Hale, E: Christian Examiner, Vol. 7 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Christian Examiner, Vol. 7

Under the law of the United States, the slave trade with the coast of Africa was piracy, punishable by the extreme penalties of the law. Yet the trade never entirely ceased, and, in many cases, there was no remark or comment by the people who knew it; and in the Charleston Convention of 1860, Colonel Gaulding, of Liberty County, a member of the Georgia delegation, made a speech from the platform in favor Of the introduction of a pro-slave-trade plank in the Demo cratic platform, and was cheered by the Convention.

The famed Wanderer case, in Savannah, is yet fresh in the public memory; and the plainly proven and undoubted fact of a cargo of Africans having been brought in the ship as her only vocation, had little effect upon the public mind, and resulted in almost nothing.

It is a Wise maxim which asserts that NO law IS stronger than public opinion and it was practically proven in the operation of these great national laws, North and South. The people of the free-labor States could not see why the declaration Of our great Charter of Liberty, that All men were created free and equal, excluded black men. Nor Why those 'inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, should be alienated by being born of a slave mother. The people of the Slave-labor States could not see any crime in buying a cargo of Africans taken in negro battle, liable to be cooked and eaten, or, worse, enslaved, if not sold to whites, and who had some chance of civilization and Christianity by importation. How could it seem a crime.

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