close
their hands and crush out the "institution," that their slaveholding
fellow-citizens might become as prosperous and as happy as themselves.

The assertion is frequently made, that white men cannot work in the hot
latitudes of the South, and this is offered as a reason why there should
be black slaves there. The gentleman knocks one of the strongest props
from under the institution. He tells us white men work, and raise not
only cotton, but corn and potatoes. He also informs us that after the
cotton, corn, and potatoes, are raised, the strong, brave man drives the
plow through the fallow ground. It will be seen that work during the
summer has not produced the lassitude and enervation that it has been
claimed is produced in white men by labor. We are still further
informed, that the fallow ground turned up by the strong, brave man,
discloses something more valuable than the gold of California--"'Tis the
sparkles of liberty!" We have heard of the sparkles of liberty that are
made manifest to the non-slaveholders of the South. The poor laboring
man at Columbia, South Carolina, when streams of blood issued from the
furrows plowed in his naked back by a cow-hide in the hands of a negro,
saw some of the sparkles of liberty, when, bleeding, exhausted,
besmeared with tar, and covered with feathers, he was thrust into the
cars, and left to perish in the cold. He had, no doubt, a vivid idea of
the liberty that is enjoyed by non-slaveholders in the South, when he
remembered that these cruelties and barbarities were inflicted on him
for expressing a rational and honest opinion relative to this "peculiar
institution."

The statements, and doubtless convictions, of the honorable member from
Mississippi, differ singularly from those of Senator CLAY, of Alabama,
who tells us that, in his State, "we may behold numerous fine houses,
once the abode of intelligent freemen, now occupied by slaves, or else
tenantless and dilapidated; that we may see fields, once fertile,
covered with foxtail and broom-sedge--moss growing on the walls of once
thrifty villages, and may find that 'one only master grasps the whole
domain' which once furnished homes for a dozen white families."

Hear, also, Senator HAMMOND, of South Carolina, who says of the
non-slaveholders of his State:

"They obtain a precarious subsistence by occasional jobs, by hunting, by
fishing, by plundering fields or folds, or, too often, by what is far
worse in its effects, tr