The "London Cotton-Plant," a journal established to sustain the interests of Slavery in the Old World, is almost overpowered with acute distress for the Order of Creation, and offers its sustaining shoulder to the System of the Universe. "Fear nothing," it seems to say, "glorious structure of the Divine Architect! Giddings shall not touch you, nor shall Seward lay his sacrilegious hand on you!" "Who are ye?" murmurs the Voice, "that would reedit the works of the Almighty?" "Sublime, but misguided object of our compassion, we prefer to remain in the modest seclusion of namelessness, but we are published at Red-Lion Court, Fleet Street, and are sold for one shilling!" To judge from Mr. Cushing's letter, he has studied this organ of the sympathizers with the Pre-established Harmonies,—certainly there is a singular coincidence in the sentiments of both, so far as we can make them out. Both call themselves conservative, both are anti-philanthropists, both claim that public opinion is tending in the direction of their views, both affirm that their cause is that of the white man, and both appear to mean by white man the same thing,—the owner of a slave.
But is not Mr. Cushing's anxiety misdirected, and wilfully so, in seeking the material for its forebodings of danger to the Union in the Free States? The only avowed disunionists of the North are the radical Abolitionists, whose position is the logical result of their admitting that under the Constitution it is impossible to touch Slavery where it exists, and who, therefore, seek in a dissolution of the federal compact an escape from complicity with what they believe an evil and a wrong,—with what, till within the last twenty years, was conceded to be such by the South itself. If Mr. Cushing be so great an admirer of stability in conviction, he might have found in these men the subject of something other than vituperation. There are men among them who might have won the foremost places of political advancement, could they have sacrificed their principles to their ambition, could they believe that public honors would heal as well as hide the wounds of self-respect. It is the South that advocates disunion, from sectional motives, and adds the spice of treason. The "London Cotton-Plant" says,—
"If she [the South] is denied 'equality' within the Union, she can have 'independence' out of it. Already in European cabinets the possibility of this contingency is contemplated. We but perform a public duty when we tell Mr. Douglas that there is in Europe more than one power able and willing and prepared to take the Cotton States of America, and with them the other 'Slave'-States, so-called by free-negroists, under their protection, as valuable and desirable allies. . . . And more, he can say by authority that she [the South] has active and successful agents in every part of Europe preparing the way for equal existence, commercially as well as politically, so long as the Union exists, or the active support of powerful allies, if driven as a last resort to appeal to the civilized world against tyranny and oppression."[1]
But what does the "Cotton-Plant" understand by "equality"? Nothing less than the reopening of the slave-trade. Speaking of the chance that the captured slaves of the "Echo" would be sent back to Africa, and resenting such a procedure as "a brand upon our section and upon our social condition," it affirms that:
"This labor-question of the South does not depend upon such miserable clap-trap as Kansas or the Fugitive Slave Law. It rests upon a full, open, and deliberate recognition of the rights of the Southern people; and the Senator from Illinois, by moving the abrogation of the so-called slave-trade treaty with England, allowing the South to supply herself with labor as she may see fit, would give, indeed, unquestioned assurance of his disposition and courage to follow the principle of the white-basis to its logical and constitutional consequence."
It declares that the sending home of the Africans would be "a practical reversal of the Dred Scott decision," and adds,—"We have no fear that our people will long remain passive under such an accumulating weight of inequality."[2]
Is not this explicit enough? and does
