The slave trade thus encouraged grew into vast proportions, and, by its expansion and appendages of cruelty, swelled from a propriety into a withering curse. But taken as a whole, it has been productive of great good. It civilized America, subdued the forest, and built up the best as well as the last system of civilization which has yet appeared upon the world. The best, because the most harmonious and nearest in conformity to the requisitions of nature’s laws—a system, which, by force of individual capital, existing in slaves, makes population rural, draws it from cities, and plants it upon fields—a system, which scatters concentrated vice and to which poorhouses and penitentiaries are but little known. This was the system under which America rose and flourished, and through which she commanded the respect and admiration of the world. But as the Genius of evil wandered up and down, his eyes fell upon “my servant Job,” and—permitted to torture—he belched forth, in deep, grinding hatred, his mighty volumes of dark and malignant spite. He first planted his batteries at a great distance, and masked them in artful disguise. He commenced in an English pulpit, in the name of philanthropy, and from thence spread his fire through kings and nobles, and by degrees to commoners, until finally reaching the tory mind of America, he let forth the full volumes of his hate and his crushing powers, until he saw the blood of the nation gushing from a million of streams, and liberty weltering and struggling beneath the grinding weight of an insurmountable national debt. Thus has America fallen and her enemies triumphed through deception and design. Experiments were numerous abroad, but had not the circle of darkness crowded up to the very tips of your noses, you would see that the experiment which you are trying, or at least pretending to try, had already been tried, and its vanity proved within the reach of your own hands, and at the very stoops of your own doors. The Eastern and Middle States, of the Union, in a spirit of mistaken philanthropy, about the close of the revolutionary war, emancipated, or rather turned their negroes loose without masters to direct them in life. Such was the action. What, then, has been the result? It is simply this: that not one of those emancipated people is now alive upon the world; nor have they—if the sphere of our own observations be an index of the whole—left a progeny equal to one tenth of their own numbers. They have died out under a mistaken liberty, while the slaves of the South have greatly outrun the multiplication of their white masters. Is this the millennium with which your experiment is to bless the negro? You can answer the question yourselves by simply citing us to the wants of your Freedmen’s Bureau—to the mortality among the negroes—and to such scenes as that of Memphis in the winter of 1863, when four hundred out of forty thousand contrabands were daily consigned to “hospitable graves.”