had been delivered in Congress by a Mr. King on the subject of slavery. He told me this Mr. King was the black man’s friend; that he (Mr. King) had declared he would continue to speak, write and publish pamphlets against slavery to the latest day he lived, until the Southern States consented to emancipate their slaves, for that slavery was a great disgrace to the country.”

The Mr. King here spoken of was Rufus King, Senator from New York. This confession shows that the evil which was foretold would arise from the discussion of the Missouri question had been in some degree realized in the course of two or three years.

Religious fanaticism also had its share in the conspiracy at Charleston, as well as politics. The secession of a large body of blacks from the white Methodist church formed a hot-bed, in which the germ of insurrection was nursed into life. A majority of the conspirators belonged to the “African church,” an appellation which the seceders assumed after leaving the white Methodist church, and among those executed were several who had been class-leaders. Thus was religion made a cloak for the most diabolical crimes on record. It is the same at this day. The tirades of the North are calculated to drive the negro population of the South to bloody massacres and insurrections.

BRITISH INFLUENCE AND INTERFERENCE.

During all this time, British abolition sentiments and designs were industriously infused into the minds of the people of the North. Looking over their own homeless, unfed, ragged millions, their filthy hovels and mud floors, worse than the common abode of pigs and poultry, crowded cellars, hungry paupers, children at work under ground—a community of wretchedness such as the American slave never dreamed of—British philanthropists wrote, declaimed, and expended untold sums upon a supposed abuse three thousand miles off, with which they have no connection, civil, social or political, and of which they know comparatively nothing. They passed their fellow-subjects by who were dying of hunger upon their very door-sills, to make long prayers in the market-place for the imaginary sufferings of negroes to whose well-fed and happy condition their own wretched paupers might aspire in vain.

Before they indulged in this invective, it would have been wise to have inquired who were the authors of the evil. In the language of an English statesman—

“If slavery is the misfortune of America, it is the crime of Great Britain. We poured the foul infection into her veins, and fed and cherished the leprosy which now deforms that otherwise prosperous country.”

Having filled their purses as traders in slaves, they have become traders in philanthropy, and manage to earn a character for helping slavery out of the very plantations of the South they helped to stock. They resemble their own beau ideal of a fine gentleman—George IV.—who, it is said, drove his wife into imprudences by his brutality and neglect, and then persecuted her to death for having fallen into them; or one of those fashionable philosophers who seduce women and then upbraid them for a want of virtue. Like the Roman emperor, they find no unsavory smell in the gold derived from the filthiest source.

The first abolition society in Great Britain was established in 1823, and it is a fact worthy of note that the first public advocate in England of the doctrine of immediate and unconditional abolition was a woman—Elizabeth Herrick. In 1825, the Anti-Slavery Society commenced the circulation of the Monthly Anti-Slavery Reporter, which was edited by Zacharay Macaulay, Esq., the father of the late Thomas B. Macaulay, the essayist, historian and lord. Petitions began to be circulated, public meetings were held, and the Methodist Conferences took an active part in the movement, exhorting their brethren, “for the love of Christ,” to vote for no candidates not known to be pledged to the cause of abolition. Rectors, curates, doctors of divinity, members of Parliament and peers engaged in the work, and converts rapidly increased. Riots and disturbances resulted. In 1832, an insurrection, fomented by abolition missionaries, broke out in the island of Jamaica, which was only terminated by a resort to the musket and gibbet—the usual fruit of these incendiary doctrines, wherever they have been circulated. In 1833, a bill was passed by the British government, by which, for a compensation of one hundred millions of dollars, eight hundred thousand slaves in the British West Indies received their liberation. This was followed, in 1843, by the abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions, which emancipated twelve millions more in the East Indies. The cause thus received a new impetus; societies sprang into life all over the United Kingdom; a correspondence was opened in every part of the world where negroes were held in bondage; lecturers were sent abroad, especially to the United States, to disseminate their doctrines and stir up rebellion, both among the people and the slaves; earnest endeavors were made to influence the policy of the non-slaveholding States of the North, and create a hatred for the South; and, in short, the abolition movement settled down in a determined warfare against the institution of slavery wherever it existed.

It has been a war in which newspapers, pamphlets, periodicals, tracts, books, novels, essays—in a word, the entire moral forces of the human mind—have been the weapons. England became the champion of anti-slavery, and the United States became the theatre of a crusade, which seemed as if intended to carry out the spirit of the remark of Sir Robert Peel, that “the one hundred millions of dollars paid for the abolition of slavery in the West Indies was the best investment ever made for the overthrow of American institutions.”

Exeter Hall and the Stafford House became the centre of this new system, around which revolved all the lights of British abolitionism. The ground of immediate and unconditional emancipation, however, was not taken by the English abolitionists until subsequent years, but these views, when presented, found ready concurrence from Clarkson, Wilberforce and other well known advocates of the cause. Among the English statesmen pledged upon the subject, were Grey, Lansdowne, Holland, Brougham, Melbourne, Palmerston, Graham, Stanley and Buxton, and in the hands of these fervent leaders the cause speedily progressed towards its fruition.

From this time forward the coalesced efforts of British and Northern influence to disturb the institution of slavery in the South, to render slave labor less valuable and incite the negroes to rebellion, have been continued with more or less system, occasionally threatening the stability of the Union; the whole object of Great Britain being, not the welfare of the slave, but the destruction of slave labor, whereby, through a system of conquest and forced labor, she would be able to supplant the United States, by producing her cotton from the fields of the Eastern world. With this end in view, and coupled perhaps with the idea that the abolition of slavery would break down our republican form of government, she resorted to every species of intrigue that promised success. Dissensions have been sown between the North and South; the “underground railroad” system has been established leading to her Canadian possessions; agitation and assault have been perseveringly maintained; the country has been flooded with tirades of every hue and kind against the institution; the Northern pulpit has been desecrated in its dedication to the work of stirring up strife; churches have been severed in twain, and Southern Christians denied fellowship with their Northern brethren, until the grand political climax has been reached of secession and revolution. It is safe to say that from the