Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1860-11-10
STAND FROM UNDER

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brought South for a market. The possibility of
the election of Lincoln may have something to
do with this. The owners of negroes living in
the border states OF Kentucky, Missouri, Nir-
pinia and Maryland, seem determined that they
will not be the losers if disunion should befall
the country-hence they are rapidly selling off
their slaves"
A similar movement to this in the non-cot-
ton growing slave states has always occurred
whenever the more especial agitations of the
slave question in congress have taken place.
A great haste has been made to rush off slaves
to the South West in order that they may be
saved from the wreck of slave property which
political agitation Of the subject seems to
threaten. The people OF the North would have
been much bolder anu more forward in the stand
taken for liberty thar they have been if they
had seen how terrified Virginia was in 1882,
1S49, 1850 and 1856 lest the action of congress
should render slaves in that state of little or no
value. While Senator Mason and Mr.. Wise
have been talking so pompously of Virginia
and so contemptuously of the North and free
laborers, the bravado slaye-power of their state
hoe boon on the point of turning tail and rum
ming away at the least determination exhibited
by the North TO put it down. The wearers of
the lions skin have always been ready, at the
first moment of danger, to exhibit the foes tail.
1t is our hesitation and indecision alone that
have emboldend them to assume such an AFRO
CANT front in the face Of freedom. The Hon.
Bushrod Washington, nephew of General Wash
ington. a Judge of the Supreme Court of the
United States, sold fifty four slaves in 1881, to
be carried to Louisiana. AS an argument for this
measure, he said that he had good reason to
anticipate the escape to the Northern States of
all the laboring men of any value as soon as he
left home. This was about the time Of the agi-
tation of the tariff, or free labor question as OPP
posed to slave-labor; and Mr.. Washington, no
doubt, though that it must result in the i'm
mediate abolition of slavery in Virginia.
This prudent policy of Judge Washington,
has been acted on over and over again since his
day. Many are the slave holders in Northern
Virginia who have pursued the same course that
the Judge did, thinking it prudent to be proyi-
ded against the possible consequences of agita-
ton of the slave question. Aud so they have
gone on with occasional spasms of selling off
slaves to the South West, as if by panic, until
BILE and legitimate business. Virginia, in this
way, has been confirmed as a slave-breeding
state. There are, however, many worthy men,
like Bushrod Washington, who are glad of a
kind of forced political necessity as an excuse
for selling their slaves; yet when these slaves
have been once sold, there is new room made
for needing a new crop, which generally has
time to grow up before another considerable
agitation takes place.
In all this mode of proceeding Virginia has
not shown that sense of the value and impor-
lance of liberty which has been attributed to
her. She was anciently rather monarchical than
republican in her proclivities, and naturally as
sumed towards the General Government the
same position that she would accupy towards a
king, consenting and willing to do whatever a
superior power did not restrain her from doing.
If Virginia had been truly devoted to free in
stitutions, she would have pursued the course
by which these institutions can alone be main
tanned, by taking the abolition of slavery within
her limits into her own hands, an act necessa-
ry to freedom, and not leaving it to the COM
pulsion of the superior power of the general
government.
But it is the leading men of Virginia, not
the people at large, who have thus shown mon
archical proclivities. The people have been
misled and deceived by their leaders-who are
men of aristocratic feelings and tendencies.
The mass of the people in Virginia were natu-
rally and socially as much addicted to liberty
and freedom and to the republican form of
government as are the people of New England;
and if rightly directed, their energies would
have shown more conspicuously in that direction
than they have in the cause of slavery.
At the time when Bushrod Washington and
others sold off their slaves, fearing that they
would run away, why did not the rejecting and
leading men of the state then take measures to
introduce free labor III the place of the slaves
who were thus sold off out of the country, and
thus prepare the way for gradual emancipation?
Inasmuch as they failed to do SO, the leaders of
Virginia of that day will ever be marked as all
inferior order Of men-as men who failed to
perceive alike the true interests of their state
and that broad and elevated sweep of human
interests which is communicated to the Saxon
race by their impulses of liberty and freedom.
RAILROADS BEHIND TIL TIMES
The N. Y. Times of the 3Oth of October