Don’t excite the nigger’s anxiety, and he’ll be better off in jail than he would running about among the wenches.  He won’t have luxuries, but we’ll make him comfortable, and he must suit his habits to our way of living.  We must not set a bad example before our own niggers; the whiter they are the worse they are.  They struggle for their existence now, and think they’re above observing our nigger laws.  We want to get rid of them, and you know it,” returned Grimshaw.

“Yes; I know it too well, for I have had too many cases to protect them from being ‘run off’ and sold in the New Orleans market.  But when you speak of white niggers, I suppose you mean our brightest; I dispute your assertion, and point you to my proof in the many men of wealth among them now pursuing their occupations in our city.  Can you set an example more praiseworthy?  And notwithstanding they are imposed upon by taxes, and many of our whites take the advantage of law to withhold the payment of debts contracted with them, they make no complaint.  They are subject to the same law that restricts the blackest slave.  Where is the white man that would not have yielded under such inequality?  No!  Mr. Grimshaw, I am as true a Southerner-born and bred-as you are; but I have the interests of these men at heart, because I know they are with us, and their interests and feelings are identical with our own.  They are Native Americans by birth and blood, and we have no right to dispossess them by law of what we have given them by blood.  We destroy their feelings by despoiling them of their rights, and by it we weaken our own cause.  Give them the same rights and privileges that we extend to that miserable class of foreigners who are spreading pestilence and death over our social institutions, and we would have nothing to fear from them, but rather find them our strongest protectors.  I want to see a law taking from that class of men the power to lord it over and abuse them.”

A friend, who has resided several years in Charleston, strong in his feelings of Southern rights, and whose keen observation could not fail to detect the working of different phases of the slave institution, informed us that he had conversed with a great many very intelligent and enterprising men belonging to that large class of “bright” men in Charleston, and that which appeared to pain them most was the manner they were treated by foreigners of the lowest class; that rights which they had inherited by birth and blood were taken away from them; that, being subjected to the same law which governed the most abject slave, every construction of it went to degrade them, while it gave supreme power to the most degraded white to impose upon them, and exercise his vindictive feelings toward them; that no consideration being given to circumstances, the least deviation from the police regulations made to govern negroes, was taken advantage of by the petty guardmen, who either extorted a fee to release them, or dragged them to the police-office,