Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party

The Convention (at Cleveland, 1854), in its Secret Sessions made, Africa, with its rich, inexhaustible productions, and great facilities for checking the abominable Slave Trade, its most important point of dependence, though each individual was left to take the direction which in his judgment best suited him. Though our great gun was leveled, and the first shell thrown at the American Continent, driving a slaveholding faction into despair, and a political confusion from which they have been utterly unable to extricate themselves, but become more and more complicated every year, Africa was held in reserve, until by the help of an All-wise Providence we could effect what has just been accomplished with signal success —a work which the most sanguine friend of the cause believed would require at least the half of a century. It is a curious, and not less singular historical fact, that a leading political journal, and the first newspap