to associate with gentlemen, they must not labour, except upon their own ground, under penalty of degrading themselves to a level with the negro. The consequences I have already pointed out. Still, with the growth of negroes, the difficulties of marriage among the whites increase; the greater number of slaves being required as decent attendance upon the family. The checks to matrimony augment precisely in proportion as the greater number of negroes annexes greater value to the remaining whites. Thus these checks exist in their worst state in the West Indies.-There a poor white is the object of contempt to the negro, who speaks with a sneer when he mentions a walk about Bukra; i. e. a white man on foot. Hence in that country the offspring of the poor, generally, are sunk into mulattoes.

We are approaching but too rapidly to this situation. Young as is this state, the checks of matrimony are felt, as the numerous instances of celibacy may attest. It is by no means uncommon to hear a girl, destitute of a single negro, express her sentiments as to the number of servants a husband ought to support for his wife.-Can we then wonder at our young men holding back? They have a grade to keep up to, their sinking from which would debase them. Contrast with their's the situation of the negro. Reduced to that of a brute, is it any wonder if he propagates as fearlessly? He knows well that his abstinence from matrimony would not better his condition, and that his master must support all the increase. Contrast the situation of the poor white in time of sickness, with that of the black. The former, after exhausting his little means, becomes indebted to the charity of his neighbours, which grows cold after expending a bottle of wine and a few ounces of bark. Not so the negro: there is five hundred dollars vested in him; and the master will rather spend three hundred than lose the whole. The diseases of the negro are fewer, poverty precluding intemperance; and though, in consequence of hard labour, his evening of life sinks earlier than that of the white, yet he has, long before, produced as numerous a progeny as if he had reached a

decrepid old age: and this seems to be the highest hope of the master; the increase of this unhappy race, being his favourite object, and which, from the nature of things, must and will be encouraged.-They are property. Why, said a friend, when he heard I was removing to Kentucky, do you not take out some breeding wenches? Their expenses in a new country would be nothing, and a few years would give you a large stock of negroes. Can we, after this, be surprised if the negroes increase faster than the whites?

Could we become acquainted with a man who had laid down a plan for rooting out the white race, I am at a loss what punishment we should deem adequate to his villany. Could we consult the bitterest enemy of America (suppose an English or French prime minister to be such) on this topic, he would declare warmly for the right of slaveholding. This extensive country, would he say, settled by white men, may one day prove our scourge, perhaps by arms, certainly by example. But intermixed with a proportion of blacks, they will have enough to do at home, without troubling their neighbours: Nay, in process of time, the disproportionate increase of the negroes may enable the latter to dispute the soil with their masters; and we may behold black envoys from America, sent to invoke our assistance against the tyranny of our sometime colony. A precedent exists in St. Domingo; and the Americans must not be surprised if European policy avails itself of every opportunity that occurs for dividing their tremendous power. And bitterly would the wily politician regret that the line of demarcation had secured to America a body of men fearless of negro insurrections, disengaged from the drudgery of patroles, and perfectly ready to oppose their whole united force to the movements of Russia from the northwest. Perhaps the minister might plead his excuse as a politician. But what excuse can be made for the slaveholder? And in what differs he from the first mentioned atrocious character? Merely in this, that he is only intent on gain, and is not generally aware of the consequences of his conduct. I say, gene

ces become woven into the texture of society, unless closely allied with the wants or propensities of man. It is certain, however, that the institutions of society, and the maxims of government, are more dependent upon the characters of the people, than upon their intrinsic conformity to justice or to truth.

If the existence of an institution, through a long succession of ages, could be admitted as evidence of its justice or expediency, perhaps the slavery of the present day might find, in the conduct of those who lived before us, some kind of justification. This, like every other institution of human society, must vary its shades, with the changing condition and character of the people; yet in this, as in many other cases, causes and effects are reciprocal. The characters of the people are, in great measure, moulded by the maxims and institutions of society. Among a barbarous people, practices spring up which could never originate in the midst of improved and enligntened communities, but which, when once established, are hard to eradicate, and often continue, the tares and brambles, of highly civilized society. To this cause may be traced the irreconcilable anomalies, with which the laws and usages of the most polished communities are so frequently marked; and which not only bear in their features the lineaments of their birth, but tend to perpetuate the barbarism in which they originated.

In studying the history of slavery, as it existed among the nations of antiquity, we must reflect that conditions essentially different, are often expressed by a common appellation-and that a definition drawn from the principles VOL. I.-11

and practice of our own age and country, would seldom be correct if applied to the ages and nations under review.

In what period of the existence of our race, man first instituted a claim to the unrequited services of his fellow man, is not easily determined ;or whether personal slavery constituted a part of the violence with which the antediluvian world was filled.* Probably, personal servitude followed close in the steps of those mighty hunters, who in the primitive ages, deluged the earth with blood. The earliest trace of its existence, is associated with the first military enterprise which history has recorded. Gen. xiv. This, however, was evi dently a national, rather than a personal bondage.

That a species of slavery existed during the patriarchal ages, is obvious from the history of Abraham, though unquestionably mollified by the simplicity of the times. If we suppose the men servants and maid servants whom Abraham possessed, to have been slaves, bought from his neighbours, or the descendants of slaves, born in his own house, and held in servitude from hereditary right, we must admit that they were subject to a patriarchal, rather than a magisterial authority. Of these, the first that attracts our notice was Eleazar of Damascus, whom Abraham considered for a time as his heir, Gen. xv. 2, 3. If this Eleazar was, as generally supposed, the servant whom Abraham employed to procure a wife for his son, he

must, in station and authority, have been subordinate to none but the master of the family.--Even Isaac himself, at the age of forty must have been subject to his direction. Gen. xxiv. 5, 6, 8. That not only the eldest servant that ruled over all that he had, but his servants generally, were treated with a degree of confidence, to which the slavery of our day affords but few parallels, may be inferred from the alacrity with which they pursued and defeated the plunderers | of Sodom. That they were parties to the same covenant, and votaries to the same religion with their master, is also abundantly manifest. Gen xvii. 26, 27.

We are expressly informed that || Abraham's servants were born in his house or bought with money of the stranger, but by what means, or under what circumstances, they were rendered objects of sale, is left unexplain- || ed. That captivity in war was, in subsequent ages, the most prolific source of slavery, appears probable from the nature of the case, and this opinion is confirmed by the direct testimony of Herodotus and others. In the patriarchal times, when detached families migrated from place to place, as convenience or fancy might suggest, subject to no municipal regulations, and bound by no political ties, the authority of fathers and masters could not be strictly defined. In both it was probably the result of general consent, rather than specific regulation. That the parental authority was understood to extend to the life of the child, either in the punishment of crimes, or the exercise of arbitrary power, appears obvious, from the sentence passed upon Tamar by her father-in-law, (Gen. xxxviii. 24,) and the proposal of

Reuben, to make the lives of his sons the forfeiture, in case he should fail to fulfil his engagement. (xlii. 37.) The facility with which the sale of Joseph was effected, seems to authorize the conclusion that a traffic in the persons of men was not then_new, and that little inquiry was made with regard to the authority of the sellers. The subsequent part of his history likewise demonstrates that the slavery of that day opposed no insuperable barriers to the attainment of eminence and power. Even in the family of the master who bought him, he occupied, not a servile but a highly confidential station. Anterior to the time of Moses, when the institution of slavery was brought under specific regulations, the servant, whether purchased or domestic, appears as a part of the patriarchal household, equally with the sons an object of religious care. (Gen. xviii. 19; xxxv. 2, 3.)

The servitude to which the descendants of Jacob were subjected during their residence in Egypt, however severe and degrading, must have been of a national, rather than a personal, character. The right of private property and the maintenance of their religion and laws, do not appear to have been further invaded by their Egyptian lords, than by the rigorous exactment of their unrequited labour. In what manner these burdens were imposed upon the Israelites is not clearly explained, though from their undisturbed possession of the most fruitful part of the land, and the numerous flocks and herds which they held, we may safely conclude that a large part of their labour must have been of the agricultural and pastoral kind, and probably applied to their own exclusive benefit. The servile

labours were, expressly, those which required the persons engaged in them to be separated from their families and farms; and hence we may conclude that a levy was made from among the Hebrew men, who were employed in the manufacture of bricks and the erection of the cities which Pharaoh required them to build. A levy or tribute of men, though probably much less severe, was afterwards made in the time of Solomon, when engaged in the magnificent structures which distinguished his reign. (1 Kings, v. 13, 14.) Here we may observe that these drafts of men from the Hebrew families, would naturally subject the women to a larger portion of the labour usually performed by the other sex, than would otherwise have fallen to their share, and hence their superior hardihood, and the consequent rapidity of national increase, may be naturally and satisfactorily explained in strict accordance with the text, the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.

From this view of the subject, we should naturally conclude that the Egyptian bondage, though severely and justly reprobated by the sacred historian, was clear of most of those accompaniments which give to the personal slavery of subsequent ages its most repulsive character. The barbarous order for the destruction of the male children was not the exercise of a master's authority, but a political expedient adopted by an unprincipled tyrant, to keep down a population, which he considered as dangerous to

the state.*

*How long this was attempted is left unnoticed, but the unparalleled increase of the people, and the great number of men able to bear arms, at

The Mosaic institutions in relation to servants, though formed and promulgated during their journeyings through the Arabian deserts, were obviously designed to apply to the Israelites when settled in the promised land; and therefore to that period of their history, and not to the time when the laws were promulgated, are we to look for their illustration.

From the general character of the law of Moses, and the terms in which they are expressed, it is obvious that his object was not the establishment of a system of servitude, but the regulation and mitigation of a previously existing institution. And we must not forget that his regulations, on this subject, were to be observed in

the time of their egress from their Egyptian bondage, are conclusive testimonies that the order was of transient continuance or but very partially executed. Admitting the usual chronology, which is confirmed by Josephus, two hundred and fifteen years elapsed between the immigration of Jacob and the departure of his descendants. A duplication in fourteen years would in that time raise his progeny to about 2,294,000 persons. The number of men able to bear arms whom Moses led out of Egypt, exclusive of the tribe of Levi, was 603,550. Now in the state of Pennsylvania, in 1820, out of a population of 1,037,860, only 199,694 were males between 16 and 45, or not quite one in five. Allowing one in five to be included in the Israelitish enumeration, we shall have the whole population 3,017,750 individuals. This number is probably too low; for we may reflect that in a community where the increase was so rapid, there must have been an unusual proportion of children. It therefore appears that the duplication was effected in a time still less than fourteen years. This falls sensibly below the time which some political economists have admitted as the shortest possible period of duplication.