This has been my feeling hitherto with regard to the views of the abolitionists, which I now, however, heartily embrace, inasmuch as I think that from the moment the United States Government assumed an attitude of coercion and supremacy towards the Southern States, it was bound with its fleets and armies to introduce its polity with respect to slavery, and wherever it planted the standard of the Union to proclaim the universal freedom which is the recognised law of the Northern United States.  That they have not done so has been partly owing to a superstitious, but honourable veneration for the letter of their great charter, the constitution, and still more to the hope they have never ceased to entertain of bringing back the South to its allegiance under the former conditions of the Union, an event which will be rendered impossible by any attempt to interfere with the existence of slavery.

The North, with the exception of an inconsiderable minority of its inhabitants, has never been at all desirous of the emancipation of the slaves.  The Democratic party which has ruled the United States for many years past has always been friendly to the slaveholders, who have, with few exceptions, been all members of it (for by a strange perversion both of words and ideas, some of the most Democratic States in the Union are Southern slave States, and in the part of Georgia where the slave population is denser than in any other part of the South, a county exists bearing the satirical title of Liberty County).  And the support of the South has been given to the Northern Democratic politicians, upon the distinct understanding that their ‘domestic institution’ was to be guaranteed to them.

The condition of the free blacks in the Northern States has of course been affected most unfavourably by the slavery of their race throughout the other half of the Union, and indeed it would have been a difficult matter for Northern citizens to maintain towards the blacks an attitude of social and political equality as far as the borders of Delaware, while immediately beyond they were pledged to consider them as the ‘chattels’ of their owners, animals no more noble or human than the cattle in their masters’ fields.

How could peace have been maintained if the Southern slaveholders had been compelled to endure the sight of negroes rising to wealth and eminence in the Northern cities, or entering as fellow-members with themselves the halls of that legislature to which all free-born citizens are eligible? they would very certainly have declined with fierce scorn, not the fellowship of the blacks alone, but of those white men who admitted the despised race of their serfs to a footing of such impartial equality.  It therefore was the instinctive, and became the deliberate policy of the Northern people, once pledged to maintain slavery in the South, to make their task easy by degrading the blacks in the Northern States to a condition contrasting as little as possible