Nor can we pass by unnoticed the noble conduct of our sister in Ohio, who, when her father proposed to bring her to the North, where she might pass for a white woman, and settle upon her a comfortable independence, replied that she would never forsake her people--that she would rather suffer with them than enjoy all the advantages he promised. We do homage to the virtue which preferred to endure affliction with the oppressed, rather than to bask in the sunshine of worldly prosperity and popular favor.
But for the dignified opposition which you manifested--but for the developments which you made of the real designs and fearful consequences of colonization, your guilty country would probably have added to her manifold transgressions against the descendants of Africa, the transcendant crime of banishing from her shores those whom she has deeply injured, and whom she is bound by every law of justice and of mercy to cherish with peculiar tenderness. But for your virtuous and uncompromising hostility to the Colonization Society, a portion of our countrymen might never have been disabused of the idle and fallacious expectation, that this scheme would cure the moral evil of slavery, and put an end to the horrible slave traffic carried on on the coast of Africa. You saw that the root of the evil was in our own land, and that the expatriation of the best part of our colored population, so far from abolishing slavery, would render the condition of the enslaved tenfold more hopeless. You saw that the only means of destroying the slave trade, was to destroy the spirit of slavery; and how just have been your conclusions, let the following testimonies declare--we extract from an official communication to the secretary of the Navy, by Captain Joseph J. Nicholson of the Navy:--"The slave trade, within the last three years, has seriously injured the colony. Not only has it diverted the industry of the natives, but it has effectually cut off the communication with the interior. The war parties being in the habit of plundering and kidnapping for slaves all whom they meet, whether parties to the war or not, the daring of the slaver increases with the demand for slaves, which could not of late be supplied by the usual means; and within a year four slave factories have been established almost within sight of the Colony."