unity of interest; why will ye be led away by a
cruel and misguided philanthropy, or by designing demagogues? why will
ye strive to inflict the most irreparable injury upon the objects of
your misplaced sympathy? reduce to ruins this fair fabric of liberty,
and this happy land to desolation? Your own leaders acknowledge that,
hitherto, your agitation, far from bettering the condition of the
slaves, has only made it worse; and in some respects this is true. So
long as you confine yourselves to making or hearing abolition speeches,
or forming among yourselves anti-slavery societies; so long as you
confine the agitation to yourselves, you neither injure nor benefit the
slaves; your exuberant philanthropy escapes through the safety-valve in
the shape of gas. But when you attempt to circulate among them
incendiary documents, intended to render them unhappy, and discontented
with their lot, it becomes our duty to protect them against your
machinations. This is the sole reason why most, if not all the slave
States, have forbidden the slaves to be taught to read. But for your
interference, most of our slaves would now have been able to read the
word of God for themselves, instead of being dependent, as they now are,
on that _oral_ instruction, which is now so generally afforded them.
When emissaries come among them, to give them _oral_ instruction
different from that contained in the word of God, instead of abridging
the privileges of the slave, we deal directly with the emissary, and
justly, too; for we are acting not only in self-defense, but we are
guarding this dependent race, committed by God to our care, from those
malign influences which would work evil, not only to us, but to
themselves, also. Could you succeed in your efforts--which you will find
to be impossible--as the red republicans did in St. Domingo, or as the
English abolitionists did in Jamaica and Barbadoes, so far from having
bettered the condition of the blacks, you would have inflicted on them
an irreparable injury. But of this you will soon have an opportunity of
satisfying yourselves. We have among us a few hundred thousand of this
race, who have been emancipated through a mistaken philanthropy, and
who, though not injurious, are almost useless to us; these we have
concluded to colonize among you, that your lecturers, while lauding the
black man as being far superior to the white race, may never be in want
of a specimen of the genuine article, to point to,