Page:The History of Slavery and the Slave Trade.djvu/476

 how absurd to commence a war for maritime rights by invading that province, while our whole sea-coast lay exposed to the enemy; not a spot on all the shores of Chesapeake bay, the city of Baltimore alone excepted, safe from attack or capable of defense 1

"If it were true that Britain had stimulated the late Indian hostilities, that might justify the proposed invasion; but that was a rash charge, with no foundation beyond suspicion and surmise. There was, indeed, an easy and natural solution of the events on the Wabash, without resort to any such conjecture. It was our own thirst for territory, our want of moderation that had driven those sons of nature to despair.

"But this Canadian campaign, it seems, is to be a holiday matter. There is to be no expense of blood or treasure on our part. Canada is to conquer herself — is to be subdued by the principles of French fraternity! We are to succeed by this French method! Our whole policy, indeed, is French! But how dreadfully might not this sort of warfare be retorted on our own southern states!

"During the war of the revolution, so fixed among the slaves was the habit of obedience, that while the whole country was overrun by the enemy, who invited them to desert, no fears were entertained of insurrection. But should we therefore be unobservant spectators of the progress of society with the last twenty years? Even the poor slaves have not escaped. The French revolution has polluted even them. Nay, there have not been wanting members of this house — witness our legislative Legendre, the butcher — [this referred to Sloan, who had proposed the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia] to preach upon this very floor the doctrine of imprescriptible rights to a crowded audience of blacks in the galleries; teaching them that they are equal to their masters; in other words, advising them to cut their masters' throats! Similar doctrines are spread throughout the south by Yankee peddlers; and there are even owners of slaves so infatuated, as by the general tenor of their conversation, by contempt of order, morality, and religion, unthinkingly to cherish these seeds of destruction. And what has been the consequence? Within the last ten years repeated alarms of slave insurrections, some of them awful indeed. By the spreading of this infernal doctrine, the whole south has been thrown into a state of insecurity. Men dead to the operation of moral causes have taken from the poor slave those habits of loyalty and obedience which lightened his servitude by a double operation, beguiling his own labors and disarming his master's suspicions and severity; and now, like true empirics in politics, you propose to trust to the mere physical strength of the shackle that holds him in bondage. You have deprived him of all moral restraint; you have tempted him to eat cf the tree of knowledge just enough to perfect him in wickedness; you have opened his eyes to his nakedness; you have roused his nature against the hand that has fed him, and has clothed him, and has cherished him in sickness — that hand which, before he became a pupil in your school, he was accustomed to press to his lips with respectful affection; you have done all this — and now you point him to the whip and the gibbet