330 HISTORY OF OHIO. 



no one interferes either with them or with what they do. So 

 far as this state is concerned, the great mass of this society 

 are the most quiet, peaceable and unoffending christians, be- 

 loved and respected by all who know them. 



There is a sensitiveness among the friends of slavery, 

 which we cannot understand. Any discussion on this subject 

 in Ohio cannot reach their slaves and render them uneasy. 

 That is absolutely impossible. What then can be the reason 

 of all this madness, about this discussion? It may be that, 

 possibly, although our discussions might never reach the slave.=, 

 yet they might reach the masters of them, and induce them 

 to push slavery south, and below Virginia and Kentucky, and 

 thereby prevent Ohio from draining these states of all their 

 young men; the life, the enterprise and energy of those 

 states. These friends of slavery in the south, and friends to 

 us, may naturally suppose, that had Rufus Putnam and his 

 associates settled on the soil of Virginia, on the 7th of April 

 1788, and had that state been then a vast wilderness, filled 

 with Indians and wild beasts, and the settlers being under 

 precisely the same law which following as a cloud by day and 

 a pillar of fire by night, they journeyed into this vast forest; 

 that instead of Ohio, had Virginia been the region in which 

 they had settled, that vast state with its rich mines of iron 

 ore, of coal and of gold! with its vast water power descending 

 from the Alleghanies in never failing abundance, in a million 

 of streams; with its towering forests so near the sea coast; its 

 pure mountain air, the purest which ever was breathed by 

 human beings; with its broad, deep and splendid rivers, 

 unrivaled by any others in the world; with its lofty moun- 

 tains and low vales, and with an extent of latitude, aided by 

 altitude or depression equal to eight degrees of latitude; 

 our or)po=ers of the anti-slavery society may suppose, we say, 

 that had Rufus Putnam and his pilgrims settled in Virginia, 

 on the same day on which they did in Ohio, and under the 

 same law, which he and they followed here, prohibiting slave- 

 ry forever in that state, Virginia would now contain five mil- 



