Description
Kansas - Slavery - Letter from B. F. Stringfellow to the Hon. P. S. Brooks, Thos. L. Clingman, William Smith, and John McQueen - - (lengthy article advocating Kansas as a slave state and answering questions about abolition and farming in Kansas. Excerpts follow.)
Negroes - field hands - have hired for some years in Western Missouri at prices which could not be paid if their labour was less valuable than as above stated. Men at $180 to 250; women from $80 to $150 per annum, the hirer paying all expenses, and losing all time of sickness; the owner at no charge. A woman with two children will bring from $60 to $90; and girls from 10 to 13 years of age from $40 to $60 per annum. I now pay for one, about 10 years of age, $6 per month by the year. I need hardly say that the negroes must be healthy and profitable to enable farmers to pay such prices.
3. Is it safe to take Slaves to Kansas now?
Of this there can be no doubt. They are less likely to escape than from Missouri; are farther from the underground railroads and hiding places of the Abolitionists; while the people of the territory are more on the alert, and watch more closely those who would steal them.
From the law there can be no danger. Slaves are now, and have been in the territory for years, so that slavery in fact is already established. I need not say to you that no lawyer, unless he is an abolitionist, will pretend that any positive law is necessary to make slavery legal.
But “to vindicate the truth of history” I ought to say that the veriest schoolboy must know, as a matter of history, that although slavery existed in all the old states, in not one was a law ever enacted to establish it.
Laws have been passed recognizing its existence after it had an existence; never to establish it before it existed. It has been abolished; not by the repeal of laws establishing or permitting it, but by laws positively and expressly prohibiting it.
Without such prohibitory laws, it would now exist in every Slate in the Union. Until such laws are enacted by some competent legislative power, Slavery is legal in Kansas. Such laws will never be enacted!
Whatever might have been the result, Abolitionists had not attempted to force the people of the Territory, their movements have “fixed the “fact.". They cannot harm us now.Date(s) of Creation
3/16/1855