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Show 150 N O'rE S ON forms necessary to it. I hope you will usc your influence to hove it perfected." . . It would seem from tl1i3 that the cmn.n.cJpallon of a. ncgJ'O in Louisiana is a very <li !Iicult ond intri cate m<tttcr,almost as much 80 as the formation of a new State Constitu· tion in this second half of the nine teenth _century .. If so, why didn't St. Clare make Tom over to 1\IJss Oph~1a, as he did Topsy, (p. 131.)? that coulcl have been do11e. 111 a ~l~Jf. hour's time, and would have been tantamount to g1vJ n ~, I o~ his liberty. Oh! but that would have prevent,cd I oms martyrdom, and so would have sp01 l?d the .s~ory · . But 1.'s the emancipation of a negro 111 Louisiana so difficult a mn.tter, after 3.11? If so, how happens it. that there arc seventeen thousand :6.\'C hundred nnd thirty-seven free ~egrocs in that Statc,-ne:1l'ly Lwo thousand more th:m in all the other "coast planting" States put togcther,-and that in the year cn1ling June, 1st., 1850, there were one hundred and fifty-uinc manumitted, being forty-one more than in all tho other St:~tcs south of Virginia an1l Kentucky, and more than one-ninth of all thO manumissions in the United States during that year? The truth is, this all eged diOiculty is all "humbug": there isn't a State in the Union in which a solvent master cannot manumit his slave at any time, proL·ided he sends him out of the Statc,-a restriction (in many of the more Southern States) designed to prevent the accumulation of • refuse p opulation that might, and probably would bec~mc • charge to the community, either as p::mpcrs or as cnmtn~ls. St. Clare had, therefore, only to g ive '11om his "walkmg papers," and he might have "maLle tra cks" for !{entucky ·~t once. And ercn when the master by a dymg, nnd lm thoughts were running·on "'11om ! p~o r :cllow !" (p. l ·H.), he had only to make a parole declaratiOn, m the prcsc.nc,c of the Doctor and j\·Jiss Ophelia, that he gave '11om his hberty, UNCJ..I<: 1'01\t'S CAD f N, 1~1 and all the laws of L ouisiana could not have retained him in bondnge. So much for the inconsistencies and improb;tbi litics in the second stnge of the s tory. 'r e come now to the third s tage, nnd ~ere we make tho acqunintance of Simon L egree, firs t at the slave warehouse, then on the steamboat, and finally nt l1is plantation on tho Ued Hivor. In the warehouse scene there are no in consistencies and improbabili ties that call for partictrlar obsel'\'ation, hut the steamboat scene is full of them. First we have Legree holding out his hand to a gentleman for examination:-" Just feel of my knuckles, now; look at my fist. Tell ye, sir, the flesh on 't has come j est like a stone, practising on niggers,-fecl on it." (p.172.) This gentleman, we arc told , (p. 311.), was the author's brother, "then collecting clerk to a la.rge mercantile house, in New Orleans." Spca.king of I.egrcc, he says, "lie actually made me feel of his fist, wl1ich was like a blacksmith's hammer, or a nodule of iron, telling me tltat it was 'calloused with knocking down niggcrs.' 'Yh en I left the plantation, I drew a long breath, and felt as if I had escaped from an ogre's den." Now a coarse, brutal man might make such a boast in tho presence of negroes, or of men of his own sort, but the supposition that he could make it bona fide, anJ in sober em· nest, to a gentleman, is, really, too rid ic ulous for nny but the gr eenest of greenhorns to swallow. 'Yithout prcsumi n!? to call in question the truth of ~Ir. Beecher's sta.temcn~ I thi nk I find an easy and natural explanation of it in ~he following paragraph fr om the Ja.. n uary number of the Southern Quarterly He view:-" ~rho testimony of this brother is the only one which she cites, except in the general 'all over the land' style, which we have noticed; and we think any one who has spent six months of his life in 3 southern city will recognize the type of this her solitary |