Constitutional Whig

Slavery in Virginia.—In the county of Goochland, a negro man during the last summer, ran away from his owner, and made good his escape to Pennsylvania. He remained there some four months, when having made a fair experiment, and finding liberty among strangers, attended by the necessity of equal labor, and the responsibility of independence, not the golden life he had dreamed, he spontaneously returned to Virginia and to slavery. He is one out of a hundred for shrewdness, and this last act in our opinion, is not the least proof of it; for to those educated as slaves, and marked by nature if not for that end, yet with colors that establish an eternal barrier between them and the whites, liberty among the latter—a liberty attended with all the inconveniences and responsibility of free agency, without any of its benefits—is but a shadow, and not to be put in competition with the substantial comforts of the Virginia slave, and the exemption from prospective care which is concomitant of all slavery. This case, though but an isolated one, is we believe a fair illustration of the mild and benevolent character of Virginia slavery in general—and though we profess and really feel, the most ardent solicitude that the day may come when the soil of Virginia shall no longer be dug by slaves, and her character no longer be obnoxious to the reproach of holding human beings in bondage, yet that solicitude is created by our love and respect for our native State, and not by the expectation of ameliorating the condition of her slaves. Some little observation, and much enquiry, have long ago satisfied us, that the slaves of Virginia enjoy more solid comfort, are exposed to fewer hardships, than the laboring class of any portion of the Christian world. To exchange their condition for freedom to be enjoyed either in the U. States, in Africa, or the West Indies, would be subtracting materially, from the sum total of human happiness. It is the condition of their masters, weighed down and impoverished by the nature of negro slavery, and of Virginia blighted and held back in the glorious race of improvement and power, by the same cause, that impels us to pray for its final extinction and enlists our sympathies in behalf of colonization schemes.

Those who act in the same cause from the contrary motive—from sympathy for the slave himself—would do well to survey more closely, the masses of European wretchedness, before they permit the emotions of a gratuitous philanthropy to disturb their happiness.