Page:An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans.djvu/141

Rh gives a renewed and apparently interminable lease to the duration of slavery.

The purchase or the conquest of the Texas, is a favorite scheme with Southerners, because it would occasion such an inexhaustible demand for slaves. A gentleman in the Virginia convention thought the acquisition of the Texas so certain, that he made calculations upon the increased value of negroes. We have reason to thank God that the jealousy of the Mexican government places a barrier in that direction.

The existence of slavery among us prevents the recognition of Haytian independence. That republic is fast increasing in wealth, intelligence and refinement.—Her commerce is valuable to us and might become much more so. But our Northern representatives have never even made an effort to have her independence acknowledged, because a colored ambassador would be so disagreeable to our prejudices.

Few are aware of the extent of sectional dislike in this country; and I would not speak of it, if I thought it possible to add to it. The late John Taylor, a man of great natural talent, wrote a book on the agriculture of Virginia, in which he acknowledges impoverishment, but attributes it all to the mismanagement of overseers. In this work, Mr Taylor has embodied more of the genuine spirit, the ethics and politics, of planters, than any other man; excepting perhaps, John Randolph in his speeches. He treats merchants, capitalists, bankers, and all other people not planters, as so many robbers, who live by plundering the slave owner, apparently forgetting by what plunder they themselves live.

Mr Jefferson and other eminent men from the South, have occasionally betrayed the same strong prejudices; but they were more guarded, lest the democracy of the North should be undeceived, and their votes lost. Mr Taylor's book is in high repute in the Southern States, and its sentiments widely echoed; but it is little known here.

A year or two since, I received a letter from a publisher who largely supplies the Southern market, in which he assured me that no book from the North would sell at