The Alleghanian

THE IRISH AND SLAVERY.

Daniel O'Connell's famous Letter to the Irish Repeal Association of Cincinnati.

This great anti-slavery document, the bitter protest of Ireland's greatest leader against the pro-slavery sentiment of so many of his countrymen in America, is again brought to light in the Catholic Telegraph, of Cincinnati, August 5th. A more severe and searching review of the evil of slavery and its sympathies has hardly ever been written. The paper in which it is published is edited by Father Purcell, a brother of the Archbishop, and intimate friend of General Rosecrans.---

The letter is prefaced with the following :

[We publish to-day, to the exclusion of much important matter, the famous letter of O'Connell to a committee of our citizens who rebuked him for his anti-slavery opinions. The document has been concealed for twenty years by a well-known Democrat, to whom we are indebted for it. We invite our Irish Catholic brethren to read it attentively, and if any one wishes to see the manuscript, which is beautifully written, and the signature of O'Connell. they can be accommodated at the office of the Telegraph. We intend to have the letter published in pamphlet form, and we respectfully invite all friends of the good cause of liberty against bondage to aid us in its circulation.]

THE LETTER.

Gentlemen: We have read, with the deepest affliction, not unmixed with some surprise and much indignation, your detailed and anxious vindication of the most hideous crime that has ever stained humanity-the slavery of men of color in the United States of America. We are lost in utter amazement at the perversion of mind and depravity of heart which your address evinces.

It was not in Ireland you learned this cruelty. Your mothers were gentle, kind and humane. Their bosoms overflowed with the honey of human charity. Your sisters are, probably, many of them, still amongst us, and participate in all that is good and benevolent in sentiment and action. How, then, can you have become so depraved? How can your souls have become stained with a darkness blacker than the negro's skin? You say you have no pecuniary interest in negro slavery. Would that you had! for it might be some palliation of your crime! but, alas! you have inflicted upon us the horror of beholding you the volunteer advocates of despotism, in its most frightful state-of slavery, in its most loathsome and unrelenting form.

We were, unhappily, prepared to expect some fearful exhibition of this description. There has been a testimony borne against the Irish, by birth or descent, in America, by a person fully informed as to the facts, incapable of the slightest misrepresentation; a noble of nature more than of titled birth; a man gifted with the highest order of talent and the most generous emotions of the heart-the great, the good Lord Morpeth--he who, in the House of Commons, boldly asserted the superior social morality of the poorer classes of the Irish over any other people --he, the best friend of any of the Saxon race that Ireland and the Irish ever knew ; he, amidst the congregated thousands at Exeter Hall, in London, mournfully, but firmly, denounced the Irish in America as being amongst the worst enemies of the negro slaves and other men of color.

PROPERTY IN MAN.

Your advocacy of slavery is founded upon a gross error. You take for granted that man can be the property of his fellow man. You speak in terms of indignation of those who would deprive white men of their "property,"and thereby render them less capable of supporting their families in affluence. You forget the other side of the picture. You have neither sorrow nor sympathy for the sufferings of those who are iniquitously compelled to labor for the affluence of others; those who work without wages--who toil without recompense-who spend their lives in procuring for others the splendor and wealth in which they do not participate.

You totally forget the sufferings of the wretched black men who are deprived of their ALL without any compensation or redress If you, yourselves, all of you, or if any one of you, were, without crime or offence committed by you, handed over into perpetual slavery; if you were compelled to work from sunrise to sunset without wages, supplied only with such coarse food and raiment as would keep you in working order; if, when your "owner" fell into debt, you were sold to pay his debts, not your own; if it were made a crime to teach you to read and write; if you were liable to be separated, in the distribution of assets, from your wives and children; if you (above all) were to fall into the hands of a brutal master-and you condescended to admit that there are some brutal masters in America--if, among all those circumstances, some friendly spirits of a more generous order were desirous to give liberty to you and your. families, with what ineffable disgust would not you laugh to scorn those who should traduce the generous spirits who would relieve you, as you now, pseudo-Irishmen-shame upon you!- have traduced and vilified the Abolitionists of North America !

THE OUTCRY AGAINST ABOLITIONISTS.

Another piece of silliness. You allege that it is the Abolitionists who make the slave restless with his condition, and that they scatter the seeds of discontent. How can you treat us with such contempt as to use assertions of that kind in your address? How can you think we could be so devoid of intellect as to believe the negro would not know the miseries of slavery, which he feels every hour of the four-and-twenty, unless he were told by some Abolitionist that slavery was a miserable condition ?

There is nothing that makes us think so badly of you as your strain of ribaldry in attacking the Abolitionists. The desire to procure abolition is, in itself, a virtue, and deserves our love for its charitable disposition, as it does respect and veneration for its courage under unfavorable circumstances. Instead of the ribaldry of your attack upon the Abolitionists, you ought to respect and countenance them.. If they err by excessive zeal, they err in a righteous and a holy cause. You would do well to check their errors and mitigate their zeal within the bounds of strict propriety. But if you had the genuine feelings of Irishmen, you never would confound their errors with their virtues. In truth, we much fear, or rather we should candidly say, we readily believe that you attribute to them imaginary errors for no other reason than that they really possess one brilliant virtue--namely, the love of human freedom in intense perfection.

Again, we have to remark that you exaggerate exceedingly when. you state that there are fifteen millions of the white population in America whose security and happiness are connected with the maintenance of the system of negro slavery On the contrary, the system of slavery inflicts nothing but mischief upon the far greater part of the inhabitants of America. The only places in which individual interest is connected with slavery are the slave- holding States. Now, in those States, almost without an exception, (if, indeed, there be any exception,) the people of color greatly exceed the whites; and thus, even if an injury were to be inflicted on the whites by depriving them of their slaves, the advantages would be most abundantly counterbalanced and compensated for by the infinitely greater number of persons who would thus be restored to the greatest of human blessings--personal liberty. Thus the old Benthamite maxim of "doing the greatest possible good to the greatest possible number" would be amply carried out into effect by the emancipation of the negroes.

We utterly deny your assertion, and we defy you to show any single instance of preparatory steps taken by any State for the emancipation of negroes before the abolition demand was raised. You violate truth in that assertion. There were no such preparations. It is a pure fiction, invented by slaveholders out of their unjust animosity to the Abolitionists [t is said that the fear of abolition has rendered the slaveholders more strict, harsh and cruel toward the wretched slaves; and that they would be more gentle and humane if thev were not afraid of the Abolitionists. We repeat that this is not true, and is merely an attempt to cast blame on those who would coalesce to put an end to negro slavery

It is in the same spirit that the criminal calumniates his prosecutor, and the felon reviles his accuser. It is, therefore, utterly untrue- that the slaveholders have made the chains of the negro more heavy through any fear of abolition.

Yet, if you tell the truth ; if the fact be that the negro is made to suffer for the zeal of the Abolitionists; if he is treated with increased cruelty by reason of the fault of the friends of abolition, then, indeed, the slaveholders must be a truly Satanic race. Their conduct, according to you, is diabolical. The Abolitionists commit an offence, and the unhappy negroes are punished. The Abolitionists violate the law of property, and the penalty of their crime is imposed upon the negro! Can anything be more repugnant to every idea of justice ? Yet this is your statement.

We, on the other hand, utterly deny the truth of your allegations: and where we find you calumniate the slaveholders we become their advocates against your calumny. You calumniate everybody--slaves. Abolitionists and slaveowners--framers of constitutions, makers of laws-everybody The slaveholders are not favorites of ours. but we will do men justice. and will not permit you to impute an impossible crime to them.

SLAVERY AGAINST CHRISTIANITY.

If you be Christians at all, recollect that slavery is opposed to the first, the highest and the greatest principles of Christianity, which teach us "to love the great and good God above all things whatsoever ;" and the next, "to love our fellow-men as ourselves;" which commands us to do unto others as we would be done by. These sacred principles are inconsistent with the horrors and crimes of slavery; sacred principles which have already banished domestic bondage from civilized Europe, and which will also, in God's good time, banish it from America, despite the advocacy of such puny declaimers as you are.

The Catholic clergy may endure, but they assuredly do not encourage the slave- owners. We have, indeed, heard it said that some Catholic clergymen have slaves of their own, but it is added, and we are assured positively, that no Irish Catholic clergyman is a slaveowner. At all events, every Catholic knows how distinctly slave- holding, and especially slave trading. is condemned by the Catholic church. That most eminent man, his holiness, the present Pope, has, by an Allocution published throughout the world, condemned all dealing and traffic in slaves. Nothing can be more distinct or more powerful than the Pope's denunciation of that most abominable crime. Yet it subsists in a more abominable form than his holiness could possibly describe, in the traffic which still exists in the sale of slaves, from one State in America to another. What, then, are we to think of you, Irish Catholics, who send us an elaborate vindication of slavery, without the slightest censure of that hateful crime? a crime which the Pope has so completely condemned-namely, the diabolical raising of slaves for sale, and selling them to other States.

If you be Catholics, you should devote your time and best exertions to working out the pious intentions of his holiness. Yet you prefer-Oh, sorrow and shame!- to volunteer your vindication of everything that belongs to the guilt of slavery.

BLACK INFERIORITY DISCUSSED.

Your important allegation is, that the negroes are, naturally, an inferior race.-- That is a totally gratuitous assertion on your part. In America you can have no opportunity of seeing the negro educated. On the contrary, in most of your States it is a crime--sacred Heaven! a crime to educate even a free negro! How, then, can you judge of the negro race, when you see them despised and contemned by the educated classes; reviled and looked down upon as inferior? The negro race has, naturally, some of the finest qualities. They are naturally gentle, generous, humane, and very grateful for kindness.-- They are as brave and as fearless as any other of the races of human beings. but the blessings of education are kept from them, and they are judged of, not as they would be with proper cultivation, but as they are rendered by cruel and debasing oppression. It is as old as the days of Homer, who truly asserts that the day which sees a man a slave takes away half his worth Slavery actually brutalizes human beings. It is about sixty years ago when one of the Sheiks, not far south of Fez, in Morocco, who was in the habit of accumulating white slaves, upon being remonstrated with by a European Power, gave for his reply that, by his own experience, he found it quite manifest that white men were of an inferior race, intended by nature for slaves; and he produced his own brutalized white slaves to illustrate the truth of his assertion. And a case of an American, with a historic name--John Adams-is quite familiar. Some twenty- five years ago--not more-John Adams was the sole survivor of an American crew wrecked on the African coast. He was taken into the interior as the slave of an Arab chief. He was only for three years a slave, and the English and American consuls, having been informed of a white man's slavery, claimed him, and obtained his liberation. In the short space of three years he had become completely brutalized; he had completely forgotten the English language, without having acquired the native tongue He spoke a kind of gabble, as unintellectual as the dialects of most of your negro slaves, and many months elapsed before he recovered his former habits and ideas.

It is also a curious fact, as connected with America, that the children of the Anglo-Saxon race, and of other Europeans born in America, were, for many years, considered as a degraded and inferior class. Indeed. it was admitted, as if it were an axiom, that the native born American was in nothing equal to his European progenitor ; and, so far from the fact being disputed. many philosophic dissertations were published, endeavoring to account for the alleged debasement. The only doubt was about the cause of it. "Nobody doubted,"to use your own words, "that the native born Americans were really an inferior race." Nobody dares to say so now, and nobody thinks it. Let it, then, be recollected that you have never yet seen the negro educated. An English traveler through Brazil some few years ago, mentions having known a negro who was a priest, and who was a learned, pious and exemplary man in his sacerdotal functions. We have been lately informed of two negroes being educated at the Propaganda, and ordained priests, both having distinguished themselves in their scientific and theological course. The French papers say that one of them celebrated mass, and delivered a short but able sermon before Louis Philippe. It is believed they have both gone out with the the Right Rev. Dr. Barron on the African mission.

We repeat, therefore, that to judge properly of the negro, you should see him educated and treated with respect due to a fellow-creature, uninsulted by the filthy aristocracy of the skin, and untarnished to the eye of the white by any associations connected with his state of slavery.

THE NEGROES A GOOD AND KINDLY RACE.

We next refer to your declaration that the two races. viz: the black and white, cannot exist, on equal terms, under your Government and your institutions. This is an extraordinary assertion to be made at the present day. on You allude; indeed, to Antigua and the Bermudas.-- But we will take you to where the experiment has been successfully made upon a large scale--namely, to Jamaica. There the two races are on a perfect equality in point of law. The law does not recognize the slightest distinction between the races. You have borrowed the far greater part of your address from the cant phraseology which the West Indian slave-owners, and especially those of Jamaica, made use of before emancipation. They used to assert, as you do now. that abolition meant destruction ;that to give freedom to the negro would be to pronounce the assassination of the whites; that the negro, as soon as free, would massacre their former owners, and destroy their wives and families In short your prophecies of the destructive effects of emancipation are but faint and foolish echoes of the prophetic apprehensions of the British slave owners. They might, perhaps, have believed their own assertions, because the emancipation of the negroes was then an untried experiment But you-you are deprived of any excuse for the reassertion of a disproved calumny. The emancipation has taken place-the compensation given by England was not given to the negroes, who were the only persons that deserved compensation. Io was given to the so called "owners." It was an additional wrong- an additional cause of irritation to the negroes; but, gracious Heaven ! how nobly did that good and kindly race-the negroes-falsify the calumnious apprehensions of their task-masters! Was there one single murder consequent on the emancipation? Was there one single white person injured either in person or property? Was there any property spoiled or laid waste? The proportion of negroes in Jamaica to white men is as 300 to 60, or 80 per cent. Yet the most perfect tranquility has followed the emancipation. The criminal courts are almost unemployed ; nine-tenths of the jails are empty and universal tranquility reigns. Although the landed proprietors have made use of the harshest landlord power to exact the hardest terms by way of rent from the negroes, and have also endeavored to extort from him the largest possible quantity of labor for the smallest wages, yet the kindly negro race have not retaliated by one single act of violence or of vengeance; the two races exist together, upon equal terms, under the British Government and under British institutions.

AN APPEAL.

Have you enough of the genuine Irishman left among you to ask what it is that we require you to do? It is this:

First. We call upon you, in the sacred name of humanity, never again to volunteer on behalf of the oppressor, nor even for any self-interest to vindicate the hideous crime of personal slavery.

Secondly. We ask you to assist, in every way you can, in promoting the education of the free men of color. and in discountenancing the foolish feeling of selfishness--of that criminal selfishness which makes the white man treat the man of color as a degraded or inferior being.

Thirdly. We ask you to assist in obtaining for the free men of color the full benefit of all the rights and franchises of a freeman in whatever State he may inhabit.

Fourthly. We ask you to exert yourselves in endeavoring to procure for the man of color, in every case, the benefit of a trial by jury, and especially where a man insisting that he is a freeman is claimed to be a slave.

Fifthly We ask you to exert yourselves in every possible way to induce slave- owners to emancipate as many slaves as possible. The Quakers of America have several societies for this purpose. Why should not the Irish imitate them in that virtue?

Sixthly. We ask you to exert yourselves in all the ways you possibly can to put an end to the eternal slave trade of the States. The breeding of slaves for sale is, probably, the most immoral and debasing practice ever known in the world It is a crime of the most hideous kind. and if there were no other crime committed by the Americans, this alone would place the advocates, supporters, and practisers of American slavery in the grade of criminals.

Seventhly. . We ask you to use every exertion in your power to procure the abolition of slavery by the Congress in the District of Columbia.

Eighthly. We ask you to use your best exertions to compel the Congress to receive and read the petitions of the wretched negroes; and, above all, the petitions of their white advocates.

Ninthly. We ask you never to cease your efforts until the crime of which Lord Morpeth has accused the Irish in America, of "being the worst enemies of the men of color," shall be atoned for, and blotted out and effaced forever.

You will ask how you can do all these things? You have already answered that question for yourselves, for you have said that public opinion is the law of America. Contribute, then, each of you in his sphere, to make up that public opinion. Where you have the electoral franchise, give your vote to none but those who will assist you in so holy a struggle.