ess of the boundless wealth of tropical
and tropicoid climates, the learned graduates of Oxford and Cambridge
raised a hue and cry against the inhumanity of the _middle passage_. So
little truth was there in it, that when the committee of the United
States Senate, appointed to consider the causes of the mortality
prevailing on emigrant ships from Europe to this country, and the means
for the better protection of the health of the passengers, did me the
honor in 1854 to request my views on the subject, I replied (see
"_Report of the Select Committee of U. S. Senate on the Sickness and
Mortality on Emigrant Ships_," pages 119-144--Washington, 1854),
recommending certain rules to be adopted to preserve the health and
ameliorate the condition of emigrants on shipboard, which appeared to me
to be the best. But, subsequently, a little volume fell into my hands
containing the rules of the African slave-traders, half a century ago,
which were so much better than those I had recommended, I called the
attention of the chairman of the Senate's committee, the Hon. Hamilton
Fish, to them, advising him by all means to adopt the African
slave-traders' rules, if he had any regard for the health and comfort of
the European emigrants. In the latter part of the last century no one
pretended, as now, that the negro lost any thing by exchanging slavery
in Africa for the more benign system of slavery in America. But it was
the imaginary sufferings on the middle passage, which brought humanity
with her eyes shut to lend to British policy a helping hand to close
Africa and prevent her sable sons from exchanging their barbarous
masters for civilized ones. America consented to that policy. The
Southern tobacco-planters, believing they had as many negroes as the
cultivation of tobacco required, had petitioned the king before the
Revolution, to close the African slave trade. He did not do it. After
the Revolution it was not only closed, but declared to be piracy, by the
federal government. The policy which closed it may have been good policy
or bad at that time. It soon gave the non-slaveholding States the
ascendency in the Union. The question, whether they shall retain that
ascendency, will depend very much upon whether they continue to abuse
the power they acquired over the South by cutting off the supply of
Southern laborers. Having ascertained that the negro would not work as a
free man, the next move of British policy was, to set those free who