The Potomac and the Chesapeake are the American Niger and Bight of Benin; while this District is the great government barracoon, whence coffles are driven across the country to Alabama or Texas, as slave ships once bore their dreadful cargoes of agony and woe across the Atlantic.
Mann uses vivid imagery to describe the slave trade routes in America, likening them to historical slave ships.
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Mere knowledge, without the moral sense, can take no cognizance of the everlasting distinctions between right and wrong; and so the blind instinct, unguided by knowledge, will be forever at fault in its conclusions.
Not the most fertile soil, not mines of silver and gold, can make a nation rich, without intelligence.
The general system of slaveholding farmers and planters, in all times and places, has been, and now is, and ever will be, to cultivate much land, badly, for present gain,--in short, to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Old Virginia was the first to sow this land of ours with slavery; she is also the first to reap the full harvest of destruction.
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