I see nothing in the facts stated
by Moses Roper at all improbable. Since I last came to this city, I
have read in an American newspaper, an account of an affair in
Tennessee, at which the blood runs cold. A black man having committed
some crime, was lodged in prison by the authorities, but being
demanded by the citizens, was given up to them, tied to a tree, and
BURNT ALIVE! During my residence in the United States, a negro was
burnt alive, according to a sentence given by one of the constituted
tribunals of the State! It was called an exemplary punishment, and
many of the papers throughout the country were filled with long and
learned articles, justifying the horrid outrage. Mr. Breckinridge may
point to the laws and the constitution of the country, but I tell him
they and the authorities appointed to enforce them are alike
powerless. I point him to the atrocities of Lynch law all over the
land; to the brutal massacre of the gamblers in Mississippi, where men
in the broad daylight were dragged forth, and tied by the neck to
branches of trees, their eyes starting from their sockets, and their
wives driven across the river, in open boats; their lives threatened,
for daring to ask for the dead bodies of their husbands. I ask if any
law reached the fiends in human shape, who perpetrated these deeds. I
ask Mr. Breckinridge if any law punished the felons of Charleston,
who, seizing the public conveyances, violated the constitution, and
the law of the State, by robbing the mail bags of their contents, and
burning them? Did not the Post Master General encouragingly say, "I
cannot sanction, but I will not condemn what you have done. In your
circumstances I would have acted in a similar manner." Need I remind
Mr. Breckinridge of the mobs at the North; the riots of New York; the
sacking of Mr. Tappan's house, and the demolition of colored schools?
Laws there may be, but while slavery exists, and is defended by public
sentiment, and while the ferocious prejudice against color remains,
they will want the "executory principle," without which they are but
cruel mockery.

A glance at the moral and religious state of the slave population will
show the amount of care and attention exercised by the Christian
churches at the South.

What says the Rev. C. C. Jones, in a sermon preached before two
associations of planters in Georgia, in 1831?

"Generally speaking, they (the slaves,) appear to us to be
without God, and without h