Slavery -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1783-1865 The Project Gutenberg eBook of AN ENGLISHMAN'S TRAVELS IN AMERICA, by J. BENWELL. AN ENGLISHMAN'S TRAVELS IN AMERICA: His Observations Of Life and Manners in the Free and Slave States. BY J. BENWELL. PREFACE. Personal narrative and adventure has, of late years, become so interesting a subject in the mind of the British public, that the author feels he is not called upon to apologize for the production of the following pages. If there is one consideration that ought to weigh in the minds of the British as a people, to endeavour to rivet the affections of the Canadians, more than another, and prevent the ultimate cession of that country to the Americans, it is, that the dependency affords now the only asylum for those persecuted outcasts of humanity, the slaves of the United States. Canada, the land of freedom, is associated in their minds with paradisaical thoughts of happiness—and many a heart-stricken creature in the Southern States of America, as I had many opportunities of ascertaining, toils on in content, with "Canada" in view, as the ultimatum of his hopes and the land of his redemption. It will scarcely be believed that the perpetrator of the deed, after a short confinement, was spirited away up the country, no doubt at the connivance of the authorities, and sold! Thus, justice is often defeated, from pecuniary considerations in the Slave States of America, where, if a slave commits even the heinous crime of murder, the ordinary course of the law is interfered with to save the owner from loss. This of itself is sufficient to stamp for ever as infamous the social cancer of slavery, and brands as ridiculous, the boasted regard for justice, so pragmatically urged in the southern states of the American continent. A mile or two from St. The pellucid waters of the Ohio, as they enter the turbid rushing current of the Mississippi, which is swollen by the Illinois and other tributaries, has a remarkable effect, the clear current of the former river refusing, for a considerable distance, to mingle with the murky stream of the latter, and forming a visible blue channel in its centre—a phenomenon I thought allegorical of the slave-stained condition of the one state, and the free soil of the other, for while Ohio is free from the curse of slavery, the banks of the Mississippi have for centuries been deep dyed in the life's blood of the oppressed African. I noticed that there was a deep scowl of hatred on the countenance of the negro prisoner as this drama was being enacted, and when the knife struck the poor mule he I went there to worship on the following Sunday, but was obliged to leave the building, there being, it was stated by the apparitor, no accommodation for strangers, a piece of illiberality that I considered very much in keeping with the slave-holding opinions of the worshippers who attend it. This want of politeness I was not, however, surprised at, for it is notorious, as has been before observed by an able writer, that, excepting the Church of Rome, "the members of the unestablished Church of England—the Protestant Episcopalian, are the most bigotted, sectarian, and illiberal, in the United States of America. There are, however, many pastors who faithfully warn their flocks of the dangers of the world, and who strenuously advise their hearers to take warning lest they be over-captivated with the "Song of the Syrens." These, however, I must say, are chiefly in the free states, for I cannot regard southern ministers in any other light than pharisaical, while they continue openly (as is their constant practice) to support from their pulpits the institution that is the main stay of the southern states; I mean slavery. In my intercourse with serious individuals with whom I came in contact during my stay on the continent of America, the doctrines of Dr. Like the administration of miscalled justice on negroes in all slave-holding states in America, the process was summary; the offender was arrested, brought before the bench of sitting magistrates, and on the ex parte [A] statement of his accuser, condemned to mutilation, being at once marched out to the rear of the building and the hand lopped off on a block fixed there for the purpose. I noticed a block and axe myself in the yard of a building near the town-hall, and on looking at them closely, saw they were stained almost black, with what I have little hesitation in saying was human blood. No editor, possessing the least leaven of anti-slavery principles, would be patronized; and it not infrequently happens that such men are mobbed and driven perforce to leave the slave, for the more northern or free, states. Here they stand a better chance, but, in many instances, the prejudice, it is said, follows their course, and southern influence occasions their bankruptcy or non-success. This overbearing conduct is so ingrained, that it shows itself on the most trifling occasions, in their intercourse with their fellow-citizens. Argumentative facts might be produced ad infinitum to prove that the legal enactments for the government of the slave states of America have been framed so as to vest in the proprietor as much control over the lives and persons of those they hold in servitude as any animal in the category of plantation stock. If we take the United States of America, where the outcry against slavery is greater than in any other country under heaven, and where we hear more of religion and revivalism, more of bustle and machinery of piety, a country setting itself up as a beacon of freedom; then does slavery amongst such a people appear transcendently wicked; a sin, which, in addition to its usual cruelty and selfishness, is in them loaded with hypocrisy and ingratitude. With hypocrisy, as it relates to their pretensions to liberty, and with ingratitude, as it relates to that God who gave them to be free.

The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic consisting of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous states border Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, with the semi-exclave of Alaska in the northwest and the archipelago of Hawaii in the Pac In the late 18th century, American settlers began to expand westward in larger numbers, many with a sense of manifest destiny. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 from France nearly doubled the territory of the United States. Lingering issues with Britain remained, leading to the War of 1812, which was fought to a draw. Spain ceded Florida and its Gulf Coast territory in 1819. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state, attempted to balance the desire of northern states to prevent the expansion of slavery into new territories with that of southern states to extend it there. Primarily, the compromise prohibited slavery in all other lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ parallel. As Americans expanded further into territory inhabited by Native Americans, the federal government implemented policies of Indian removal or assimilation. The most significant such legislation was the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a key policy of President Andrew Jackson. It resulted in the Trail of Tears (1830–1850), in which an estimated 60,000 Native Americans living east of the Mississippi River were forcibly removed and displaced to lands far to the west, causing 13,200 to 16,700 deaths along the forced march. Settler expansion as well as this influx of Indigenous peoples from the East resulted in the American Indian Wars west of the Mississippi. During the colonial period, slavery became legal in all the Thirteen colonies, and by 1770 it provided the main labor force in the large-scale, agriculture-dependent economies of the Southern Colonies from Maryland to Georgia. The practice began to be significantly questioned during the American Revolution, and spurred by an active abolitionist movement that had reemerged in the 1830s, states in the North enacted laws to prohibit slavery within their boundaries. At the same time, support for slavery had strengthened in Southern states, with widespread use of inventions such as the cotton gin (1793) having made slavery immensely profitable for Southern elites. The United States annexed the Republic of Texas in 1845, and the 1846 Oregon Treaty led to U.S. control of the… America's…

Race and Rights in Antebellum America 131 (2018) (noting, in a monograph documenting the ways in which free Black Baltimoreans seized rights in the courtroom