Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 9.djvu/286

262 fails to do it. Drunken, depraved and vicious as he may be, you must control his passions and be responsible for his acts. I remember that a slaveholder in St. Louis told me that the vicious behavior of a female slave, which for some reason he could not or would not sell, caused him more trouble than all the other cares of his life.

Suppose a farmer to own two or three negroes. They may be of profit to him in the summer, but what can they do in the winter? They cannot plow, or sow or reap or thresh. What could a negro fitted by nature for the blazing sun of Africa, do at chopping wood, splitting rails, or making fence in the cool drenching rains of an Oregon winter? One season of such exposure would endanger his life. The fact is that negro slaves other than house servants would be perfect leeches upon the farmer during our long rainy winters. They would be more useless here than in New England, for there the winter is cold and dry, and a man can work in the barn or in the woods, but the reverse is true in this country.

There is another thing in this connection to be noticed. When a man proposes to make an investment, the risk of its loss is always taken into account. If you loan money on doubtful security, you ask more for its use than when the security is perfectly good. Mr. Buchanan said that "it was morally impossible for slavery to exist in California, because every facility was there afforded for the slave to escape from his master, and such property would be entirely insecure." What is true of California in this respect is certainly true of Oregon. Slaves might accompany their masters to Oregon from attachment, but suppose a slave dealer to start for the Oregon market, across the plains with a band of slaves bought here and there; what regard would they have for a man who had bought them to sell again upon speculation, and who was taking them a returnless distance from the "old folks at home?" With all the safeguards of law and public sentiment, slaves are manacled to be taken by the trader from one slave State to another; how then could they be safely transported thousands of miles across a wilderness