Want to get back.
A gentleman, who has recently visited the
Southern portion of the dominions of
Lincoln, states that nice out of every ten of the runaway and captured negroes would gladly return if they could to their masters.
There is nothing improbable in this statement — But for the
Yankee bayonets in the way the runaways would come back in droves.
The negro's idea of freedom is exemption from work; but that is not the freedom he receives at the hards of the
Yankees, or indeed has a right to expect anywhere.
Labor is the universal law, and if
Cuffee expects to escape from
that he must go somewhere out of this world.
The very last place of all for him is
New England or Old England.
In both those Abolition regions every man is busy from his cradle to his grave.
All the elements of nature are harnessed to their chariots, and the negro, when he goes that way, will be put in the traces as quickly as an ox or an ass. Nor will he be treated much better, if as well.
One of their principal arguments in favor of free labor over slave labor is that you can get double the work out of a free man as out of slave.
When the unfortunate runaway falls to demonstrate the truth of this proposition he will be at liberty to starve.
There is no bond of sympathy, none whatever, between the
white and
black man in Old or
New England.
In the
South, he grows up from infancy side by side with white children, who feel towards him as towards and humble member of the same family, and support and protect him till his dying day. In other countries he is a stranger, an object of derision and of contempt, because a negro.
No one feels for him, no one cares for his soul.
Of all the selfish and hard-hearted people in this world, none are so selfish and hard-hearted as the professional philanthropists.
There may be exceptions, but these exceptions prove the general rule.
Why should Old England or
New England be more humane and merciful than other people?
Are they distinguished by humanity and mercy to their own poor?
Let that infamous libeler of the
Southern States,
Charles Dickens, himself give the answer.
Let Oliver Twist,
Nicholas Nickisby, and every other novel he has written, setting forth the horrible oppressions and sufferings of the poor, and the children of the poor, in
England, testify.--And as for
New England scarcely a ship floats on the ocean which does not bear the evidence of the tyranny of white men over white men to the most distant clime.
So mercilessly are the seamen beaten and scourged on board Yankee ships, that death often ends their sufferings, and they not unfrequently jump overboard to escape their for mentors.
How comes it that these men, who treat their own white poor so inhumanly, are melted with compassion over the imaginary sufferings of the negro?
Is not their compassion morbid sensibility, without a particle of heart in it, or else sheer downright hypocrisy?
When a man is tyrannical in his family, despotic to his dependants, and cold-hearted socially, what are we to make of his exquisite feeling for the "poor negro?" What except that he is deluding himself with the idea that he can escape the consequences of his own iniquities, and obtain a cheap reputation for virtue, by repenting of other people's sine?
We are not surprised that the runaways are anxious to escape from their new masters.
They find the Abolitionists the most exacting and the most heartless of tyrants.
They sigh for the comforts, the kindly sympathies, the balmy airs of Dixis.
They would rather be the slave of a Southern gentleman than the political and social poor of an Abolitionist.
