Not True.

But it is false. The slaves are not content to be in bondage. Witness the pains needed to keep them there;—the laws against their leaving home without a written pass; the penalties for helping them away or harboring them while fleeing; the nightly patrols, to watch them; the bloodhounds, trained to track their flight; the high rewards often offered for their recapture; the slaveholder’s anxiety for northern aid, by legislation and otherwise, to hinder their escape; the provision of the Constitution, that they shall find no refuge in the whole land, but, wherever found, shall be given up to their pursuers; the many calls made upon northern officers and magistrates to enforce it, and the many victims torn, at its behest, from hope and freedom. Witness, too, the thousands who, in spite of all these precautions, have fled to Canada, and the multitudes scattered over the free states, or lurking in southern woods and swamps, braving unnumbered perils, toils, and hardships, rather than be slaves. How can we believe that “they would not be free if they could,”—are “better off in slavery,” and choose to stay there? Why! the slaveholders themselves know better. They use enslavement as a penalty, and offer freedom as the highest of rewards. Governor Giles, of Virginia, in his address to the legislature, in 1827, speaking of the punishing of free blacks, byselling them as slaves, says “slavery must be admitted to be a punishment of the highest order; and according to every just rule for the apportionment of punishment to crimes, it would seem that it ought to be applied only to crimes of the highest order.” Several of the slave states permit emancipation “for meritorious services,” and for no other cause. A few years ago the state of Georgia paid $1800 to buy freedom for a slave who, by great exertion and at much personal risk, had saved the state-house from being burnt. And lately the legislature of South Carolina permitted a slave to be set free, for his valor and devotion to his master’s son,—with whom he had gone to the war, and who fell fighting the Mexicans. Such instances show the slaveholder’s real belief as to what the slaves like best, and what is best for them. “That our negroes will be worse off, if emancipated,” says a Committee of the Synod of Kentucky, in an address to the Presbyterians of that state, “is, we feel, but a specious pretext for dulling our own pangs of conscience, and answering the argument of the philanthropist. None of us believe that God has so created a whole race that it is better for them to remain in perpetual bondage.”