Is the rapid increase of a population of slaves in itself no evil? In
all the slave states the increase of the slaves is vastly more rapid than
that of the whites or free blacks. When we recollect that they are under
no natural or moral restraint, careless of providing food or clothing for
themselves or their children; when, too, we consider that they are raised
as an article of profitable traffic, like the cattle of New England and
the hogs of Kentucky; that it is a matter of interest, of dollars and
cents, to the master that they should multiply as fast as possible, there
is surely nothing at all surprising in the increase of their numbers.
Would to heaven there were also nothing alarming!

7. Because, by the terms of the national compact, the free and the slave
states are alike involved in the guilt of maintaining slavery, and the
citizens of the former are liable, at any moment, to be called upon to
aid the latter in suppressing, at the point of the bayonet, the
insurrection of the slaves.

Slavery is, at the best, an unnatural state. And Nature, when her
eternal principles are violated, is perpetually struggling to restore
them to their first estate.

All history, ancient and modern, is full of warning on this point. Need
I refer to the many revolts of the Roman and Grecian slaves, the bloody
insurrection of Etruria, the horrible servile wars of Sicily and Capua?
Or, to come down to later times, to France in the fourteenth century,
Germany in the sixteenth, to Malta in the last? Need I call to mind the
untold horrors of St. Domingo, when that island, under the curse of its
servile war, glowed redly in the view of earth and heaven,--an open hell?
Have our own peculiar warnings gone by unheeded,--the frequent slave