s of nigger-catching, then, is brisk, just now?'

'No, not more brisk than usual. We always have more or less runaways.'

'Do most of them take to the swamps?'

'Yes, nine out of ten do, though now and then one gets off on a
trading-vessel. It is almost impossible for a strange nigger to make his
way by land from here to the free States.'

'Then why do you Carolinians make such an outcry about the violation of
the Fugitive Slave Law?'

'For the same reason that dogs quarrel over a naked bone. We should be
unhappy if we couldn't growl at the Yankees,' replied the Colonel,
laughing heartily.

'_We_, you say; you mean by that, the hundred and eighty thousand nabobs
who own five sixths of your slaves?'[4]

[4: The statistics given above are correct. That small number of
slaveholders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this
terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and
secessionists, and we may cover the South with armies, and keep
a file of soldiers upon every plantation, and not smother this
insurrection unless we break down the power of that class. Their
wealth gives them their power, and their wealth is in their
slaves. Free their negroes by an act of Emancipation, or
Confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day.
Omit to do it, and it will last till doomsday.

The power of this dominant class once broken; with landed property
at the South more equally divided, a new order of things will arise
there. Where now, with their large plantations, not one acre in ten
is tilled, a system of small farms will spring into existence, and
the whole country be covered with cultivation. The six hundred
thousand men who have gone there to fight our battles, will see the
amazing fertility of the Southern soil--into which the seed is
thrown and springs up without labor into a bountiful harvest--and
many of them, if slavery is crushed out, will remain there. Thus a
new element will be introduced into the South, an element that will
speedily make it a loyal, prosperous, and _intelligent_ section of
the Union.

I would interfere with no one's rights, but a rebel in arms against
his country has no rights; all that he has 'is confiscate.' Will
the loyal people of the North submit to be ground to the earth with
taxes to pay the expenditures of a war brought upon them