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endorse the speech, and the Whig ask: ‘What is the1 question of who shall be President—of Banks, of Roads and Canals, of Tariffs2—to this?’
The Select Committee reported it inexpedient to make any legislative enactments at present, but declared the removal of the free blacks the first step to be taken.
The debates have ended, said Mr. Garrison, ‘precisely as we have 3 expected—in a refusal to act upon any proposition for the gradual emancipation of the slaves, and in a 4 recommendation to expel the free colored population from the South.’
The gain lay in those admissions on the part of slaveholders which could never be obliterated.
Many of the speeches were ‘as inflammatory and dangerous as any remarks ever published in the Liberator. Query— Where is the Columbia Vigilance Association?
where the Legislature of Georgia?
where the Grand Jury of North Carolina?
Incendiaries are multiplying rapidly —why do they pause?
Let them magnify their rewards and multiply their indictments!
If our humble persons be worth kidnapping, surely the Legislature of Virginia is a more valuable prey.’
The same Mr. Broadnax who boldly asked: ‘Is there5 one man in Virginia who does not lament that there was ever a slave in the State?’
reported a measure to effect the compulsory removal of the free and freed blacks by means of annual appropriations.6 He was reputed one of the pillars of the Colonization Society, and nothing7 could have been more gratifying to that body than the impulse in the border free as well as in the slave States, after the Virginia rising, to get rid of the free colored
2 So the Whig: ‘But for its [slavery's] existence, we should never have heard a murmur against the tariff. . . . It is not a political, but a moral, cause, which is at the bottom of Southern decline’ (Quoted, and heartily endorsed, by Niles in his Register, Feb. 18, 1832, p. 445, and reaffirmed in Register, 42.61).
4 Niles' Register, Jan. 14, 1832, pp. 368-9.
6 This bill passed the House (Niles' Register, 41.472), but failed to pass in the Senate (ibid., 42.78), on the ground of its interfering with the arrangement for slave representation between the eastern and western sections of the State (cf. ante, p. 154).
7 Lib. 1.167, 197, 199; 2.19, 26, 34, 35, 59, 60, 62; Niles' Register, 42.93.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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