“Recent movements in the slave States themselves encourage the friends of freedom.  In Kentucky, at the late election for state officers, one of the candidates, Cassius M. Clay, nephew of Henry Clay, avowed his opposition to pro-slavery principles in the strongest terms, and staked his election upon this avowal.  He was warmly supported, and his opponent only succeeded by a small majority.  Tennessee, in her mountain region, has many decided, uncompromising abolitionists, whose encouraging letters and statements have been published within the last year, in the Northern anti-slavery papers.  The excellent work of Joseph John Gurney, on the West Indies, and Dr. Channing’s late pamphlet, entitled “Emancipation,” have been very widely circulated in many of the slave States; and, so far as can be ascertained, have been read with interest by the planters.  The movements of English and French abolitionists have attracted general attention, and, in the Southern States, have awakened no small degree of solicitude.

“That baleful American peculiarity, prejudice against color, is evidently diminishing, under the influence of anti-slavery principles and practice; and the laws which have oppressed the free colored citizen are rapidly yielding to the persevering action of the abolitionists.  Dr. Channing has not over-stated the fact, that the provision in the Federal Constitution, relative to the reclaiming of fugitive slaves, has been silently but effectually repealed by the force of public opinion, and the interposition of jury trial, in many of the free States.  In Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, and New York, with the exception of its slavery-ridden commercial emporium, the recovery of a slave by legalized kidnappers is entirely out of the question.  In any one of these States, it would, to use the language of a New York mechanic, be exceedingly difficult to prove, to the satisfaction of a jury of honest freemen, that a man had been born ‘contrary to the Declaration of Independence.’  The frontiers of slavery are every where very much exposed, and all along the line of Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri, the tide of self-emancipated men and women is pouring in upon the free States.  I cannot give a better idea of the extent of this peculiar emigration, than by copying extracts from the Centreville Times, a paper published in Maryland:—­

“’Free Negroes and Slaves.—­When it is too late, the people of Maryland will begin to look for the means of protection in their slave property.  We still say slave property; although, notwithstanding slaves are recognized as property by the constitution, without which recognition this confederation never would have been formed:  yet such has been the effect of fanaticism and emancipation, of the intermeddling machinations of abolitionists, and the mischievous agency of free negroes—­that the very owners of this species of property seem to