SOUTH CAROLINA AND ITS SLAVE POPULATION. 295 



lie recoils with horror from the bare idea of such a thing, he could not possibly 

 take them without their respective appendices the guineas ! it would be very 

 irregular. In a lawyer's bill the barrister is always mentioned in connection 

 with his clerk" fer to Mr. Pipps and clerk ;" " retainer to Serjeant Sawdust 

 and clerk," &c. &c. They are inseparable as regards money matters ; they 

 form a firm in which the interest of the clerk is an eighth they are Castor 

 and Pollux the Siamese twins, or, to give a better similitude the beggar and 

 his dog. It is impertinent to paint over any door in Lincoln's-Inn, the name of 

 only one of its occupants ; why not stick to the truth and write up, " Mr. Ser- 

 jeant Simpleton and Clerk," " Mr. Belial and Clerk" or otherwise as the case 

 may be ? 



2. I can answer this question : only on the two or three occasions per 

 annum, of a poor devil of a suitor being allowed to figure in forma pauperis ; 

 these two or three cases being distributed among the whole profession. It can- 

 not, however, be denied that men at the bar, who are not overburthened with 

 business, do sometimes omit to put a brief down in the bill if their client 

 be an attorney who regularly employs them, if the action have been brought 

 with a view to obtain atonement for some piece of villainy perpetrated by 

 such an attorney, and if " his learned friend" fail by forensic fraud to skreen 

 him from the consequences. But in cases where all these postulates are present 

 should the attorney hoping by such rashness, to give the advocate an ad- 

 ditional stimulus have handed over the fee before-hand, however disastrous 

 the event of the trial may prove he never sees a farthing of his coin again. 

 Barristers never refund u it would be irregular." If you throw a sovereign into 

 the sea there is some chance of } 7 our finding it in the stomach of a casual cod- 

 fish, bought by you at Billingsgate for a crown, but nothing ever returns from 

 the charybdis of a counsellor's maw. Orpheus re-passed the Styx, but those 

 who practise "in the Courts below," differ from those who plead " in the Courts 

 above :" the learned brothers of Rhadamanthus are merely infernal. 



SOUTH CAROLINA AND ITS SLAVE POPULATION. 



THE rapid progress of events in the southern divisions of the 

 United States of America, and the approaching struggle which 

 threatens the state ot South Carolina with the horrors of domestic 

 war, render it not an uninteresting speculation to review the condi- 

 tion, hopes, and future prospects of the slave population of the plant- 

 ing states. It is indeed remarkable, that after the many alarming 

 symptoms of insurrectionary movements, and the miraculous disco- 

 very of plots for the extermination of the whites, that the southern 

 states should now plunge into acts which, in all human probability, 

 will unchain their most deadly enemies, and awaken the demons of 

 revenge and murder among them. Of the perpetual danger which 

 impends over the white people of these states, some judgment may 

 be formed from the circumstances of the following narrative of the 

 projected insurrection in the state of South Carolina, in the year 

 1823, headed by a well-known free negro, Vesey Denmark. 



This man was a native of Africa, who, being captured, when a 

 youth, among a cargo of slaves bound for one of the Danish islands 

 in the West Indies, in the year 1 797> was carried to Charleston, where 

 he soon afterwards received his freedom from the commander of the 

 vessel of war to whom he had become a prize. He subsequently 

 became a sawyer, and saved a considerable sum of money; being 

 known, up to the period of the insurrection in 1823, as a clever, in- 

 dustrious, and worthy free negro. Suddenly, in the latter end of 



