Summary

According to the editor of the Rome (New York) Sentinel, slavery in Charleston was humane, efficient, modern, and progressive. The editor suggested that the slave is in many ways in a better position than the free wage laborers in the North.

EXCERPT:

"I am more fully confirmed in previous belief, that the free States fail entirely to understand the system, as well as the views and feelings of the slave owners, but more particularly of the slaves themselves. . . The system of slavery is looked upon here, both by the owners and the slaves themselves, as we at the North do of any business transactions: it is like the apprentice system of the North, where the master does not consider he is committing a crime to take an indentured apprentice for a term of years--say from the time he is ten until he is twenty-one, nor does the bound apprentice consider he is disgraced or demeaned because he is thus bound out."

Full-text web version of newspaper

"In the first half of 1860 Democratic editors in Franklin County emphasized slavery's compatibility with the Northern economy and society and Northern complicity in the South's institution."