let him store his mind with the most valuable researches of science and literature-and let him add to a highly gifted and cultivated intellect, a piety pure, undefiled, and "unspotted from the world "it is all nothing he would not be received into the very lowest walks of society. If we were constrained to admire so uncommon a being, our very admiration would mingle with disgust, because, in the physical organization of his frame, we meet an insurmountable barrier, even to an approach to social intercourse, and in the Egyptian color, which nature has stamped upon his features, a principle of repulsion so strong as to forbid the idea of a communion either of interest or of feeling, as utterly abhorrent. Whether these feelings are founded in reason or not, we will not now inquire-perhaps they are not. But education and habit, and prejudice have so firmly riveted them upon us, that they have become as strong as nature itself— and to expect their removal, or even their slightest modification, would be as idle and preposterous as to expect that we could reach forth our hands, and remove the mountains from their foundations into the vallies, which are beneath them.'-[African Repository, vol. vii. pp. 230, 331.] "We have been charged with wishing only to remove our free blacks, that we may the more effectually rivet the chains of the slave. But the class we first |