Slavery, when considered with reference to the white race alone, may be considered an evil. There is, probably, no species of property which is so troublesome, hazardous, and expensive, and subject to so many contingencies, as negro slave property. The slave requires constant care and attention upon the part of the master. He must be fed, and clothed, and nursed, during the years of infancy and childhood, and the hours of sickness. There is no passive state. If not actively employed, he is a bill of expense, an object of earnest solicitude, for whose every overt act the master is held accountable. A more responsible, perplexing situation, can hardly be imagined, than that of an individual surrounded by a large number of slaves of all ages, who are dependent upon him, both in sickness and in health — in helpless infancy and decrepit old age, for food, clothing, and, indeed, all the necessaries of life. Let flood or fire, famine or pestilence, or whatever of the manifold evils and
and enterprising races. Nor have they ever gotten out of the tropical parts of Africa, except when they were carried as merchandise. It remains to be proved, however, yet to the world, that the negro, any more than the horse, can permanently exist, in a state of freedom, out of a tropical region. Their decay at the North, as well as other circumstances which I have not time to detail, are adverse to the proposition. And yet, sir, the journals of the North, while they deny that the French and the Germans, the most enlightened of the continental nations of Europe, are capable of freedom, stoutly maintain that the negro is; the negro, who has never anywhere, when left to himself, gotten up to the respectable state of barbarism which all the other races have attained, not even excepting our Indians in Mexico and Peru."
