Judge said that he believed that God had, in his mysterious
providence, and of his sovereign pleasure, making use of the cupidity of
white men, placed these blacks here in connection with us for their good
as a race, and for the welfare of the world. He said that his mind could
feel no peace on the subject of slavery, unless he viewed it in this
light. In connection with the great industrial and commercial interests
of our globe, and as an indispensable element in the supply of human
wants, this abject race had been transported from their savage life in
Africa, and had been made immensely useful to the whole civilized world.
'We agree, as I have said,' he continued, 'as to the immorality of those
who brought them here; but he is not fit to reason on this subject,
being destitute of all proper notions with regard to divine providence,
who does not see in the results of slavery, both as to the civilized
world and to negroes themselves, a wise, benevolent, and an Almighty
Hand. Here my mind gets relief in contemplating this subject, not in
abstract reasoning, not in logical premises and deductions, but by
resting in Providence. There are mysteries in it,--as truly so as in the
human apostasy, origin of evil, permission of sin, which confound my
reasonings as to the benevolence of God; in which, however, I,
nevertheless, maintain my firm belief. Here was the great defect in Mr.
Jefferson's views of slavery. In the highest Christian sense, he was not
qualified to understand this subject; he reasoned like one who did not
take into view the providence and the purposes of God, even while he was
saying what he did of there being "no attribute in the Almighty that
would take part with us" in favor of slavery. Standing as I do by this
providential view of the great subject, the assailants of slavery at the
North seem to me, some of them, almost insane, and others, even
ministers of the Gospel, shall I say it? more than unchristian;--there
is a sort of blind, wild, French Jacobinical atheism in their feeling
and behavior; while as to the rest, good people, they are misled by what
Mr. Webster, in one of his speeches in the Senate, called "the constant
rub-a-dub of the press,"--"no drum-head," he says, "in the longest day's
march, having been more incessantly beaten than the feeling of the
public in certain parts of the North." I cannot reason with these men,'
continued the Judge, 'for I confess, at once, that I cannot demonstrate,
eit