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  THE

  RIGHT

  OF

  AMERICAN SLAVERY.

  BY

  T. W. HOIT,

  OF THE ST. LOUIS LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION.

  SOUTHERN AND WESTERN EDITION.


  FIRST AND SECOND EDITIONS, 500,000 COPIES.


  FOR SALE BY THE PRINCIPAL PUBLISHERS THROUGHOUT THE UNION.


  ST. LOUIS, MO.:
  PUBLISHED BY L. BUSHNELL.
  1860.


  Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1860,

  By T. W. HOIT,

  In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States
  in and for the District of Missouri.


  BAKER & GODWIN, PRINTERS,
  Printing-House Square, opposite City Hall,
  NEW YORK.




PREFACE.


TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

_My Fellow Countrymen:_--Upon what manner of times have we fallen? Is
our supposed experiment of self-government about to prove a failure?
Are we so blind as not to see the abyss into which we are about to
plunge? Section hostile against section; States arrayed against the
Constitution; Churches sundered; the springs of intelligence poisoned
at their source; treason stalking at noonday; insurrection rife; the
equality of States and citizens denied, and derided; justice rebuked;
treachery applauded; traitors canonized; anarchy inaugurated; monarchy
calculating the end of republicanism; and the wheels of government
clogged by the minions of despotism! All this, my Countrymen, and you
passive, silent, sightless; reckless of your own and your children's
doom? And while all this is true, you go about your usual avocations,
as though the eyes of the civilized world were not upon you; as though
the great, the good, the magnanimous of all lands were not breathless,
and spell-bound, and appalled at the spectacle; as though the
prophetic admonitions of the Father of our Country were forgotten, and
nature, with an ominous silence, conspired to lull you into
forgetfulness, the more to astound you with the wonders and the woes
of an approaching catastrophe!

What fatal error is there in our Republican principle? What virus
sickens our body politic? What fascination lures us from the shrine of
freedom? What infatuation hath seized the American people, that they
should put to hazard this priceless inheritance,--the home, and
refuge, and hope, of the down-trodden nations?

I aver there is a fatal fallacy adopted by a large number of the
American people, which, if not rejected, will lead us down to national
oblivion. That fallacy is exposed in the following pages, by showing
what is right, and what is wrong, and explaining the fundamental error
by which our public opinion is divided, and the way of a reunion
pointed out. No one can desire to remain in error. It is the desire to
do right which animates the great mass of the American people. It was,
perhaps, the _desire_ to do right, that made John Brown a rebel and a
traitor, and which consigned him to a traitor's doom. There is no
safety, then, in _desiring_ to do right; but to KNOW what is right,
and to DO it. The time has now arrived when the American people must
do right, or suffer the penalty of doing wrong.

Good _intentions_ will not do. Good DEEDS are demanded,--actions
founded upon truth and justice, and in accordance with nature's
irrevocable laws. We boast of our greatness, and power, and
intelligence. Of what avail are all these, if they will not save us
from national ruin? What boots it that a slumbering giant dreams of
his strength while he is falling upon the bosom of a burning lake? The
mightiest empires have sunk to oblivion. Are we soon to follow them?

Our material greatness and vigor seem to forbid the idea of premature
decay; but let us not be blind to the delusive dream of an immortality
springing from mental imbecility, nor the chimera of a political
finality in governmental system which establishes and tolerates
INJUSTICE, nor the permanence of a State in the midst of
preponderating elements of fluctuating popular delusion.

Either the institutions under which we live are founded in truth, or
they are founded in error. Our constitution is the work of wisdom, or
of folly. It is founded in justice, or injustice; in RIGHT, or
_wrong_. Shall we honor the astuteness of its founders, and
perpetuate these institutions to remotest ages? or shall we prove
recreant to this trust, unworthy of these manifold blessings, and in
our mental blindness and moral imbecility invoke the scorn of future
ages, and the just execrations of all mankind?

The _material_ elements of greatness of the Great American Republic,
must be vivified and enlivened by a corresponding degree of INTELLECT;
they must be permeated by an adequate element of illuminating soul, or
they will fall, a lifeless mass, into chaotic ruin. Let us remember

    "That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
    As ocean sweeps the labored mote away;
    Whilst self-dependent power can time defy,
    As rocks resist the billows and the sky."




THE RIGHT OF SLAVERY.


INTRODUCTION.

AFRICAN SLAVERY is, at present, the subject of all-absorbing interest
to the American mind; for, our people, almost intoxicated with their
own freedom, seem unsatisfied with those manifold blessings acquired
by the labors of their sires; and while they are conscious of not
excelling them in wisdom, virtue, or valor, they are becoming ideal,
and seem willing to sacrifice the practical, safe rules of republican
action, for mere idealisms, born in the dizzy sphere of their own
over-wrought imaginations. They tremble at the name of Washington,
whose purity and moral power shed lustre upon the name of man, and
they worship him as a god; but while the REAL WASHINGTON commands the
homage of mankind, and stands the intermediate between the race of men
and the Infinite, we find the imaginations of men ignoring reason, and
embarked upon a voyage aerial, amid the clouds. There they revel high
above the mountain tops of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, where
the atmosphere is pure, where the light is clear, and where the
lightnings play; but, alas for human weakness and frailty! they are
there only in imagination, though the splendid illusion is to them a
reality, and the pleasing dream of ideal beauty, which, by the magic
power of transmutation, annihilates or obliterates the reason and
memory, destroys those distinctions of great and little, right and
wrong, weakness and power, which nature has arbitrarily made, and the
experience of mankind recognized as fundamental; upon which all law is
based, and all order and civilization sustained and advanced, for the
security and elevation of nations and of men.


THE IDEAL AND THE REAL

This ideal element so predominates, in consequence of over or false
_culture_; by the reading of a spurious literature, which dwells in
the regions of fiction and romance, to the proportionate neglect of
the stirring incidents of our time, which actually go to make up true
history--which seem marvellous enough of themselves, without the
necessity of invention, or the aid of artificial novelties, except for
mere embellishment.

It would seem that the rise and progress of this Republic; the spread
of our ocean commerce; the building of a thousand cities; the rush of
the world to our shores; the peopling of our boundless plains; the
rapid birth of new States into our Union; the triumph of our arms; our
repeated accessions of territory; our maritime and commercial
superiority; our foreign discoveries; our inventions in mechanism; our
discoveries in science; the use of steam, and electricity; our
statesmanship, and foreign diplomacy; a thousand miraculous incidents
of individual enterprise and success; the discovery of gold, of
silver, and iron; our internal improvements and meliorations; our
national _prestige_; and finally, our greatness and glory as a
nation,--ought to suffice for any reasonable conception of the
marvellous, as they outstrip the more ignoble creations of fancy, and
absolutely invade the former domain of fiction and romance. Hence the
seeming puerility of fiction when contrasted with these more wondrous
phenomena of fact. The substitution of fiction for fact is, therefore,
unnecessary and absurd, as it defeats the very purpose intended, by
its own inferiority. Its chief effect, then, is but to mislead the
mind.

Let us, then, control the imagination; discard the _ideal_ in
practical affairs, hold it in its sphere, and adopt the REAL, in order
that by the exercise of right reason we may be enabled to consider the
present subject as it _is_, and not as it would be when weighed in the
scale of the ideal; for in this way, and this alone, can we come to
just conclusions, and our labors result in practical benefit to those
most concerned in the premises. In the spirit of truth, of candor, of
sober reality, let us, therefore, approach the subject of American
Slavery.


THE <DW64> EVER A SLAVE.

The <DW64> has been a slave from time immemorial. This is shown from
the earliest Egyptian monuments, paintings, and traditions. Herodotus,
the father of Grecian History, tells us of <DW64> slavery in Ancient
Greece. It existed in Rome also. During the tenth century of the
Christian era, the Moors, from Barbary, established an extensive
traffic in the cities of Nigritia, where they bought large numbers of
slaves; and the merchants of Seville brought slaves from the western
coast of Africa, and established slavery in that city, and in
Andalusia, long before the time of Columbus.[1] It is also a curious
fact in history, that Hanno, the great Carthagenian commander and
discoverer, having explored Africa from the Straits of Gibraltar to
the bounds of Arabia, brought back to Carthage a cargo of
ourang-outangs, which he supposed to be <DW64> men and women; _showing
more historically his estimate of African character, than his
familiarity with Natural History_. The <DW64> has ever been a slave;[2]
and it is to be considered whether his quick and sudden transition
from slavery to freedom, by emancipation, is probable or possible, or
is sanctioned by the history of human development and progress.


TWO PHASES OF SLAVERY.

Slavery has two phases; the moral, which involves the RIGHT, and the
prudential, which is the expedient. But strictly, the moral is the
principal and controlling view of the subject, and that which has made
and will continually constitute the criterion of action from which the
expediency is deduced, and the anomaly of slavery in our Republic
understood, the paradox of a slaveholding democracy explained, and the
institution of slavery justified with human equality, by justly
disc