g slavery everywhere (especially Southern
slavery, maintained by enlightened Protestants of the nineteenth
century) replete with torments and horrors--the direst form of
oppression that upheaves itself before the sun. These facts have been so
successfully impressed on a large portion of the intelligent mind of the
country, that the slaves of the South are beginning to be considered as
those whom God emphatically regards as the "poor," the "needy," the
"afflicted," the "oppressed," the "bowed down;" and for whose
consolation he has said, "Now will I arise--I will set him in safety
from him that puffeth at him."

This state of the public mind has been brought about within the last two
or three years; and it is an event which, so far from lessening, greatly
animates, the hopes and expectations of abolitionists.

3. The abolitionists believed from the first, that the tendency of
slavery is to produce, on the part of the whites, looseness of morals,
disdain of the wholesome restraints of law, and a ferocity of temper,
found, only in solitary instances, in those countries where slavery is
unknown. They were not ignorant of the fact, that this was disputed; nor
that the "CHIVALRY OF THE SOUTH" had become a cant phrase, including,
all that is high-minded and honorable among men; nor, that it had been
formally asserted in our National legislature, that slavery, as it
exists in the South, "produces the highest toned, the purest, best
organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth."
Nor were the abolitionists unaware, that these pretensions, proving
anything else but their own solidity, had been echoed and re-echoed so
long by the unthinking and the interested of the North, that the
character of the South had been injuriously affected by them--till she
began boldly to attribute her _peculiar_ superiority to her _peculiar_
institution, and thus to strengthen it. All this the abolitionists saw
and knew. But few others saw and understood it as they did. The
revelations of the last three years are fast dissipating the old notion,
and bringing multitudes in the North to see the subject as the
abolitionists see it. When "Southern Chivalry" and the _purity_ of
southern society are spoken of now, it is at once replied, that a large
number of the slaves show, by their _color_, their indisputable claim to
white paternity; and that, notwithstanding their near consanguineous
relation to the whites, they are still held