This war, with all its attendant horrors, is the legitimate result of slavery agitation.  There were, it is true, other causes of dissatisfaction and other elements of discord that served to disquiet the public mind; but any or all of these was wholly inadequate to sever the bond of brotherhood which, for more than seventy years had united the North and South.  To rid ourselves forever of this vexatious controversy, was our prime inducement to secession and to preserve and perpetuate our present social system was the paramount object of that suffering and sacrifice which has marked every page of this eventful struggle.

Four weary years have elapsed—our cities have been pillaged and burnt to ashes—our gallant countrymen by thousands have fallen by the sword or bullet, or perished by disease in the hospital—our women are widowed and childless; and now the identical men who clamored loudest for secession, gravely propose to abandon the very object for which the revolution was inaugurated, and has been hitherto stoutly maintained by the soldiery of the Republic.  Some of this class have newly discovered that we must modify, if not abrogate, our system of labor, so as to render it conformable to the civilization of the age.  We are not averse to the largest liberty of discussion consistent with public order, but we do insist that dissemination of such sentiments as these at the present time, is seditious in its character, and if unrebuked, will do immense injury to the cause we have espoused.

It will not be amiss, therefore, to re-examine the grounds on which we have heretofore defended the institution of slavery against Northern fanatics, and their foreign sympathizers.  African slavery as it exists amongst us, may be successfully vindicated on philosophical, economical, and scriptural grounds.  Leaving out of view, for the present, those delicate and perplexing problems which ethnology has started during the present century, we content ourself with the simple affirmation, that the anatomy of the negro races shows them to be physically, mentally, and morally inferior to the white races, and exactly fitted to that relation of servitude which obtains in the Confederate States  This is an incontrovertible proposition, whether we hold with Buffon and the earlier naturalists to the unity of the races, or agree with Agassiz and Gliddon, that there is an original diversity of species.  We need not, with the disciples of Gall and Spurzheim, examine curiously the cranial conformation of the negro to ascertain that he is defective in the highest attributes of humanity, nor need we, with the followers of Cuvier, inspect carefully the bones of the pelvis, and of the lower and upper extremities, to satisfy ourselves that in anatomical structure he bears a marked resemblance to Lord Monboddo’s primeval man.  The curse which Noah, the second founder of the world, pronounced on the posterity of Ham, has clung to them amidst the mutations of four thousand years; and to-day it is legibly imprinted on the physical and mutual structure of the Southern slave.  Authentic history has likewise recorded its literal fulfillment in the destiny of the Hamatic tribes.  No descendant of Ham has ever attained to universal empire, or, except for brief intervals has exercised dominion over the offspring of Shem and Japheth.  The genius of Carthage, which Hannibal sorrowfully acknowledged in the decisive battle of Metauras, was the simple embodiment of the great ethnological truth which we are endeavoring to support.  We would not exclude the African from the pale of human brotherhood, much less would we deprive him of the charities of the gospel; but science, no less than Revelation, compels us to place him in an inferior and dependant position.

Having disposed of the physiological question, we next consider the economical relations and bearings of slavery.

We are no propagandist of slavery.  Whether it shall exist here or elsewhere, is a question to be determined by climatic conditions than by legislative enactments.  The same argument which would exclude it from New England as unsuited to the soil and. climate, would establish it in the cotton region of Georgia and Alabama, and the sugar districts of Florida and Louisiana.  There is a wise and omnipresent law of adaptation in the economy of nature.  The polar bear is not better suited to the frozen wastes and floating icebergs of the Arctic Zone, than is the negro to the malarial swamps of the seacoast of Carolina and Georgia.  Here he finds a local habitation nicely accommodated to his physical peculiarities; and here he finds, too, useful employment in the production of those great staples—rice, cotton and sugar—which have become the very lifeblood of commerce.  It is, besides, historically certain that his capabilities of usefulness cannot be made available on the vo1untary plan.  As Falstaff was a coward by instinct, so the negro is by constitution and habit a lazy, thriftless mortal, needing the compulsion of law, at least, to make him a productive consumer.

The almost unbroken desolation which reigns throughout the British and French West Indies is a stubborn fact which all the cant of Exeter Hall cannot gainsay or invalidate.  The perverted philanthropy of Clarkson and Wilburforce, and the crazy Jacobinism of 1792, have converted the once flourishing islands of Jamaica and St. Domingo into the abodes of a demoralized negro population, who if left to themselves will soon relapse into their primitive barbarism, and from having been at least nominal Christians will become once more brutish worshippers of Obii, the Devil-God of Africa.  It is moreover a pregnant fact, that while these colonies of France and Great Britain have not only languished but greatly retrograded under the emancipation policy, that Cuba, a slaveholding colony with fewer natural advantages, has enjoyed unexampled prosperity, and is the acknowledged “Gem of the Antilles”—the brightest jewel in the crown of his most Catholic Majesty.

In the light of these examples, we may be qualified to judge of the effects of immediate and universal emancipation at the South; and we are prepared, too, to appreciate the sagacity of those politicians who, for the sake of a foreign protectorate, would invoke the calamity of abolitionism upon a confiding and betrayed people.

But we assume higher ground in our vindication of slavery as it exists in the South.  We hold that the system is itself scriptural in the just acceptation of the term.  We need hardly remind the reader that the Divine Lawgiver of Israel incorporated slavery into the framework of their social polity.  Nor were their slaves hired servants only, but bondmen and bondwomen in the strictest sense of the word.  Besides he ordained a fugitive slave law, and not only authorized but encouraged the traffic in slaves.  As a matter of fact, Jerusalem the Holy City was no less a slave mart than Mobile and New Orleans.  There were the statutes which God himself gave to Israel, and they amply justify similar legislation on our part.

The New Testament is not less explicit.  The apostle Paul preached in the chief cities of the Roman Empire, and was of course in daily contact with slavery in its most odious form.  Yet set as he was for the defence of the gospel, he raised no outcry against the system.  He did not labor to abolish, but to regulate; and in our estimation he sanctioned it by prescribing rules for the government of the relation.

Unless, then, we can discover some loftier standard of moral truth than is contained in the oracles of God, we may consider the moral question as already adjudicated in favor of the institution.  And thus we perceive that natural science, political economy and the Bible all bear witness to the truth of our original proposition.  Let us say, however, once for all, that we do not mean to vindicate the abuses of the system.  God has a quarrel with us on that account, and until the marriage relation is respected, until they are provided with proper food and raiment, until their religious enlightenment is tended to, we can neither be guiltless in the sight of God or man.

With these qualifications, we do not hesitate to affirm that we ought to resist every scheme of policy, wherever it may originate, that look to the sudden subversion of this relation.  Interwoven as it is, with our political system and our social habitudes, its overthrow would be nothing but a dissolution of the body-politic.  Independence even, we maintain, if purchased at this price would be an unspeakable calamity.  But we deny that there is any connexion of cause and effect as between emancipation more or less general and independence.  Slavery is today the keystone of our political arch---the very basis of our agricultural wealth without which our armies would disband in a single month.  The negro is serving us much more effectually in the farm than he ever could on the battle-field.  And he is far more formidable to the common enemy when arrayed with the hoe and axe, than when handling the musket in the trenches.  If, however, he was a hundred-fold less productive in his present position, it would be insecure to enroll him in our armies.  It will require years of patient drilling to bring him to a point of tolerable efficiency as a soldier and even then his treachery might ruin us in the very crisis of a battle or campaign.

In a word, the negro is likely to be worth less as a soldier and dangerous as an armed ally.

In his present relation he is subsisting our armies, and in spite of raids and invasions on a grand scale, there is hardly yet any alarming scarcity of breadstuffs.  He is now happy and contented—no insurrectionary plots are seething in his sluggish brain; no midnight forays are planned or perpetrated.  But in an evil hour we alter his status—we force him into the ranks to fight for liberty; this idea obtains the mastery of the kindlier instincts of his nature; the enemy ply him with promises and inducements yet more liberal; his fidelity is shaken and he betrays us in the hour of our sorest need.  Nor does the evil stop here—the contagion spreads; the idea of liberty leavens the whole slave population—and presently they are transformed into a race of demons shrieking for freedom and howling for blood.  There springs up a war of races indeed, followed by scenes that sicken the heart of the spectator.

It is not yet too late to prevent these appalling calamities.  But if affairs are not differently managed and directed, the South will be both deprived of slavery and disappointed of independence.  Her sons and daughters homeless wanderers in the earth, while their fair heritage is laid waste by fire and sword until “not a rose is left on its stalk to tell where the garden had been.”