Cotton is king, and pro-slavery arguments : $b comprising the writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on this important subject
History
Cotton is king, and pro-slavery arguments : $b comprising the writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright, on this important subject
Scott, Dred, 1809-1858; Slavery -- Justification; Slavery -- United States; United States -- Fugitive slave law (1850)
In this connection it may be remarked, that the author has had many
opportunities of conversing with colored men, on the subject of
emigration to Africa, and they have almost uniformly opposed it on the
ground that they would be needed here. Some of them, in defending their
conduct, revealed the grounds of their hopes. But details on this point
are unnecessary. The subject is referred to, only as affording an
illustration of the extent to which ignorant men may become the victims
of dangerous delusions. The sum of the matter was about this: the
colored people, they said, had organizations extending from Canada to
Louisiana, by means of which information could be communicated
throughout the South, when the blow for freedom was to be struck.
Philanthropic white men were expected to take sides against the
oppressor, while those occupying neutral ground would offer no
resistance to the passage of forces from Canada and Ohio to Virginia and
Kentucky. Once upon slave territory, they imagined the work of
emancipation would be easily executed, as every slave would rush to the
standard of freedom.
These schemes of the colored people were viewed, at the time, as the
vagaries of over excited and ignorant minds, dreaming of the repetition
of Egyptian miracles for their deliverance; and were subjects of regret,
only because they operated as barriers to Colonization. But when a
friend placed in the author's hand, a few days since, a copy of the
_Chatham_ (Canada West) _Weekly Pilot_, of October 13, he could see that
the seed sown at Columbus in 1849, had yielded its harvest of bitterness
and disappointment at Harper's Ferry in 1859. That paper contained the
proceedings and resolutions of the colored men, at Chatham, on the 3d of
that month, in which the annexed resolution was included:
"_Resolved_,--That in view of the fact that a crisis will soon occur in
the United States to affect our friends and countrymen there, we feel it
the duty of every colored person to make the Canadas their homes. The
temperature and salubrity of the climate, and the productiveness and
fertility of the soil afford ample field for their encouragement. To
hail their enslaved bondmen upon their deliverance, in the glorious
kingdom of British Liberty, in the Canadas, we cordially invite the free
and the bond, the noble and the ignoble--we have no 'Dred Scott Law.'"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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