cases families have made them their permanent abodes; and thus, what with their native servants, the natives in neighboring towns, the more remote natives who flock hitherward for trade, and the few happy cases where pious young men devote a portion of their time to teaching; there is, and has been, a powerful, a wide-spread system in operation for the teaching and extension of English.
Another process has been for some time at work to spread our language. The interior natives have found out that a home in our vicinity is equivalent to an act of emancipation; and, as a consequence, remnants of tribes who for centuries have been the prey of their stronger neighbors, for the slave trade; and boys and men, upwards of 100 miles inland, who have been held in slavery; crowd in upon our neighborhood for freedom. Behind our settlements, on the St. Paul, there is the most heterogeneous mixture conceivable, of divers tribes and families, who have thus sought the protection of our commonwealth. Numbers of the Bassas, Yeys, Deys, Golahs and especially the Pessas, the hereditary slaves of the interior, have thus come to our immediate neighborhoods. Although I am doubtful of the moral effect of this movement upon ourselves, yet I feel no little pride in the fact that this young nation should become, so, a land of refuge, an asylum for the oppressed! And I regard it as a singular providence, that at the very time our government was trumpeted abroad as implicated in the slave trade, our magistrates, in the upper counties, were adjudicating cases of runaway slaves, and declaring to interior slaveholders
