Virginia Free Press

SOUTH CAROLINA.

Upon the subject of domestic slavery, and the interference of Northern agitators, Governor McDuffie descants in the following terms:

"Since your last adjournment, the public mind throughout the slaveholding States has been intensely, indignantly, and justly excited by the wanton, officious, and incendiary proceedings of certain societies and persons, in some of the non-slaveholding States, who have been actively employed in attempting to circulate among us pamphlets, papers, and pictorial representations of the most offensive and inflammatory character, and eminently calculated to excite them to insurrection and massacre. The wicked monsters and deluded fanatics, overlooking the numerous objects in their own vicinity who have a moral, if not a legal claim upon their charitable regard, run abroad, in the expansion of their hypocritical benevolence, muffled up in the saintly mantle of Christian meekness, to fulfil the fiend-like errand of mingling the blood of the master and the slave, to whose fate they are equally indifferent, with the smouldering ruins of our peaceful dwellings. No principle of human action so utterly baffles all human calculation, as that species of fanatical enthusiasm which is made up of envy and ambition, assuming the guise of religious zeal, and acting upon the known prejudices, religious or political, of an ignorant multitude. Under the influence of this species of voluntary madness, nothing is sacred that stands in the way of its purposes.—

Like all other religious impostures, it has power to consecrate every act, however atrocious, and every person, however covered with "multiplying villanies" that may promote its diabolical ends or worship at its infernal altars. By its unholy creed, murder itself becomes a labor of love and charity, and the felon renegado, who flies from the justice of his country, finds not only a refuge, but becomes a sainted minister, in the sanctuary of its temple.

For the institution of domestic slavery "we hold ourselves responsible only to God, and it is utterly incompatible with the dignity and the safety of the state, to permit any foreign authority to question our right to maintain it.—

It may nevertheless be appropriate, as a voluntary token of our respect for the opinions of our confederate brethren, to present some views to their consideration on this subject, calculated to disabuse their minds of false opinions and pernicious prejudices.

No human institution, in my opinion, is more manifestly consistent with the will of God, than domestic slavery, and no one of his ordinances is written in more legible characters than that which consigns the African race to this condition, as more conducive to their own happiness, than any other of which they are susceptible. Whether we consult the sacred scriptures, or the lights of nature and reason, we shall find these truths as abundantly apparent as if written with a sunbeam in the heavens. Under both the Jewish and Christian dispensations of our religion, domestic slavery existed with the unequivocal sanction of its prophets, its apostles, and finally its great Author. The patriarchs themselves, those chosen instruments of God, were slaveholders.

In fact the divine sanction of this institution is so plainly written, that "he who runs may read" it, and those over-righteous pretenders and pharisees, who affect to be scandalized by its existence among us, would do well to inquire how much more nearly they walk in the ways of Godliness, than did Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That the African negro is destined by Providence to occupy this condition of servile dependence, is not less manifest. It is marked on the face, stamped on the skin, and evinced by the intellectual inferiority, and natural improvidence of his race. They have all the qualities that fit them for slaves, and not one of those that would fit them to be freemen. They are utterly unqualified not only for rational freedom, but for self-government of any kind. They are in all respects—physical, moral, and political—inferior to millions of the human race, who have for consecutive ages dragged out a wretched existence under a grinding political despotism, and who are doomed to this hopeless condition by the very qualities which unfit them for a better. It is utterly astonishing that any enlightened American, after contemplating all the manifold forms in which even the white race of mankind are doomed to slavery and oppression, should suppose it possible to reclaim the Africans from their destiny. The capacity to enjoy freedom is an attribute not to be communicated by human power. It is an endowment of God, and one of the rarest which it has pleased his inscrutable wisdom to bestow upon the nations of the earth. It is conferred as the reward of merit, and only upon those who are qualified to enjoy it. Until the "Ethiopian can change his skin" it will be vain to attempt, by any human power, to make freemen of those whom God has doomed to be slaves by all their attributes.

Let not, therefore, the misguided and designing intermeddlers who seek to destroy our peace, imagine that they are serving the cause of God by practically arraigning the decrees of his Providence. Indeed, it would scarcely excite our surprise if, with the impious audacity of those who projected the tower of Babel, they should attempt to scale the battlements of Heaven, and remonstrate with the God of wisdom for having put the mark of Cain and the curse of Ham upon the African race instead of European."