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302 instinctive watchfulness for the safety of the peculiar institution, which characterized the orthodox slave-holder, was entirely foreign to him. He had to be told what the interests of slavery demanded, in order to see and feel its needs. The original anti-slavery spirit would again and again inspire his impulses and break out in his utterances. We remember how he praised the Spanish American republics for having abolished slavery. In his great “American System” speech he had argued for the superior claims of free labor as against those of “servile labor.” He was scarcely seated in the office of Secretary of State, when, in April, 1825, as Mr. Adams recorded, he expressed the opinion that “the independence of Hayti must shortly be recognized,” — an idea most horrible to the American slave-holder. When he eagerly accepted the invitation to the Panama Congress, the association with new states that had liberated their slaves, and counted negroes and mulattoes among their generals and legislators, had nothing alarming to him. Little more than a year before he instructed Gallatin to ask of Great Britain the surrender of fugitive slaves from Canada, he had made one of the most striking demonstrations of his genuine feeling at a meeting of the African Colonization Society, which is worthy of special attention.

That society had been organized in 1816, with the object of transporting free negroes to Africa and of colonizing them there. It was in the main com-