So long as they are on the same soil with us, the subordination
which slavery establishes makes it the least of two evils. If there is
any curse in the case, it is the blacks themselves, not their slavery.
Were it not for their enslavement to us, we should hate them and drive
them away, like Indiana and Illinois and Oregon and Kansas. Now we
cherish them, and their interests are ours.
"Two distinct races," said she, "never have been able to live together
unless one was subordinate and dependent. This, you know, all history
teaches. Your fanatics say it should not be so; they talk about liberty,
equality, and fraternity, and put guns and pikes into the hands of the
inferior race, here, to help them 'rise in the scale of being,' as they
term it. What God means to accomplish in this matter of slavery I do not
see.
"Suppose, merely for illustration," said she, "that cotton should be
superseded. Vast numbers of our slaves might then be useless here. What
would become of them? We should implore the North to relieve us of them,
in part. Then would rise up the Northern antipathy to the negro,
stronger, probably, in the abolitionist than in the pro-slavery man; and
as we sought to remove the negroes northward and westward, the Free
States would invoke the Supreme Court, and the Dred Scott decision, and
then we should see, with a witness, whether the black man has 'any
rights' on free soil 'which the' original settlers 'are bound to
respect.
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