12 MR. braman's address. 



that time, who was a Virginian, that a very great proportion of 

 the larger plantations, stocked with from fifty to one hundred 

 slaves, annually brought the proprietors in debt. At the end 

 of a term of years, a very large proportion of the landholders 

 are contented if they can just meet the expenses and save 

 themselves from ruin ; and those who make profit scarcely ev- 

 er realize more than one, or one half per cent on the capital. 

 Mr. Randolph said the time would come when the masters 

 would run away from their slaves, and be advertised in the 

 papers. There is no constitutional provision requiring masters 

 held to the care or service of their slaves, to be returned when 

 they escape ; but if the framers had been thoughtful enough 

 to insert one, there probably would not have been much objec- 

 tion to a law demanding the restoration of the fugitive to his 

 bondage. 



Under no circumstances does the blighting effect of slave 

 toil on agriculture, more forcibly arrest attention, than when it 

 is seen on the northern borders of the slaveholding states. 

 Ohio and Kentucky are separated only by a river. The form- 

 er was settled about nineteen years after the latter. They are 

 of about equal size, and possess a soil of equal degrees of fer- 

 tility. Ohio now contains almost one million nine hundred 

 and eighty-two thousand inhabitants, while the population of 

 Kentucky has reached only about half that number. And the 

 difference between the aspects of the two states as they strike 

 the eye of the observer in his passage upon the dividing wa- 

 ter, is as great as if this water were not merely a river, separ- 

 ating two states, but an ocean intervening between two coun- 

 tries. In the cultivated and luxuriant farms of the one, as 

 contrasted with the thriftless tillage of the other, the voice of 

 Providence like a trumpet from heaven is pronouncing its a- 

 nathema on slave labor. It is, as if the hills of Ohio should 

 burst into song, and the "trees of the field" should "clap their 

 hands," and the waving harvests should lift up one great shout 

 of rejoicing that they are free from the curse of Kentucky. 



A prosperous agriculture must breathe a free air, and be con- 

 ducted by unmanacled hands. The Greeks thought agricul- 

 ture unworthy of freemen. They should rather have thought 



