When we speak of the South as
distinguished from the North by elements of inherent hostility, we
speak only of the governing faction, and not of the millions of
nominally free men who are scarcely less its thralls than the black
slaves themselves. This unhappy class of our countrymen are the first
to feel the blight which Slavery spreads around it, because they are
the nearest to its noxious power. The subjects of no European
despotism are under a closer _espionage,_ or a more organized
system of terrorism, than are they. The slaveholders, having the
wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of,
employ these mighty instruments of power to create the public
sentiment and to control the public affairs of their region, so as
best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the
institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction,
even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in
safety. A Christian minister in Tennessee relates an act of fiendish
cruelty inflicted upon a slave by one of the members of his church,
and he is forced to leave his charge, if not to fly the
country.
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