14 to Southern slavery all those peculiarities which the masters are pleased to call patriarchal. Plantation life has reared two generations of American slaves, in a climate comparatively temperate, where they have preserved and propagated all their native excellencies undisturbed by the annual relays of native vices which the slave-ship brought. A good many savage habits have dropped away from them. Fetichism and serpent-worship lingers only in a few places in Mississippi, and perhaps in Louisiana, where the slave-trade lasted longer. The natural religiousness of the negro is more healthily developed by Methodism and the Baptist sects, as in Jamaica, than by Catholicism, as in Hayti, or by the half-savage rites of Africa. "When the “ Wanderer,” in 1858, landed a cargo of native negroes on the coast of Georgia, the better portion of the Southern press and people were alarmed and indignant; many disliked the violation of law; the rest felt that it was an infraction of law which brought harm instead of benefit to the institution. A few papers were clamorous with approbation, but the more influential recorded their disgust at the sight of the sickly and savage cargo. * In 1850 it was calculated that not more than eight or ten thousand of originally imported Africans were yet alive. * See Charleston and Savannah papers of that date. It was not long before the politics of the South represented its controlling interest, in the doctrine of State rights, the interpretation of the Constitution^the jealous safeguards thrown around the property in man, the absolute necessity to encroach and domineer, to invent new compromises, to abolish old ones, to thrust the fatal tendency into the courts and every department of government. The South never did a single act that was not strictly in harmony with the exigencies of its position. It had recovered from the amiable expectation of the fathers, that slavery would disappear. Figures, which are said to never lie, began to prove slavery a divine institution. It was the cotton crop which sent Southerners to the Old Testament after a divine sanction for slavery, and to the New, to applaud Paul for remanding Onesimus to his master. Washington, Jefferson, Lee, and Lowndes and Mason never cared to build a hedge of
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