All this for trade. He topped off this
analysis with the remark that negro slavery was a benign institution,
exactly in line with the processes of the business of life; that it had
been lied about by a growing fanaticism in the States; New York had
always been in sympathy, for the most part with the Southern States,
where slavery was a necessary institution to the climate and the cotton
industry. He went on to tell me that about a year before a maniacal
cobbler named William Lloyd Garrison had started a little paper called
_The Liberator_ in which he advocated slave insurrections and the
overthrow of the laws sustaining slavery; and that a movement was now on
foot in New England to found the American Anti-Slavery Society. And that
John Quincy Adams, once President, but now a senile intermeddler, had
been presenting petitions in Congress from various constituencies for
the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. This would be
finally squelched, he thought. New England had always demanded a tariff
in order to foster her industries, and that policy trenched on the
rights of the states not needing and not wanting a tariff. While slavery
did not in any way harm New England, she intermeddled in a mood of moral
fanaticism.
I was much interested in these revelations by Mr. Yarnell, for such was
his name.
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