Overrun the North.

But if freed, it is said, they will overrun the North. Ah! Wouldn’t leave their masters if they could; so if allowed to do as they please, they will all run off! Sound logic, truly! And as sound morality, is the inference that therefore they must still be enslaved! If they would come north, to hinder is to wrong them. As rightfully might the West shut out the eastern emigrant, as the North shut out the southern. But there is no danger of their coming. Free them, and the motive which brings them here is gone. When they come now, it is for freedom. Let them have it at home, and they will stay there. The climate of the South suits them better than ours, they are used to its employments, their habits are formed by and fitted to a southern life, there are all their attachments and associations, there the strong home-feeling binds them. There too they are needed. They do the hard work of the South, and could not be spared from its fields and shops. To employ them there at liberal wages would cost much less than to put other laborers in their places. Hence it would be for the employers’ interest to keep them, and for theirs to stay. Moreover they do stay there now, when freed; although oppressive laws—which would be repealed when the abolition of slavery had removed their cause—are now in force there against free blacks.

Of the whole South, about one man in thirty-six is free colored. And more than two-thirds of these are in the northern border slave States, whence, of course, they could most easily “come north.” In Virginia, they are one in twenty-five of all the people; in Maryland, nearly one in ten; in Delaware, more than one in five. Yet hardly ever does one of them remove into a free State, though slaves come often—sometimes hundreds in a year.