slavery that is the mother of amalgamation. Does the gentleman want
facts on this subject? let him look at the colored race in the free
States; it is a rare occurrence there. A colony of blacks, some three
or four hundred, were settled, some fifteen or twenty years since, in
the county of Brown, a few miles distant from my former residence in
Ohio, and I was told by a person living near them, a country merchant
with whom they dealt, when conversing with him on this very subject,
he informed me he knew of but one instance of a mulatto child being
born amongst them for the last fifteen years; and I venture the
assertion, had this same colony been settled in a slave State, the
cases of a like kind would have been far more numerous. I repeat
again, in the words of Dr. Channing, it is a slave country that reeks
with licentiousness of this kind, and for proof I refer to the
opinions of Judge Harper, of North Carolina, in his defence of
southern slavery.
The Senator, as if fearing that he had made his charge too broad, and
might fail in proof to sustain it, seems to stop short, and make the
inquiry, where is the process of amalgamation to begin? He had heard
of no instance of the kind against abolitionists; they (the
abolitionists) would begin it with the laboring class; and if I
understand the Senator correctly, that abolitionism, by throwing
together the white and the black laborers, would naturally produce
this result. Sir, I regret, I deplore, that such a charge should be
made against the laboring class--that class which tills the ground;
and, in obedience to the decree of their Maker, eat their bread in
the sweat of their face--that class, as Mr. Jefferson says, if God has
a chosen people on earth, they are those who thus labor. This charge
is calculated for effect, to induce the laboring class to believe,
that if emancipation takes place, they will be, in the free States,
reduced to the same condition as the colored laborer. The reverse of
that is the truth of the case. It is the slaveholder NOW, he who looks
upon labor as only fit for a servile race, it is him and his kindred
spirits who live upon the labor of others, endeavoring to reduce the
white laborer to the condition of the slave. They do not yet claim him
as property, but they would exclude him from all participation in the
public affairs of the country. It is further said, that if the negroes
were free, the black would rival the white laborer in the free Stat
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