which it professes at the North, none of its Presidents, (and slave-holders only are deemed worthy to preside over it,) has ever contributed from his stock of slaves to swell those bands of emigrants, who, leaving our shores in the character of “nuisances,” are instantly transformed, to use your own language, into “missionaries, carrying with them credentials in the holy cause of Christianity, civilization, and free institutions.”  But you were not in earnest, when you held up the idea in your recent speech, that the rapidly multiplying millions of our colored countrymen would be expatriated.  What you said on that point was but to indulge in declamation, and to round off a paragraph.  It is in that part of your speech where you say that “no practical scheme for their removal or separation from us has yet been devised or proposed,” that you exhibit your real sentiments on this subject, and impliedly admit the deceitfulness of the pretensions of the American Colonization Society.

Before closing my remarks on the topic of “the rights of property,” I will admit the truth of your charge, that Abolitionists deny, that the slaveholder is entitled to “compensation” for his slaves.

Abolitionists do not know, why he, who steals men is, any more than he, who steals horses, entitled to “compensation” for releasing his plunder.  They do not know, why he, who has exacted thirty years’ unrequited toil from the sinews of his poor oppressed brother, should be paid for letting that poor oppressed brother labor for himself the remaining ten or twenty years of his life.  But, it is said, that the South bought her slaves of the North, and that we of the North ought therefore to compensate the South for liberating them.  If there are individuals at the North, who have sold slaves, I am free to admit, that they should promptly surrender their ill-gotten gains; and no less promptly should the inheritors of such gains surrender them.  But, however this may be, and whatever debt may be due on this score, from the North to the South, certain it is, that on no principle of sound ethics, can the South hold to the persons of the innocent slaves, as security for the payment of the debt.  Your state and mine, and I would it were so with all others, no longer allow the imprisonment of the debtor as a means of coercing payment from him.  How much less, then, should they allow the creditor to promote the security of his debt by imprisoning a third person—­and one who is wholly innocent of contracting the debt?  But who is imprisoned, if it be not he, who is shut up in “the house of bondage?” And who is more entirely innocent than he, of the guilty transactions between his seller and buyer?

Another of your charges against abolitionists is, that, although “utterly destitute of Constitutional or other rightful power—­living in totally distinct communities—­as alien to the communities in which the subject on which they would operate resides, so far as concerns political power over that subject, as if they lived in Africa or Asia; they nevertheless promulgate to the world their purpose to be, to manumit forthwith, and without compensation, and without moral preparation, three millions of negro slaves, under jurisdictions altogether separated from those under which they live."