ally by traffic, subjection, etc." Now, as we of the South,
against whom Mr. Sumner is pleased to inveigh, propose to make no such
changes of freemen into slaves, much less to wage war for any such
purpose, we may dismiss his gross perversion of the text in question. He
may apply the condemnation of the apostle to us now, if it so please the
benignity of his Christian charity, but it will not, we assure him,
enter into our consciences, until we shall not only become
"slave-traders," but also, with a view to the gain of such odious
traffic, make war upon freemen.

We have undertaken to defend, as we have said, neither "slave-traders,"
nor "manstealers." We leave them both to the tender mercies of Mr.
Sumner. But we have undertaken to defend slavery, that is, _the_ slavery
of the South, and to vindicate the character of Southern masters against
the aspersions of their calumniators. And in this vindication we shrink
not from St. Paul's "real judgment of slavery." Nay, we desire, above
all things, to have his real judgment. His judgment, we mean, not of
manstealers or of murderers, but of slavery and slaveholders. We have
just seen "his real judgment" respecting the character of one
slaveholder. We have seen it in the very epistle Mr. Sumner is
discussing. Why, then, does he fly from St. Paul's opinion of the
slaveholder to what he has said of the manstealer and the murderer? We
would gather an author's opinion of slavery from what he has said of
slavery itself, or of the slaveholder. But this does not seem to suit
Mr. Sumner's purpose quite so well. Entirely disregarding the apostle's
opinion of the slaveholder contained in the passage right before him, as
well as elsewhere, Mr. Sumner infers his "real judgment of slavery" from
what he has said of manstealers and murderers! He might just as well
have inferred St. Paul's opinion of Philemon from what he has, "on
another occasion," said of Judas Iscariot.

Mr. Sumner contents himself with "calling attention to two things,
apparent on the face" of the epistle itself; and which, in his opinion,
are "in themselves an all-sufficient response." The first of these
things is, says he: "While it appears that Onesimus had been in some way
the servant of Philemon, it does not appear that he had ever been held
as a slave, much less as a chattel." It does not appear that Onesimus
was the slave of Philemon, is the position of the celebrated senatorial
abolitionist. We cannot argue this