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THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE.
motives and designs of the insurgents,-were studiously concealed from the public view. Influential slaveholders are contributing money, equipping troops, and marching to the scene of conflict. The land speculators are fitting out expeditions from New York and New Orleans, with men, munitions of war, provisions, &c., to promote the object. The independence of Texas is declared, and the system of slavery, as well as the slave trade, (with the United States,) is fully recognized by the government they have set up. Commissioners are sent from the colonies, and agents are appointed here, to make formal application, enlist the sympathies of our citizens, and solicit aid in every way that it can be furnished."
When this iniquity has so far ripened that the national government of the "great republic of liberty" were ready to plunge into a war with Mexico, to reëstablish slavery upon soil from which the curse had been removed, and were searching for pretexts for the war, the Hon. John Quincy Adams, in his speech in the House of Representatives, in May, 1836, said:
"But, sir, it has struck me, as no inconsiderable evidence of the spirit which is spurring us into this war of aggression, of conquest, and of slave-making, that all the fires of ancient, hereditary national hatred are to be kindled, to familiarize us with the ferocious spirit of rejoicing at the massacre of prisoners in cold blood. Sir, is there not yet hatred enough between the races which compose your southern population and the population of Mexico, their next neighbor, but you must go back eight hundred or a thousand years, and to another hemisphere, for the fountains of bitterness between
