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In the second number of this volume of the Genius, Lundy sounded a vigorous alarm against the plot just being developed to wrest Texas from Mexico, ‘for the1 avowed purpose of adding five or six more slaveholding States to this Union’; and called upon the people of the United States who were opposed to slavery ‘to arouse from their lethargy and nip the monstrous attempt in the bud.’
He pointed to the fact that slavery had already been abolished in Texas by the Mexican Government, and that Senator Benton and his Southern2 associates, who were pushing the scheme, were resolved to re-introduce slavery, with all its barbarities, into a State now free.
‘Should the territory be added to the Union,’ he continued, ‘upon the condition that slavery should still be interdicted, a great portion of the colored population in the other States, at least on this side of the Mississippi, might be induced to remove thither.
It would be the most suitable place for them in the world.3 But a greater curse could scarcely befall our country than the annexation of that immense territory to this republic, if the system of slavery should likewise be reestablished there.’
Other papers took up and echoed the alarm, and joined in the vigorous protest, but the plot against Texas was not yet ripe for accomplishment.
The Genius urged the renewed circulation of petitions against slavery in the District of Columbia, though
1 G. U. E., Sept. 16, 1829, pp. 13, 14.
3 It was a favorite idea of Lundy's to establish a colony for the free blacks and emancipated slaves in Southern territory. So firm was his belief that Texas was the most appropriate region for it, that he subsequently (between 1831 and 1835) made three journeys thither, traversing the country, living there for months at a time, falling back on his saddler's trade for support when his funds gave out, incurring constant peril from disease or violence, yet laboring year after year, in season and out of season, to obtain a grant of land from the Mexican Government for his colony. In 1835 he succeeded in securing a grant of 138,000 acres, on condition that he should bring to it two hundred and fifty settlers with their families, and he returned to the United States to secure these; but the disturbances arising from the lawless Southern invasion of Mexico put an end to his scheme. His journeys had no other result than to make him the best informed man in the country in regard to the Mexican province, and of great assistance subsequently to John Quincy Adams and the other opponents of annexation in Congress.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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