ave, a
happy escape from sufferings and misery indescribable. It was to these,
our then infant, feeble, and dependent, but protesting colonies of the
South, most of these slaves were forced by British avarice, and royal
vetoes on colonial acts of the South prohibiting the traffic. Most
justly then did Mr. Jefferson, in the original of our Declaration of
Independence, announce the terrible truth as follows:

'He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most
sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who
never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in
another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of INFIDEL powers, is the
warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open
a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or
restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors
might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very
people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which
he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded
them, thus paying off former crimes committed against the LIBERTIES of
one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the LIVES
of another.'

The flag of England was then the flag of slavery, and not of slavery
only, but of the African slave-trade; and wherever slavery now exists,
England may look upon it and say, This is the work of my hands--mine was
the price of blood, and mine all the anguish and despair of centuries of
bondage.

This war, then, is mainly the work of England. She forced slavery here,
and then commenced and inflamed here the anti-slavery agitation,
assailing the Constitution and the Union, arresting the progress of
manumission in the Border States, and finally culminating in the
rebellion. Here, then, in the South are slavery and rebellion, branches
of that Upas tree, whose seeds were planted in our soil by England.

England, then, should never have reproached us with slavery. The work
was hers, and hers may yet be the dread retribution of avenging justice.
Had the contest she provoked in the Trent affair then happened, the
result might have been very different from her expectations. Instead of
a ruined country, and divided Union, and God save the K