Pennsylvania lies directly on the borders of slave land, being immediately north of Maryland.  Mason and Dixon’s line, of which we hear so often, and which was first established as the division between slave soil and free soil, runs between Pennsylvania and Maryland.  The little State of Delaware, which lies between Maryland and the Atlantic, is also tainted with slavery, but the stain is not heavy nor indelible.  In a population of a hundred and twelve thousand, there are not two thousand slaves, and of these the owners generally would willingly rid themselves if they could.  It is, however, a point of honor with these owners, as it is also in Maryland, not to sell their slaves; and a man who cannot sell his slaves must keep them.  Were he to enfranchise them and send them about their business, they would come back upon his hands.  Were he to enfranchise them and pay them wages for work, they would get the wages, but he would not get the work.  They would get the wages; but at the end of three months they would still fall back upon his hands in debt and distress, looking to him for aid and comfort as a child looks for it.  It is not easy to get rid of a slave in a slave State.  That question of enfranchising slaves is not one to be very readily solved.

In Pennsylvania the right of voting is confined to free white men.  In New York the colored free men have the right to vote, providing they have a certain small property qualification, and have been citizens for three years in the State, whereas a white man need have been a citizen but for ten days, and need have no property qualification—­from which it is seen that the position of the negro becomes worse, or less like that of a white man, as the border of slave land is more nearly reached.  But, in the teeth of this embargo on colored men, the constitution of Pennsylvania asserts broadly that all men are born equally free and independent.  One cannot conceive how two clauses can have found their way into the same document so absolutely contradictory to each other.  The first clause says that white men shall vote, and that black men shall not—­which means that all political action shall be confined to white men.  The second clause says that all men are born equally free and independent.

In Philadelphia I for the first time came across live secessionists—­secessionists who pronounced themselves to be such.  I will not say that I had met in other cities men who falsely declared themselves true to the Union; but I had fancied, in regard to some, that their words were a little stronger than their feelings.  When a man’s bread—­and, much more, when the bread of his wife and children—­depends on his professing a certain line of political conviction, it is very hard for him to deny his assent to the truth of the argument.  One feels that a man, under such circumstances, is bound to be convinced, unless he be in a position which may make a stanch adherence to opposite politics a matter of grave public