Jasper Banner, Volume 4, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 August 1857 — The Black-Republican Press for Slavery. [ARTICLE]

The Black-Republican Press for Slavery.

[From the Cincinnati Enquirer.

The Black-Republican press, which has been engaged for some years past in disturbing the peace of this Union, creating feuds among a peopje who have a common destiny and interest, and ought to cherish kindly and fraternal feelings toward each other, and in every imaginable way exciting ill blood, dissension, political, social and commercial, all on the pretext of hostility to the institution of negro slavery as it exists in fifteen of the States of this Union, as “ a great national sin ** —“ a foul stain upon our escutcheon ” —“ a bitter satire upon our claim to be regarded the only free Republic on the earth,” upon which so many brilliant books and grand speeches have been made—the very authors and instigators of all this demagogical tumult —appear to be undergoing a conversion from the folly and madness of their howlings of a quarter of a century, and to be veering rapidly around to the very con verse of the propositions in behalf of which they have so long torn “ passion to tatters.” The Proslavery party itself, with all the necessities of its position, compelled to maintain and reconcile the institution with right, justice and policy, by an inevitable mandate, has never gone further, even if as far, as some of the journals recently have done, which, awhile ago,, were the most bitter, denunciative and viperous against all “man-stealing,” alias slaveholding. In the South the supporters of slavery have preferred to defend the institution on the ground of an immovable, unavoidable necessity, handed down" by antecedent generations, and inextrieably interwoven with their social and political system. Good or bad, it was part of their existence as a community. It was vain to discuss abstract questions of ethics, of right, and wrong, in the face of eo unavoidable and unchangeable a condition. This has been generally the attitude of the Southern slaveholders. It was left to their bitterest enemies and revilers to take broader and bolder grounds, and maintain the wisdom and justice of slavery, as an institution beneficial to both parties; as, indeed, a great philanthropic medium for civilizing benighted Africa; the only means of securing the cultivation of certain important regions of the earth that would otherwise be desolate, and, as a necessity, a natural and wise consequences of the juxtaposition of the white and black races. These views have all been uttered in this very city, which has been compelled to endure -far more than its share of the insane howlings against African slavery and our Southern brethren; uttered, too, by the most viperous and indecent of the maligners of the institution now so suddenly discovered to be a wise and logical necessity. Such sentiments, uttered by any one whose birth or rcaideffoe " ®

has been cast on the other side of; the narrow river that laves the feet of our city, would bring down upon him a shower of that vile scurrility which this party, in default of all other weapons, is wont to discharge with such unequaled affluence. The doctrine broached in this city, by one of tbe worthy organs of a / party now revealed in all its Wretched meanness as a mere sectional, traitorous faction, intent only upon the injury of our neighbors, with its mask of philanthropy and love of freedom torn off by its own hands, would go much further than the defense of slavery as it exists in the South. It would justify and urge the reduction of the negro race in the North into slavery. If the juxtaposition of the white and black races demands slavery as the only and the wise alternative of the extinction of the African race, it follows that the thirty or forty thousand negroes within the State of 0., might be wisely and benevolently reduced to that condition—that it would be better for them and the whites. In view of Such doctrine, our Southern brethren, instead of being villified, ought to be applauded as the upholders of a wise and benevolent system. The only offense to which they may be liable is that of exciting the jealousy of those who are not able to illustrate, practically, their theory. But, there are much more significant and important indications of this tendency of the quondam negropholists toward the extreme of the doctrines, so long shrieked by them, in the London Times , which, both in this country and in Europe, is the acknowledged leader of the press of this party. Hear how boldly it leackoff in behalf of slavery : “Moreover, it is not for. the interests of civilization that productive estates should go out of cultivation, or that an article of almost first necessity should fall in the European markets. We should rejoice, therefore, to see the recent suggestion of certain active philanthropists carried into effect and a legitimate supply of labor established by proper communications between Africa and the West Indies. Be it remembered that there is no humanity in leaving Africa to itself. Many of its tribes, and especially those near the coast, have been brutalized by the prevalence of the very traffic we have been considering; and even those of the interior, though less debased, are still savages and heathens. The work of instruction and conversion cannot be more effectually prosecuted than through a system which would maintain a constant communication between Africa and other parts of the world. Africa is rich in races of men who can endure tropical labor, and it is allowed, on all hands; that-when slaves were well treated their condition was superior, not only to that of their countrymen at home, but to that of the poorer classes in many parts of Europe. Why should not some such result be now established as a general condition of things ? ” If this means anything but a defense of slavery as a wise, just and necessary institution, and a direct proposition for its revival, very strong, plain and clear language can be very ingeniously tortured and misconstrued. Other European journals pursue the same idea; and several of our Northern journals incline in the same direction —arguing in favor of slavery as preferable to the importation of free Africans, under contract for labor. For instance, in the New-York Courier—& representative press of a great voice in the Black-Republican party — there, is a letter, from its Washington correspondence, in which the facts that the free negroes in Jamaica, Guiana and Barbadoes, and, in all the British and French posses- ‘ sions, will not work without legal coercion, is dwelt upon as an argument against the Anglo-Gallic scheme of the “ deportation of negroeaJ.’ . ..Though not so expressed, it is also an argument in favor of “the legal coercion” of slavery. The writer then refers to the inevitable tendency pi the African, in a I free State, to barbarism, and presents the whole theory of slavery, without expressly indicatioglt, in art i favorable a light as its most ultra f and open supporters have ever done. These are certainly strange exhibitions of thd > most wonderfiil revolu- . tion in sentiment and feeling, or the > strangest freak and caper of human

| versatility, which tho present very extraordinary age has produced.