late Judge of the Court of Appeals of
Kentucky, and a slaveholder, in a speech before the legislature of
that state, Jan. 1837, says,--

"The deliberate convictions of the most matured consideration I can
give the subject, are, that the institution of slavery is a _most
serious injury to the habits, manners and morals_ of our white
population--that it leads to sloth, indolence, dissipation, and vice."

Dr. THOMAS COOPER, late President of the College of South Carolina, in
a note to his edition of the "Institutes of Justinian" page 413,
says,--

"All absolute power has a direct tendency, not only to detract from
the happiness of the persons who are subject to it, but to DEPRAVE THE
GOOD QUALITIES of those who possess it..... the whole history of human
nature, in the present and every former age, will justify me in saying
that _such is the tendency of power_ on the one hand and slavery on
the other."

A South Carolina slaveholder, whose name is with the executive
committee of the Am. A.S. Society, says, in a letter, dated April 4,
1838:--

"I think it (slavery) _ruinous to the temper_ and to our spiritual
life; it is a thorn in the flesh, for ever and for ever goading us on
to say and to do what the Eternal God cannot but be displeased with. I
speak from experience, and oh! my desire is to be delivered from it."

Monsieur C.C. ROBIN, who was a resident of Louisiana from 1802 to
1806, published a work on that country; in which, speaking of the
effect of slaveholding on masters and their children, he says:--

"The young creoles make the negroes who surround them the play-things
of their whims: they flog, for pastime, those of their own age, just
as their fathers flog others at their will. These young creoles,
arrived at the age in which the passions are impetuous, do not _know
how to bear contradiction_; they will have every thing done which they
command, _possible or not_; and in default of this, they avenge their
offended pride by multiplied punishments."

Dr. GEORGE BUCHANAN, of Baltimore, Maryland, member of the American
Philosophical Society, in an oration at Baltimore, July 4, 1791,
said:--

"For such are the effects of subjecting man to slavery, that it
_destroys every humane principle_, vitiates the mind, instills ideas
of unlawful cruelties, and eventually subverts the springs of
government."--_Buchanan's Oration_, p. 12.

President EDWARDS the younger, in a sermon before the Connecticut
Abolit