CHAPTER I.

AMERICAN SLAVERY.


If they had not triumphed, do you know who would have gained the
victory? Slavery is only a word--a vile word, doubtless, but to which we
in time become habituated. To what do we not become habituated? We have
stores of indulgence and indifference for the social iniquities which
have found their way into the current of cotemporary civilization, and
which can invoke prescription. So we have come to speak of American
slavery with perfect sang froid. We are not, therefore, to stop at the
word, but to go straight to the thing; and the thing is this:

Every day, in all the Southern States, families are sold at retail: the
father to one, the mother to another, the son to a third, the young
daughter to a fourth; and the father, the mother, the children, are
scattered to the four winds of heaven; these hearts are broken, these
poor beings are given a prey to infamy and sorrow, these marriages are
ruptured, and adulterous unions are formed twenty leagues, a hundred
leagues away, in the bosom and with the assent of a Christian community.
Every day, too, the domestic slave-trade carries on its work; merchants
in human flesh ascend the Mississippi, to seek in the _producing_ States
wherewith to fill up the vacuum caused unceasingly by slavery in the
_consuming_ States; their ascent made, they scour the farms of Virginia
or of Kentucky, buying here a boy, there a girl; and other hearts are
torn, other families are dispersed, other nameless crimes are
accomplished coolly, simply, legally: it is the necessary revenue of the
one, it is the indispensable supply of the others. Must not the South
live, and how dares any one travesty a fact so simple? by what right was