The Hebrew word translated buy, is, like other words, modified by the nature of the subject to which it is applied.  Eve says, “I have gotten (bought) a man of the Lord.”  She named him Cain, that is, bought.  “He that heareth reproof, getteth (buyeth) understanding”, Prov. xv. 32.  So in Isa. xi. 11.  “The Lord shall set his hand again to recover (to buy) the remnant of his people.”  So Ps. lxxviii. 54.  He brought them to this mountain which his right hand had purchased, i.e. gotten.  Jer. xiii. 4.  “Take the girdle that thou hast got” (bought.) Neh. v. 8.  “We of our ability have redeemed (bought) our brethren that were sold to the heathen.”  Here “bought” is not applied to persons who were made slaves, but to those taken out of slavery.  Prov. 8. 22.  “The Lord possessed (bought) me in the beginning of his way before his works of old.”  Prov. xix. 8.  “He that getteth (buyeth) wisdom loveth his own soul.”  Prov. xvi. 16.  “How much better is it to get (buy) wisdom than gold?” Finally, to buy is a secondary meaning of the Hebrew word Kana.

4.  Even at this day the word buy is used to describe the procuring of servants, where slavery is abolished.  In the British West Indies, where slaves became apprentices in 1834, they are still “bought.”  This is now the current word in West India newspapers.  So a few years since in New-York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and even now in New-Jersey servants are “bought” as really as in Virginia.  And the different senses in which the same word is used in the two states, puts no man in a quandary, whose common sense amounts to a modicum.

So under the system of legal indenture in Illinois, servants now are “bought."[A] A short time since, hundreds of foreigners who came to this country were “bought” annually.  By voluntary contract they engaged to work for their purchasers a given time to pay for their passage.  This class of persons called “redemptioners,” consisted at one time of thousands.  Multitudes are bought out of slavery by themselves or others, and remove into free states.  Under the same roof with the writer is a “servant bought with money.”  A few weeks since, she was a slave.  As soon as “bought,” she was a slave no longer.  Alas! for our leading politicians if “buying” men makes them “chattels.”  The Whigs say that Benton and Rives were “bought” by the administration with the surplus revenue; and the other party, that Clay and Webster were “bought” by the Bank.  The histories of the revolution tell us that Benedict Arnold was “bought” by British gold.  Did that make him an article of property?  When a northern clergyman marries a rich southern widow, country gossip hits off the indecency with this current phrase, “The cotton bags bought him.”  When Robert Walpole said, “Every man has his price, and whoever will pay it can buy him,” and when John Randolph said, while the