The Yankees the Greatest of all kidnappers.
It is well known to all who are conversant with the subject, that when the colony of Virginia protested against the introduction of any more slaves from Africa, she was thwarted by the British Legislature and compelled to continue the trade. The English people hated slavery very much; but the trade was profitable, and they never thought then, nor have they thought since, of weighing profit against humanity. "Let Glasgow flourish" is the motto upon the town arms of that respectable city. And Glasgow did flourish. It flourished upon the blood and tears of some scores of thousands of Africans, torn annually from their homes by Glasgow traders, and sold into slavery in the West Indies and upon the Continent. Of course, now that the trade is no longer profitable, Glasgow sees the enormity of the sin as clearly as Liverpool, or any other community, which once found its profit in encouraging it. Glasgow and Liverpool — and all the maritime cities of Great Britain--according to their own showing, were great sinners at that day; but their sins were, in enormity, as white is to crimson, when compared with the crimes of the Yankees. They were the great man-stealers of the earth--"the felons of the human race"--as O'Connell once chose to call the slave States of this Confederacy. The English and Scotch traders had some bowels of compassion; but the Yankees had none. They were as destitute of such appendages as a steam engine or a spinning jenny, and they regarded the poor negro pretty much in the same light in which they regarded these implements of labor. That they are engaged at this moment in the same trade of kidnapping, their own people are beginning to confess. At a late meeting of the Board of Supervisors of the City of New York, when a circular from the Provost Marshal General, recommending recruiting in the rebel States was read, Supervisor Purdy said "he hoped the city of New York would never engage in the business of enlisting negroes. He characterized it as trafficking in human flesh. We are able to perform the duty of maintaining the Union without following the example of Massachusetts in kidnap Ping poor negroes to have them slaughtered !"Notwithstanding these amiable Supervisors passed a resolution appointing agents to recruit for the county of New York in the rebel States, Supervisor Little (a genuine Yankee) having smoothed the matter over by explaining that the object was merely to recruit the army and fill the county quota, without being obliged to resort to "a draft of our own citizens, " and suggesting that there were white men in the rebel States as well as black, the real object, we presume, being too humiliating to admit of a can did acknowledgment. All this sounds well for the Confederacy. It is an admission that the Yankees depend upon the negro, and upon the negro alone, for success in the attempt to subjugate the Southern States; and we have already seen what they are capable of doing.
We would specially call attention, however, to the remarks of Supervisor Purdy. The men who, of all other men upon earth, have raised the loudest clamor about trafficking in human are the Puritans of New England. And what are "the solid men of Boston" doing at this moment ? "Trafficking in human flesh" to an extent, and with a cruelty, unknown to any other people or any other era. The Guinea trade, by which so many of their forefathers accumulated gigantic fortunes, with all the horrors of the "Middle Passage." were mercy and compassion compared to the present traffic. The negro imported from Guinea was expected, to be sure, to work. But he was not treated cruelly. His food was ample, his clothing sufficient, his lodging better than that of any peasantry in the world, and his labor comparatively light. In return for his services as a laborer he was civilized, and became, from an unreclaimed savage, a social and comparatively enlightened human being. He left Africa a benighted heathen, his intellect clouded, and his soul enslaved by the foul and dark superstition in which that wretched land has been involved from the earliest traces of recorded time.--He became a converted man — a Christian--and transmitted his new faith, with all its glorious hopes and glowing associations, to his children and his children's children, oven to the tenth generation. Dr. Johnson, one of the most humane men that ever existed, and, as far as his humble mean went, one of the most actively benevolent, expressed his regret at the attempts made in his day to suppress the African slave trade, because he regarded it as, under Providence, the most powerful of all agents for the Christianization of Africa. That it was so, we are enabled to see from the four millions of Africans upon this continent, not one of whom believes in the superstition of the country from which his origin is derived, and every one of whom has been, more or less, instructed in the religion of Jesus Christ. We are not writing a defence of the African slave trade. We merely present the extenuating circumstances, and call attention to the fact that in was not an unmined evil. Far from it. Millions of human beings have been benefitted by it.
Contrast it with the present traffic in human flesh, driven by the Yankees. In the former case the slave was bought from some chief who held him captive, and was prepared to sacrifice him to his gods if he could not get his price for him. His condition was as miserable as that of a human being could be, and his purchase and transfer to a new country was a relief. In the latter case he is seduced or torn from a home in which he was happy, and where everything is happy around him — in which he had no fears for the future and no care for the day that was passing — in which he was at liberty to worship God in the manner best suited to his capacity, and to employ the time not occupied in the labors of the farm in any way he might think proper. In the former case he was transferred to a country in which he could be civilized and taught the Christian religion. All that was wanted of him was the service of a laborer, which was neither onerous nor accompanied with danger. In the latter case, he is kidnapped to be forced into the ranks — to be put upon forlorn hopes — to be driven, at the point of the bayonet, into such slaughter-pens as that at Petersburg, of that at Fort Pillow--to stand between his kidnappers and harm — to be used as a rampart to protect them from Confederate bullets — to be kicked, to be cuffed, to be shot like a dog — to be kicked, to be cuffed, to be shot like a dog-- to be buried in a ditch, and to be used afterwards by the kidnappers as a scapegoat to carry off their own offences of cowardice and ill-discipline. We leave it to any disinterested man to say whether the traffic in human flesh, against which Clarkson wrote and Wilberforce harangued — the Guinea trade we mean-- was comparable in enormity to that now practiced by the Yankees ? As for the slave trade within the several States, or the inter-State slave trade, they do not bear mentioning on the same day.
