The Maryland Slave Holder's Meeting.
Human chattels have become so prone to take to their legs and run away in portions of Maryland that the owners recently held a meeting at Snow Hill to devise means to stop the disposition to emigrate. They did not resolve to free their slaves and to pay them suitable wages for their labor like sensible men, but they did resolve to make the life of the slave more irksome than ever, by depriving him of his corn patch, not permitting him to leave home without pass, and not suffering him to choose his master when hired out. They also resolved in favor of the enactment of still more stringent laws by the State of Maryland and by Congress touching fugitives from service, and the payment of $100 for every white man, and $50 for every free negro, detected and convicted of tampering with slaves. The effect of this cruel policy will be to make stampedes still more frequent.
The crowning act of the folly of the Snow Hill resolvers, was the adoption of the following:
Resolved, That we recommend that authority be given to postmasters in slaveholding States to open and read all letters and other documents addressed to free negroes and slaves; and whenever anything incendiary shall be found therein, to place them in the hands of the proper officers for prosecution.
It is well remarked by the Toledo Blade that this policy of subjecting the mails to the espionage of slaveholders was acceded to by leading Democrats in Congress twenty-five years ago, and the support it received from them was among the first steps taken in the work of subjecting that party to the domination and uses of slavery, which has since that time so steadily progressed and has now become so complete. It is far from being the most audacious of slavery's demands upon the country, but it is one which will never be acceded to by the Legislative department of the Government, however ready the Executive may be to grant it.
"The Maryland Slave Holder's Meeting," Cleveland (OH) Daily Leader, September 28, 1858, p. 2