Scene in a Southern Slave Town

By a provision of the national Constitution the foreign slave-trade in the United States was abolished, and Congress declared it to be " piracy." Encouraged by the practical sympathy of the national government, the friends of the slave-labor system formed plans for its perpetuity, which practically disregarded the plain requirements of the fundamental law. They resolved to reopen the African slave-trade.

Africans were kidnapped in their native country, brought across the sea, and landed on our shores as in colonial times, and placed in perpetual slavery. In Louisiana, leading citizens engaged in a scheme for legalizing the traffic, under the guise of what they called the African Labor-supply Association, of which James B. De Bow, editor of De Bow's Review, published in New Orleans, was president.

His Review was the acknowledged organ of the slave-holders, and wielded extensive and powerful influence when the flames of the Civil War were kindling. In Georgia, negroes from Africa were landed and sold, and when a grand jury at Savannah was compelled by law to find several bills against persons engaged in the traffic, or charged with complicity in the slave-trade, they protested against the law they were compelled to support.

We feel humbled," they said, " as men, conscious that we are born freemen but in name, and that we are living, during the existence of such laws, under a tyranny as supreme as that of the despotic governments of the Old World. Heretofore the people of the South, firm in their consciousness of right and strength, have failed to place the stamp of condemnation upon such laws as reflect upon the institution of slavery, but have permitted, unrebuked, the influence of foreign opinion to prevail.

The True Southron, published in Mississippi, suggested the " propriety of stimulating the zeal of the pulpit by founding a prize for the best sermon on free-trade in negroes." This proposition was approved, and pulpits exhibited zeal in the cause. James H. Thornwell, D.D., president of the Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Columbus, S. C., asserted his conviction that the African slave-trade formed the most worthy of all missionary societies. Southern legislatures and conventions openly discussed the subject of reopening the slave-trade. The Southern Commercial Convention, held in Vicksburg, Miss., May 11, 1859, resolved, by a vote of 47 to 16, that " all laws, State or federal, prohibiting the African slave-trade ought to be abolished." It was warmly advocated by several men who became Confederate leaders in the Civil War.

The late JOHN SLIDELL, of Louisiana, urged in the United States Senate the propriety of withdrawing American cruisers from the coasts of Africa, that the slave-trade might not be interfered with by them. When, in the summer of 1858, it was known that the traffic was to be carried on actively by the African Labor-supply Association, the British cruisers in the Gulf of Mexico were unusually vigilant, and in the course of a few weeks boarded about fifty American vessels suspected of being slavers. The influence of the slave-holders was brought to bear so powerfully upon the administration that the government protested against what it was pleased to call the " odious British doctrine of the right of search." The British government, for " prudential reasons," put a stop to the practice and laid the blame on the officers of the cruisers.