will so exactly coincide with Southern interests, as a rapid
emigration of freemen into these new Territories. White free labor,
doubly productive over slave labor in grain-growing, must be multiplied
within their limits, that the cost of provisions may be reduced and the
extension of slavery and the growth of cotton suffer no interruption.
The present efforts to plant them with slavery, are indispensable to
produce sufficient excitement to fill them speedily with a free
population; and if this whole movement has been a Southern scheme to
cheapen provisions, and increase the ratio of the production of sugar
and cotton, as it most unquestionably will do, it surpasses the
statesman-like strategy which forced the people into an acquiescence in
the annexation of Texas.
And should the anti-slavery voters succeed in gaining the political
ascendency in these Territories, and bring them as free States
triumphantly into the Union; what can they do, but turn in, as all the
rest of the Western States have done, and help to feed slaves, or those
who manufacture or who sell the products of the labor of slaves. There
is no other resource left, either to them or to the older free States,
without an entire change in almost every branch of business and of
domestic economy. Reader, look at your bills of dry goods for the year,
and what do they contain? At least three-fourths of the amount are
French, English, or American cotton fabrics, woven from slave labor
cotton. Look at your bills for groceries, and what do they contain?
Coffee, sugar, molasses, rice--from Brazil, Cuba, Louisiana, Carolina;
while only a mere fraction of them are from free labor countries. As now
employed, our dry goods' merchants and grocers constitute an immense
army of agents for the sale of fabrics and products coming, directly or
indirectly, from the hand of the slave; and all the remaining portion of
the people, free colored, as well as white, are exerting themselves,
according to their various capacities, to gain the means of purchasing
the greatest possible amount of these commodities. Nor can the country,
at present, by any possibility, pay the amount of foreign goods
consumed, but by the labor of the slaves of the planting States. This
can not be doubted for a moment. Here is the proof:
Commerce supplied us, in 1853, with foreign articles, for consumption,
to the value of $250,420,187, and accepted, in exchange, of our
provisions, to the value of but $33
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