African Slavery in America (Classic Reprint)

Now that the Presidential election is over, and pursuant to its equally dubious and perilous, but fortunate conclusion, this is the time, Pennsylvania is the meridian, and an aged descendant from New England, withdrawn from party politics, is not an improper person to submit to the whole country of these United States their temperate but decided philosophy of vindication from foreign misrepresentation, and intestine disturbance concerning slavery; a task, insensibility to whose difficulties would be incapacity for the patriotic undertaking. To explain satisfactorily the most crying and formidable of our national evils is beset and hindered by passionate contradictions. Within the last half century, the vast influence of England has undergone complete revulsion, from approval of much cultivated to aversion of much abused slavery, which aversion has been naturalized in parts of the United States with virulent intensity. The baneful fanaticism of political abolition, endemic in Great Britain, and widely spread throughout this country, has become an intractable distemper, discarding discussion, disregarding facts, ignoring history, however recent and instructive, and substituting shouts of clamorous vituperation, drowning argument and reason. While in fifteen sovereign States, nearly four millions of negroes, continually and rapidly increasing in number, are held in slavery by some eight millions of free people, passionately, with all the instincts of right of property, insisting on that right as inherited, legal, moral, profitable, indispensable, and constitutional, which neither can, must, or shall be questioned; at the same time this their asserted right of property is vehemently denied and disputed by other fourteen millions of fellow-countrymen, in sixteen other sovereign and nearly contiguous States, the whole thirty-one altogether confederated in constitu
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)