ore rapidly than it has under the best
arrangements of exclusive freedom.
These facts show that, with the advantages of the best location and
climate upon the globe, and a high degree of moral, religious, and
social intelligence to commence with, those communities at the North who
excluded this element from their organizations, are actually behind
slaveholding communities, in religion, in wealth, in the increase of
their race, and in the comforts of their condition. If this be so, (and
the census testifies that it is,) what will justify the North in efforts
to involve both sections of our country in civil war and disunion,
because slavery exists in one section of it? And if the institution of
African slavery has certainly improved the condition of both races in
our country, (and the census testifies that it has,) why should they
hazard all the blessings vouchsafed to the North and the South sooner
than suffer its expansion over new territory?
The expansion of African slavery (according to the test by which we are
now trying it) has never yet done injury in this Union. In Texas
slaveholders were called to organize a State, (not in this Union at the
time,) which in 1850 had a population of two hundred and twelve thousand
five hundred and ninety-two. The individuals composing it originally,
were the most lawless set of adventurers that ever lived. Did slavery
disqualify slaveholders from organizing a social body, even out of these
materials, that could secure the highest results in human progress? What
is now the social, moral, and religious complexion of Texas? In the
essentials of prosperity it is ahead, under equal circumstances, of any
portion of the Union. Slaveholders, in the providence of God, had to
organize States on the Gulf of Mexico, and on the banks of the
Mississippi, after the acquisition of Louisiana from France, and Florida
from Spain. The original materials (numbering upwards of seventy
thousand) of which these States were composed, had been trained under
the most pernicious system of morals that ever existed among a civilized
people. The result in this case, also, will testify that slavery does
not paralyze communities in the accumulation of wealth, or in the
correction of moral, social, and religious evils. The census shows that
in all these items these new slave States which have been added to our
Union, have greatly outstripped their non-slaveholding equals in age.
The temples of the Lord are now s
|