“This planter asked the young lady, the school-teacher, if tare and tret were in her arithmetic?  Upon her saying ‘yes, in the older books,’ he told her that there was, seemingly, a good deal of tare and tret in God’s providence, when accomplishing his great purposes; and that to fix the mind inordinately on evils and miseries incident to a great system and forgetting the main design, was like a man of business being so absorbed by the deductions and waste in a great staple as to forego the trade.  He said that he thought the Northern mind ciphered too much in that part of moral arithmetic as to slavery.

“A very excellent gentleman from the District of Columbia who had held an important office under government, gave us some valuable information.  He said that the extinction of slavery in New England was not because the institution was deemed to be immoral or sinful, but from other considerations and circumstances.  It was abolished in Massachusetts, without doubt, by a clause, in the bill of rights, copied from the Declaration of Independence.  In Berkshire, one township, he believed, sued another for the support and maintenance of a pauper slave, and the Supreme Court decided that the bill of rights abolished slavery.  The question was as incidental, he said, as was the question in the Dred Scott case which the United States Supreme Court decided.  This Massachusetts case was previous to any reports of decisions, and he had some doubt as to the form in which the suit was brought, but was sure as to the decision.  The question as to abolishing slavery was not submitted to the people, nor to a Convention, nor to the Legislature.

“I was specially interested in his account of the way in which the slave-trade was prohibited by our excellent sister, Connecticut.  It was done by a section prohibiting the importation of slaves by sea or land, preceded by the following preamble:—­’And whereas the increase of slaves in this state is injurious to the poor, and inconvenient, Be it therefore enacted.’  Another section of the same statute, he said, was preceded by the following words:—­’And whereas sound policy requires that the abolition of slavery should be effected, as soon as may be consistent with the rights of individuals, and the public safety and welfare, Be it enacted,’ etc.  Then follows the provision that all black and mulatto children, born in slavery, in that state, after the first of March, 1784, shall be free at twenty-five years of age.  Selling slaves, to be carried out of the state, was not prohibited before May, 1792; thus allowing more than eight years to the owners of slaves in Connecticut to sell their slaves to Southern purchasers!  ’There seems to me,’ he said, ’no evidence of superior humanity in this; nor was it repentance for slavery as a sin.’  He thought that if we feel compelled, by our superior conscientiousness, to require any duty of the South, all that decency will allow us to demand is, that she tread in our steps.