Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/371

 , announced by Chief Justice Sharkey, — and never was judge more significantly named, — from the bench of the Supreme Court of Mississippi. And already this doctrine begins to find many advocates among the inhabitants of the new slave breeding Guinea, into which Virginia and Maryland have degenerated; nor, when the pinch comes, will there be wanting northern merchants, eager to please their southern customers; northern politicians, for the prospect of office, ready to worship Satan himself; northern editors, who publish papers for circulation at the south; northern doctors of divinity, ready to yield up, if not their own mothers, — for though he might say it in the heat of the moment, not even the famous Dr. Dewey is quite brave enough to stick to that, — yet, at all events, ready to surrender their own brothers into servitude, to keep the slaveholders quiet and good natured: plenty of such supple tools will not be wanting to preach, throughout the pretended free states, subscription to the perpetuity of servitude as the corner stone of the American Union!

Let those who would trace the onward march of American slavery, since the time of Washington and Jefferson, call to mind the difference between the principles avowed by them and those set up at the present day by the Mississippi Sharkeys and Virginia slave breeders for the market, who nominate the presidents, dictate the legislation, make tools of the politicians, and aspire, not unsuccessfully, to control the moral and religious sentiment of America!





I entered the town of Vicksburg, an appalling prospect met my eyes: five men hanging by the neck, just swung off, as it would seem, from an extempore gallows, and struggling in the agonies of death; a