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March, 1861. DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. 421 [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] be found very dear,) for quarreling parties to make peace at the expense of an innocent party. Herod and Pilate made peace at the expense of Christ. Governor Seward and others would make peace between the oppressors at the expense of the slave. God's way to make it, is to 'break off thy sins by righteousness, and thine iniquities by showing mercy to the poor; if it may be a lengthening of thy tranquility.' God's peace-making voice to this guilty nation is: 'Let my people go." 'Let my people go.' This was his voice to an ancient nation. It refused to give heed and perished, as will this nation also if it shall refuse to be warned. Our great men are working their wits to devise a salvation for our crumbling national edifice. The Divine prescription: 'Let my people go.' is, however, its only possible salvation. In other words, repentance is our only remedy. I said that Gov. Seward and others would make peace at the expense of the slave. They would make it by heaping up fresh cruelties and outrages upon him. They would make it by making his prison tighter, and the return of the fugitive from it surer. The wickedness of such a peace kindles all my abhorrence; its meanness all my disgust. 'Rob not the poor because he is poor,' is a solemn command of the previous bible; and emphatically is the present a case where the poor is robbed because his helpless poverty gives impunity to robbery. My speech is done. Old age is upon me. - Sickness has often hushed my voice. I may never again be allowed to lift it up in this Hall, where for more than thirty years it has occasionally been heard in behalf of various causes of righteousness. And if I am now to speak the last words I shall be allowed to speak here, what better can I do than exclaim: 'Let my sicknesses be multiplied. Let me, as I have repeatedly done, go down to the gates of death. Let my brain again sink so low that I shall not know one friend from another. Let me suffer every anguish of body and every anguish of spirit. - Let me become, if it is possible, even more than ever the public laughing-stock, because of my fanaticism, which prefers truth to numbers and the right to popularity. Let all this come upon me. But let me never be guilty of seeking to adjust a claim or compose a strife between my fellow-man and myself at the expense of a third person. But let me never be guilty of favoring a compromise between two peoples at the expense of robbing another and an innocent people, and that, too, a people whom they had always robbed. But let me never be guilty of favoring the plan to reunite two peoples by recrushing and more thoroughly crushing a poor people whom they had always been crushing. But let me never be left to approve the taking of the heart's blood of the innocents to cement the broken friendship of their enemies. From such superlative wickedness, from such ineffable meanness, from such stupendous hypocrisy, may God preserve me.' [[line]] COTTON AND SUGAR CULTURE IN AFRICA. [[line]] BENZONIA, Lebanon Co., Mich., Feb. 5, '61. TO GERRIT SMITH, Peterboro', N. Y. DEAR BROTHER:- Please excuse my intruding upon your notice once more, for though I am far away in the big woods of north-western Michigan, endeavoring to lay the foundations of society RIGHT in this new country, yet our acquaintance must not therefore stop. I am acting here an an independent Home Missionary, preaching in the new settlements where there is no one to break unto them the 'bread of life,' doing what I can to sustain myself and family, and refusing nothing that any person may freely give to aid in feeding my family - a wife and three children. We are in a log house, have to clear our land, and work very hard; but we enjoy it. A Christian Colony has been commenced here, with a view of establishing a Manual Labor College, for male and female, irrespective of color. Since I was obliged to leave Africa on account of my wife's ill health, I have for years had a strong desire to commence in West Africa, in opposition to the South, the raising of cotton and sugar for the world's market.- Africa is the greatest country in the world for [[/column]] [[column 2]] the production of these articles. They can be raised very much cheaper and more abundantly there than in the South, even though they pay slaves nothing for their labor. Cotton is indigenous to the soil, grows wild almost everywhere, and can be cultivated to any extent with the greatest ease; for (1) when once planted, the same bush bears its crop yearly, so that all that is needed, after the first year, is to to gather the cotton; (2) labor is cheaper there than even slave labor; (3) there are no frosts there to interfere with the plant. And sugar cane, when once planted, does the same - cut down, it sprouts up again immediately, and thus keeps growing all the year, and needs only to be gathered. - The cane I have seen growing there, I have never seen equaled in America or the West Indies. Coffee, a forest tree, growing wild, can be cultivated as easily as any fruit tree with us. Ginger, pepper, arrow-root, &c., can all be produced there in the greatest perfection. The cotton and sugar business particularly can be successfully carried on in West Africa, so as to supply the world in a few years. All that is needed is to start the thing in a few places along the coast, show the natives how, employ them till they learn, make a market for them, and they will go into it by scores of thousands, as they are already doing on the Gulf of Guinea, where the English have in a few years sold hundreds of cotton presses and gins to the natives, (the thick skulled, stupid Guinea niggers we hear about,) who are now working them successfully, and shipping their own cotton to Manchester. - My idea is this. Secure [[illegible]] soil and shipping, employ hundreds of the natives, and plant cotton and sugar extensively, connecting with the enterprize schools and preaching, thus uniting, as they should be, Christianity and Civilization. In such an enterprize I have much desired to engage, acting as the agent of some person or persons who would supply the means to begin it. But as I was prevented from going to Africa, I wrote to Bro. J. S. Brooks, my associate in Africa, and proposed that he enlist in it. He could not then; but now I have a letter from him, saying he is ready to do so if he can have the needful aid to start. He has the land, the river to float to sea, the people about him anxious to work, and the skill and judgment to carry forward such a work, and he deems it of the greatest importance for the welfare of Africa, as well as the breaking down of slavery. But he says he needs $1,500 to get the thing under way, to clear land, and plant, put up buildings, buy gin and press &c.; then after the third year he could take the whole upon himself, and refund the principal in two or three annual installments. Now, is not this worthy of a trial? Your brother, GEO. THOMPSON. [[line]] - A bill to protect freedom of speech and public discussion has been introduced by Mr. Argile of the State Assembly. It provides for punishment by fine of $10 to $100, of any person disturbing meetings or assemblages convened for any lawful purpose, by noise, violence or annoyance of any kind, and where force, concert and combination is proved, by a fine of not more than $500, and imprisonment of from thirty days to six months. It gives magistrates and officers summary power of arrest and trial. - A petition was presented to our State Assembly Jan. 20, for a revival of the law allowing the citizens of slave States to temporarily sojourn in New York with slaves. [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER. The star-spangled banner that blows broad and brave O'er the home of the free, o'er the hut of the slave- Whose stars in the face of no foe e'er waxed pale. And whose stripes are for those that the stars dare assail- Whose folds every year, broad and broader have grown, Till they shadow both arctic and tropical zone, From the Sierra Navada to Florida's shore, And, like Oliver Twist, are still asking for more- That banner whose infantine bunting can boast To have witnessed the Union's great charter engrossed; Which at Boston saw freedom's stout struggle begun, And from Washington welcomed its victory won- For our fathers in rebel defiance it spread, But to us it waves brotherly greeting instead; And Concord and Peace, not Bellona and Mars, Now support Englands' Jack and the States' stripes and stars. Can it be there are parricide hands that would tear This star spangled banner, so broad and so fair? And if there be hands would such sacrilege try, Is the bunting too weak the attempt to defy? Alas! while its woof freedom wove in her loom, She paused in her work, and the fiend took her room, And, seizing the shuttle that freedom had left, Threw slavery's warp across liberty's weft. How the fiend laughed and leaped, as the swift shuttle flew, With its blood-rotted threads, the fair weft running through, 'Now cut out your web - it is broad, it is long- 'Twixt fiend's work and freedom's, let's hope it is strong!' And now that the blood-rotted warp is worn bare, The flag it is fraying, the flag it may tear; For the fiend cheers on those who rend it essay, And the work he's had hand in is apt to give way. Now Heaven guide the issue! May Freedom's white hands, 'Ere too late, from the plank those blood-rotted strands, And to battle and breeze fling the banner in proof That 'tis all her own fabric, in warp as in woof. If this may not be, if the moment be nigh, When this banner unrent shall no more flout the sky, To make fitting division of beams and of bars, Let the South have the stripes, and the North have the stars. - [Punch. [[line]] THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY AND FUGITIVE SLAVES. - The Provisional Constitution of the Southern Confederacy contains the following clause on the subject of fugitive slaves: 'A slave in one State, escaping to another, shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom said slave may belong, by the Executive authority of the State in which such slave shall be found, and in case of any abduction or forcible rescue, full compensation, including the value of the slave, and all costs and expenses, shall be made to the party by the State in which such abduction or rescue shall take place.' The clause in the Constitution of the U.S., which is generally construed to refer to fugitive slaves, is this:- 'No person held to service of labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.' [[line]] - Mr. Parrott, the delegate from Kansas, who recently had a valuable slave bequeathed to him by his grandmother, in Maryland, has emancipated him and sent him as a free man to Ohio.
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