aveholders, as much as the improvement
of the general condition of mankind has those of the most ardent
philanthropists; and the greatest progressive amelioration of the system
has been effected. You yourself acknowledge that in the early part of
your career you were exceedingly anxious for the _immediate_ abolition
of the slave trade, lest those engaged in it should so mitigate its
evils as to destroy the force of your arguments and facts. The
improvement you then _dreaded_ has gone on steadily here, and would
doubtless have taken place in the slave trade, but for the measures
adopted to suppress it.

Of late years we have not only been annoyed, but greatly embarrassed in
this matter, by the abolitionists. We have been compelled to curtail
some privileges; we have been debarred from granting new ones. In the
face of discussions which aim at loosening all ties between master and
slave, we have in some measure to abandon our efforts to attach them to
us, and control them through their affections and pride. We have to rely
more and more on the power of fear. We must, in all our intercourse with
them, assert and maintain strict mastery, and impress it on them that
they are slaves. This is painful to us, and certainly no present
advantage to them. But it is the direct consequence of the abolition
agitation. We are determined to continue masters, and to do so we have
to draw the rein tighter and tighter day by day to be assured that we
hold them in complete check. How far this process will go on, depends
wholly and solely on the abolitionists. When they desist, we can relax.
We may not before. I do not mean by all this to say that we are in a
state of actual alarm and fear of our slaves; but under existing
circumstances we should be ineffably stupid not to increase our
vigilance and strengthen our hands. You see some of the fruits of your
labors. I speak freely and candidly--not as a colonist, who, though a
slaveholder, has a master; but as a free white man, holding, under God,
and resolved to hold, my fate in my own hands; and I assure you that my
sentiments, and feelings, and determinations, are those of every
slaveholder in this country.

The research and ingenuity of the abolitionists, aided by the invention
of run-away slaves--in which faculty, so far as improvizing falsehood
goes, the African race is without a rival--have succeeded in shocking
the world with a small number of pretended instances of our barbarity.
The