the Legislature of Mississippi had passed a Bill recognizing and
providing for the debt, which Bill Mr. Jefferson Davis vetoed. Unless
we abandon the principles we have for two generations consistently
professed and acted on, we should be at war with the new Confederacy
within five vears about the African slave-trade. An English Government
will hardly be base enough to recognize them, unless they accept all
the treaties by which America is at present bound; nor, it may be
hoped, even if _de facto_ independent, would they be admitted to the
courtesies of diplomatic intercourse, unless they granted in the most
explicit manner the right of search. To allow the slave-ships of a
Confederation formed for the extension of slavery to come and go free,
and unexamined, between America and the African coast, would be to
renounce even the pretence of attempting to protect Africa against the
man-stealer, and abandon that Continent to the horrors, on a far
larger scale, which were practised before Granville Sharp and Clarkson
were in existence. But even if the right of intercepting their slavers
were acknowledged by treaty, which it never would be, the arrogance of
the Southern slave-holders would not long submit to its exercise.
Their pride and self-conceit, swelled to an inordinate height by their
successful struggle, would defy the power of England as they had
already successfully defied that of their Northern countrymen. After
our people by their cold disapprobation, and our press by its
invective, had combined with their own difficulties to damp the spirit
of the Free States, and drive them to submit and make peace, we should
have to fight the Slave States ourselves at far greater disadvantages,
when we should no longer have the wearied and exhausted North for an
ally. The time might come when the barbarous and barbarizing Power,
which we by our moral support had helped into existence, would require
a general crusade of civilized Europe, to extinguish the mischief
which it had allowed, and we had aided, to rise up in the midst of our