greater portion of southern citizens, whose perverted notions of justice and propriety are clamorously expressed on the most trivial occasions.  In whatever sphere of society amongst them you go, you find the subject of “protecting their rights” urged with impetuosity; the same rancorous feeling towards men of abolitionist sentiments, and the same deprecation of the slave race.  To decry the negroes in public opinion is one of their constant rules of action, and if an individual attempts to assert their equal rights with mankind at large, he is considered as disaffected towards southern interests, and, if not openly threatened, as I have before observed in this work, is unceremoniously talked down.’  It is thus often dangerous to broach the subject, and if an individual, more daring than people generally are when in the plague-infected latitudes of slavery, attempts to repudiate the views so unhesitatingly expressed by the pro-slavery advocates, that the negro race is but the connecting link between man and the brute creation, he is looked upon with disgust, and his society contemned.  This overbearing conduct is so ingrained, that it shows itself on the most trifling occasions, in their intercourse with their fellow-citizens.

Argumentative facts might be produced ad infinitum to prove that the legal enactments for the government of the slave states of America have been framed so as to vest in the proprietor as much control over the lives and persons of those they hold in servitude as any animal in the category of plantation stock.  This in my tour through that region of moral darkness and despair, the state of Louisiana, I had numberless opportunities of observing, which would not fail to convince the most sceptical; and if I have passed over many of these in the foregoing pages, it is because the incidents themselves (though proving that the slightest approach to independent action, or opposition to the depraved wills of their tyrannical superiors, is at once visited with consequences that make me shudder to reflect upon) were of too trivial a nature to interest the general reader.  I will, however, copy here an extract from a paper published in Virginia, the Richmond Times for August, 1852, which must, I think, tend to remove any doubts, if they exist in the mind of the reader, that the conclusions I have come to from personal observation are correct, and sufficient to prove that the despotic Nicholas of Russia himself does not exercise more absolute control over the lives and liberties of the degraded serfs he rules, than the slave-appropriators of America do over their victims.

The newspaper in question is a highly popular one with the aristocratical slave-owners of Virginia, and the editor one of those champions of the unjust and iniquitous system who invariably meet with extensive patronage in every part of the southern states.