"No Southern man can journey (as he had lately done) through the Northern States, and witness the prosperity, the industry, the public spirit which they exhibit--the sedulous cultivation of all those arts by which life is rendered comfortable and respectable--without feelings of deep sadness and shame as he remembers _his own neglected and desolate home_. There, no dwelling is to be seen abandoned--not a farm uncultivated. Every person and every thing performs a part towards the grand result; and the whole land is covered with fertile fields, with manufactories, and canals, and rail-roads, and edifices, and towns, and cities. We of the South are mistaken in the character of these people, when we think of them only as pedlars in horn flints and bark nutmegs. Their energy and enterprise are directed to all objects great and small within their reach. The number of rail-roads and other modes of expeditious intercommunication knit the whole country into a closely compacted mass, through which the productions of commerce and of the press, the comforts of life, and the means of knowledge, are universally diffused; while the close intercourse of travel and of business makes all neighbors, and promotes a common interest and a common sympathy. How different the condition of these things in the South! _Here_ the face of the country wears the aspect of premature old age and decay. NO IMPROVEMENT IS SEEN GOING ON, nothing is done for posterity. No man thinks of anything beyond the present moment."
Yet this same Mr. Preston, thus sensitively alive to the superior happiness and prosperity of the free States, declared in the United States Senate, "Let an abolitionist come within the borders of South Carolina, if we can catch him we will try him, and notwithstanding all the interference of all the governments of the earth, including the Federal Government, we will HANG him."[7] In other words, the slaveholders, rather than part with their slaves, are ready to murder, with all the formalities of law, the very men who are laboring to confer on them the envied blessings of the North.
[7] We are well aware that Mr. Preston has denied, what no one asserted, that he had said an abolitionist, if he came into South Carolina, would be executed by Lynch law. He used the words we have quoted. (See "New York Journal of Commerce," Jan. 6th, 1838).