Emancipation and Colonization, BQR for April 1862
EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION
[From Browson's Quarterly Review For April, 1862.]
COUNT GASPARIN’S book on the "Uprising of a Great People," is a remarkable book for its keen foresight, its broad statesmanlike views, its inspiring eloquence, and its noble sentiments. Our only wish while reading it is, that our countrymen were less unworthy of the high praise the enlightened French nobleman awards them. The election of Mr. Lincoln in 1860 to the presidency was indeed a great event, less indeed on account of the man elected than on account of the cause he represented; and we are not surprised that foreigners, who are strongly opposed to slavery, should have regarded it with interest, and greeted it with pleasure and hope. Under the circumstances, it was an act of courage, and not undeserving of admiration.
Yet there was less real courage in the actors generally than appeared to onlookers from abroad, for comparatively few of those who voted for Mr. Lincoln, believed any real danger was to be apprehended. The southern politicians .threatened loudly, everybody knew; but not many, if any, in the Republican party believed their threats were in earnest, or were any thing more than a part of the machinery usually put in operation before elections. The northern politicians opposed to the Republican party assured us that this time the South were in downright earnest; and that if the. Republicans should dare elect their candidate, there would surely be separation or civil war, or perhaps both; but we believed it only an ordinary trick of politicians to serve their own personal or party purposes, and we could hardly do otherwise, since we found them offering no word of rebuke to their southern allies, and not one manly word in defence of the constitutional freedom of election. Their warnings we believed selfish, uncalled for, and we felt that, when addressed to Republicans, they were addressed to the wrong party. The tears they shed over the dangers to the Onion, seemed to us only tears shed over their own probable displacement from power; and history will for ever throw on the Union-loving and Union-saving Democrats and their allies, who would save the Union by surrendering it, bound hand and foot, to slavery, the guilt of the rebellion, which their depravity and want of manhood, of true and enlightened patriotism, encouraged and well-nigh rendered successful. Yet certain it is that they whose votes elected Mr. Lincoln, did not generally believe that either separation or civil war would follow his election. They believed the Democratic party, South as well as North, would acquiesce in the election, when it was over and the new administration fairly inaugurated. This was in accordance with all past experience, and they had no special reason to believe the present election would prove an exception to the general rule.
How many of them would have voted for Mr. Lincoln if they had believed any serious attempt would be made to put the threats loudly vociferated by politicians into execution, or if they had clearly foreseen the course since taken, it is not possible to determine. It can never be known, and perhaps it is better that it should not be known. The architect sometimes builds better than he knows. But this is certain, that many prominent Republicans, when they saw the wolf had really come, that southern threats were not mere bullying, but did mean something, showed the white feather, and were prepared to avert the coming storm by new and larger concessions to slavery, and to purchase peace at the expense of throwing away the fruits of the victory they had just won after a hard-fought battle. The Republican party were saved from a disgraceful compromise, not, perhaps, so much by their own virtue, as by the madness of the southern politicians, who, disgusted with their Democratic allies of the free states, and resolved on separation and reconstruction, or, if you will, on separation alone, would listen to no compromise, and declared that they would not come back into the Union, even if left at liberty to prescribe their own terms. Their madness, rather than our virtue, saved us at the critical moment, and left us no alternative but to consent peaceably to separation, or to fight for the Union, and to crush out secession by force of arms. The merit of the Republicans is that they had the virtue, the manliness, the patriotism, to choose the latter alternative.
We ourselves voted for Mr. Lincoln, because we felt that it had become necessary for the country to commence the work of breaking and annihilating the political power of slavery, which had almost from the origin of the government dominated in the administration. The domination of the slave interest was corrupting our politics both North and South, was blackening our reputation in the eyes of the civilized world, and undermining the public and private morals of the people. We did not believe secession or civil war, though threatened, would follow, and, even if we had so believed, should still have voted for Mr. Lincoln all the same. We should only have felt it so much the more necessary to do so. We stated in some remarks to our fellow-citizens, urging them to support the Republican party, that we wished the power of the slave interest broken, and that, if civil war should follow, we would welcome and meet it as the sons of the heroes of the revolution should meet it. We wished the question, which was sure sooner or later to come up, to be met and disposed of in our day, so that we might, when called to our own final account, know whether we left our children a heritage of freedom or not. There are, we said, greater evils for a nation than civil war. The loss of liberty is greater, the loss of public and private virtue is greater, and greater by far is the loss of that patriotism which counts it sweet to die for one's country, or that heroism that dares do or suffer any thing or every thing in defence of the just and noble cause. We did not believe the South would secede, openly rebel, but, if they did, if they chose to fight, we were for meeting them, and giving them fight for fight to their hearts' content. Whether the majority of Republicans at that time could have said as much, may be doubted, but their purposes and ours were the same, and they have for the most part shown no deficiency of pluck when they found themselves forced to meet the stern realities of war.
We confess, however, that in voting with the Republican party, we were not moved by any special regard for the negroes held in bondage. We were, as a matter of course, opposed to slavery, and wished there were no slaves, and no negroes in the country. The system was bad, detestable, abominable, but we of the non-slaveholding states were not responsible for it. It was a local matter, and its disposition a matter for the states that authorized it, with which we had no civil or political right to interfere. Our motive was not to abolish slavery where it had a legal or quasi-legal existence, but to restrain, and finally abolish the political power of the slave interest, by sternly forbidding its expansion into new territory, and the admission of any additional slave states into the Union. We opposed the extension of slavery, not on abolition principles, not for the sake of slavery itself, but for the sake of emancipating and purifying American politics, because we found the interest created by slavery stronger in federal politics than any other one interest in the country, and able by its combinations and alliances to carry our presidential elections, and to shape the policy to the federal government, in a sense necessarily antagonistical to the general interests of the immense majority of the people of the United States. We found it dominant, awl laboring, not without success, to render its domination complete and perpetual. It had the feeble administration to [r. Buchanan on its side; it had got an opinion of the supreme court in its favor; it had fifteen states out of thirty-three, the majority of voters in three or four, and large majorities in all the other states, pledged to its support, and we felt bound to do all we could constitutionally to overthrow it It was not liberty for the black race so much as for the white race, that we wished to secure. It was not the abolition of negro slavery, but the redemption and preservation of the glorious republic inherited from our fathers, that moved us. We did not propose to interfere with slavery where it had a recognized legal existence, and were prepared to adhere strictly to the so-called "compromises of the constitution," and to pay the slaveholders their pound of flesh cut from the region nearest the heart. It was only the political power of slavery we sought to eliminate. So was it with us personally, and so, we presume, was it with the great majority of those who voted in 1860 for the Republican candidates. The Republican party were denounced at the North as well as at the South by the Bell and Everett men, and by both wings of the Democratic party, as an abolition party; but an abolition party they were not, and had no thought of becoming.
But there is logic in events, and men who adopt the principles of a movement are carried further than they foresee or are prepared for in the outset. All great movements have their law, and must and will on to their legitimate conclusion. The developments and events since the presidential election, have carried us far beyond the point we had then reached, and have made evident, what should have been evident to us from the first, that it is impossible to annihilate the political power of the slave interest without' annihilating that interest itself, and that it is impossible to annihilate that interest without the complete emancipation of the slaves, and their recognition as free population. We have seen three or four slave states, nominally in the Union, and having, comparatively speaking, only a small number of slaves, for over a year embarrassing the action of the government, preventing much necessary legislation, paralyzing the administration, impeding its military operations, and rendering useless the most costly sacrifices. For six weeks after the inauguration of the present administration, the military defences of the country were neglected, forts and arsenals, the armory at Harper's Ferry, the navy-yard and naval armaments at Gosport, were left unprotected, lest the border states should be irritated and secede, and there was even thought of abandoning on one and the same day Sumter, Pickens, and all the forts still held by the Union in the seceded states. Even after the war had commenced, and we had a powerful army in the field, it was pretended that its principal object was to defend the national capital, while all thought of subjugating the rebellious states was officially disclaimed. Even congress, at its extra session, passed almost unanimously, at least without serious debate, a resolution declaring that the war having been forced upon the United States by the rebels in the seceded states, would be prosecuted solely to the end of putting down the rebellion, without any intention of interfering with the property or institutions of those states. All this was done through the influence of the slave interest in the non-seceding slave states. That interest is hardly less controlling in congress to-day than it was under the administration of the feeble Buchanan. Maryland. Delaware, Western Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri have inherited the mantle of the more southern states, and succeeded to their power. Even now not a step can be taken without reckoning with the slave interest.
This fact alone suffices to show that there is no way of emancipating the government from the slave power, but by treating slavery as abolished, but by destroying the property in slaves, and never suffering a slave interest again to grow up anywhere within the limits of the United States. This we can now do without any violation of constitutional law7, or breach of constitutional duty, for the secession of the slaveholders has given the federal government jurisdiction over the whole subject. Slavery, if suffered to exist in any part of the Union at all, will compel all other interests to succumb to it, because it is antagonistical in its very essence to all other interests. If it exists in the Union at all, the interest it creates must be placed on a footing of equality with every other interest, and be counted as legitimate and as sacred as the interest of freedom. If allowed equality, it will from its nature claim superiority, and dominate, because equality can be predicated only of things homogeneous, and there is no homogeneousness between liberty and slavery. The equality of the slave interest can in the nature of the case mean only the right of slavery to restrain and repress freedom, for the advance of freedom is the destruction of slavery. We can, then, secure an open field for freedom, and prevent the slave interest from domineering, only by abolishing it, and recognizing the slaves as free. The republic to subsist and flourish must either be all free or all slave.
ln the slaveholding states themselves the slave-owners are only a small minority, and yet this minority is the ruling class, and to the interests of slavery the interests of the non-slaveholding whites are sacrificed. The seven and a half millions of non-slaveholding whites are of the same race as ourselves, are, by nature, as hardy, as brave, as energetic, and as ingenious as we are, and yet, even their material prosperity, notwithstanding their more genial climate, and their richer and more productive soil, cannot compare with ours. The blight of slavery is on them, because all their interests must be sacrificed to the interests of the slaveholders. They have comparatively few schools, few private or public libraries, and in many parts of the South are below the level of the most degraded peasantry of Europe. We sympathize with these people, who are fitted by nature, and by their favored climate and soil, to stand in the foremost ranks of the free American people. Not a few of those brave Union troops who fought at Belmont, and conquered at Logan's Cross Roads, at Henry, and at Donelson, were either from their class or their descendants, and are only a sample of what the whole would be, if the curse of slavery were removed, and they lived in a land of freedom. Why shall these seven millions of free whites, of the same stock with ourselves, and by nature every way our equals, be sacrificed to the slaveholding oligarchy which rules them with a rod of iron, and prevents the development and growth of their innate genius and greatness? They, not the slaveholders, are the real people of the South, and, if united heart and hand with us of the North, would contribute their full share toward making the American people the greatest and noblest people on earth.
Now, to emancipate these non-slaveholding whites of the slaveholding states, who, as a population, dislike slavery. far more than do the population of the non-slaveholding states, to emancipate national politics, and free labor both North and South, and to make the North and the South really one people, one in their system of labor, one in their institutions, culture, and affections, it is necessary to put an end to slavery, and to induce—not force—and aid, as fast and as far as practicable, the freed men of the African race to emigrate to some tropical region congenial to their constitution and temperament, where they may form a great cotton, rice, coffee, and tobacco growing and exporting people by themselves, leaving the whole territory of the United States to the white race. This is what is necessary, and the assurance of the government that it will adopt and carry out the policy of emancipation and settlement of the blacks in a congenial climate, beyond the limits of the United States. would make these seven millions, or seven millions and a half, of non-slaveholding whites its fast friends, and friends who would fight for it with a heartiness and zeal they have never manifested in fighting: the battles of the slaveholders, for it is not slavery they would retain, but the africanization of free American society they would avert. They hold uo slaves; they resist all amalgamation with the negro race, leaving that to slave-owners and overseers; they believe the negro a man with the natural rights of man; they think him different from themselves; do not regard him as a white man; they wish him well; but they do not want negroes for neighbors, associates, fellow-citizens, or voters. They Bee and know well, if freed and remaining as laborers, they will do so only as a degraded class, and so long as a considerable portion of the labor of the country is performed by a socially degraded class, they understand perfectly well that labor will never rise from its degradation, and it be held honorable to labor. It is therefore they join the slaveholders against abolition; but if it could be made clear to them that free American society would not be Africanized, and that in a reasonable time the African element of the American population would be eliminated, there would be no more resolute, determined, and invincible abolitionists in the country. To accomplish, then, the destruction of the political power of slavery, and to make the American people really one people, complete emancipation and colonization are necessary.
This is the conclusion to which events, our own reflections, and the suggestions of others have brought us. But the greatest obstacle to the realization of the good aimed at, is in the free, not in the slave states. The abolitionists are opposed to the colonization feature of emancipation, as are also the political economists, and most of our old Democratic and pro-slavery politicians. The abolitionists demand the abolition of slavery on the ground that slavery is unjust, a sin, and no people has the right to tolerate it. The slaves must be freed as an act of simple justice to them, and, when freed, they are freemen, and we have no more right to colonize them than we have to colonize any other class of freemen. They have the same right to live in the country that we who propose to colonize them have. Besides, if it is necessary to colonize, why not colonize their late masters, whom we can much better spare? The economists add that we need the labor of the blacks, and that to deport four millions of the laboring population, to say nothing of the expense of doing it, would derange the labor market, diminish production, and impoverish the country, almost to a ruinous extent. To the economists it may be conceded that the loss of labor would be great, and be a serious blow to production, if we suppose them all deported at once, and their places unsupplied from other sources. But the process of removal must, on any supposition, spread over a considerable space of time; and as their removal leaves a vacuum, white labor will rush in to fill it, and keep up the equilibrium between demand and supply. There would undoubtedly be for a time some derangement, some difficulty, and some loss; but here, as everywhere else, supply would soon follow the demand, and the labor market of the world v is generally overstocked with white laborers.
To the abolitionists it may be replied that the question is not a question of colonizing the freed men of the African race for the interest or pleasure of their late masters. We make little of these late masters, and are quite willing, if thought best, that they should be deported to Africa, to become, if they wish, slave-drivers for their friend and ally, the king of Dahomey. We demand nothing as a concession to their interests and feelings; we consult only the interests of the whole country, and the rights, feelings, and interests of the non-slaveholding whites in the slave states, the seven millions or seven millions and a half, the real southern people, who own no slaves, and are as much opposed to slavery as we are. We think it would be better, as well as easier, to colonize four millions of the African race, than to colonize those seven and a half millions of the white race.
The other objection of the abolitionists cannot be so lightly dismissed; it professes to be founded in justice, and asserts that to deport the slaves after their freedom would be a violation of their liberty, and therefore an act of injustice. This is a grave objection, and should be gravely considered. If the abolitionists are chargeable with having given too little weight to political interests, or political expediency, we who have opposed them are, perhaps, even more chargeable with having made too little account in our political calculations of justice, which overrides, and should override, all other considerations. It will not do for us, when settling up the past, and taking a fresh start for the future, to neglect the strict and stern demands of justice. We cannot hope to repair one sin by another, or an act of injustice by an act of injustice. Tin's is certain. Let justice stand though the heavens fall; for justice is the basis of all institutions worth preserving, and the condition of all real prosperity, social or individual. To forget justice is to forget God; and all the nations that forget God shall perish, as all history proves.
We grant that slavery is not only a political wrong, not only an evil to the free whites, but an injustice to the slave himself, and must be abolished for his sake alone. We are willing on this point to sing our palinode, and frankly confess that we have never given to this feature in the slave question its due consideration. Many others are very likely in the same predicament with ourselves. Slavery is a wrong done to the slave, the greatest possible wrong that can be done him. It is an outrage upon his manhood, an outrage which disfigures and debases in him that very image of God after which he was created. It is a supreme sophism, utterly repugnant to the dialectic harmony of God's creation. The negro is a man, and slavery is as great an outrage of the rights and dignity of manhood in the black man as in the white man. We have never denied or overlooked this, but we have not given it in our calculations all the weight it deserved. On this point the abolitionists have exaggerated nothing; and they have said no more than the simple truth when they have said strict justice demands the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slave. But, practically considered, the real and complete act of emancipation is a complex act, and cannot be performed instantaneously and at once. The act is not, and cannot be, one simple isolated act. It has its relations, and its relations on all sides, the consideration of which does and must enter into and form a part of the act itself. In doing even an act of justice to the slave, we must take care so to do it, that if it results in evil to him it shall be through his fault, not ours. Certainly justice must never give place to expediency, hut we must take care that justice be done in the best practicable manner, and be as complete as possible. The question of emancipation, from the abolitionist point of view, is one of reparation of wrong done to the slave by slavery. This wrong is not confined to the simple deprivation of liberty and is not repaired by simply declaring him free. Slavery has done him a greater wrong than such a declaration repairs. It has injured him in the habits it has generated, in the obstacles it has interposed to his intellectual and moral development, and in disqualifying him for fair competition, in the race for equality, in a community where the white element predominates. This injury cannot be repaired at once, and by a single stroke of the pen. The obligation of setting about repairing it immediately or at once, is imperative, and all avoidable delay is criminal, is an augmentation of the wrong done to the slave; but it is not imperative that the reparation should be instantly completed, r or completing it time may be demanded, and many things besides declaring the slave free may be necessary to be done, which cannot be done all at once. There are vested rights to be considered and adjusted, the rights of others—we mean not the slaveholders—are to be consulted, and care has to be taken that no injustice be done to other and innocent parties. It is always easier to do a wrong than it is to undo it. We are not at liberty to undo the wrong to the slave by doing a wrong to the free. It is just to abolish slavery against the will of their pretended owners, for their ownership being founded in injustice is invalid save as against the community that authorized it; but to force upon the free nonslaveholding southern society four millions of negroes, to take their place in that society against its will, on a footing'' of equality, or, in other words, to africanize free non-slaveholding society against its consent, is not an act of justice, but may be an act of injustice. To do it strikes at the freedom of that society, and without repairing the injustice done to the slave; for the slaves, liberated by a stroke of the pen, and let loose in such a society, with which they could not amalgamate, would not and could not be really free. They cannot be free and equal members of a society that instinctively repels them, and can remember them only as having been slaves. They can, in the southern states, with here and there an individual exception, be only slaves or pariahs, and to leave them pariahs is not to repair the injustice of slavery. Even not counting for the moment the invasion of the rights of the non-slaveholding people of the South, by the infusion of four millions of blacks into their free society, against their will, the government has the right to treat the negroes heretofore held as slaves, and would be bound to treat them, as wards, so far and so long as necessary for their transition from slavery to freedom, in the best practicable way for their own interest.
We hold the slaves in all the seceded states have been freed from their former owners, whose rebellion has annulled the only law by which they were held to service. The federal government in succeeding to the defunct states cannot remand the slaves to their former condition, cannot hold them to service to the United States, nor sell them as vacated or confiscated property. It cannot treat them as property at all, but must treat them as persons, though persons under its authority, and for whose future status and welfare it is bound in justice to provide. They properly become wards of the United States, who have over them the authority, and owe them the duty, of guardians. They are to be regarded in law and even in justice as under L, age, as not having as yet attained to their majority, and, if the United States as their guardian honestly believe that their colonization in a congenial climate and productive soil, where they may form a civil community and an independent sovereign state of their own race, is practicable, they have the right, and it is their duty, so to colonize them.
We know the answer of the abolitionists. They say, yon must immediately and at once recognize the slaves as freemen; and, when you have so recognized them, they stand on the same footing of equality with any other class of freemen. Being freed, to colonize or deport them without their choice and consent, would be to violate the very freedom you have recognized as theirs. When you recognize them as freemen, you recognize in them the inalienable right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." You deny that right, when you deny them the right to live, to be free, and to pursue their happiness, where it best pleases them. When you claim the right to deport them, except for crime, you make a distinction between them and white men, as unjust in principle as slavery itself. The abolitionists demand not only the freedom of the slave as a man, the complete and unreserved recognition of his manhood, but the full and unreserved recognition of the equality of the negro race with the white race. They demand freedom for the slave in the name of the universal brotherhood of the human race, as a man and a brother, and therefore demand that this brotherhood be recognized, and the negro be placed on a footing of perfect equality with the white race, in one and the same civil and political community; and therefore they hold that the forced colonization of the African race, in a community by themselves, is an act of injustice to the members of that race, which no plea of expediency or utility can ever justify.
Let no man treat this answer of the abolitionists with contempt. There is in it a homage paid to justice, which commands our reverence. We recognize the brotherhood of the human race, in the sense that all men of whatever temperament or complexion have had the same origin, have sprung from the same original pair, Adam and Eve. So far, as a Christian, a philosopher, a man, we have no doubt or misgiving. But there is the fact of human degeneracy, called by theologians original sin, which must be taken into the account. The fact of this degeneracy is evident to everyone who will compare the ideal or typical man presented by / his own reason and conscience, with the actual state of men as he finds them. This degeneracy, as sin, or considered in regard to its culpa, or guilt, is the same in all men, for it .was committed alike by all in Adam. But, taken as simple degeneracy, as a simple fact in man's natural history, it has various degrees, and from these various degrees spring what we call races, which are not properly distinct races, but simple varieties in one and the same race. The degeneracy is greater in some, and less in others. Some have departed further than others from the primitive type. Why, or wherefore, we have no space now to inquire. We restrict ourselves to the simple statement of the fact. The least degenerated variety is that commonly called the Caucasian; the most degenerated is the African. The African is the lowest variety, and stands furthest removed from the true ideal or typical man. The Caucasian variety has suffered from original sin, has degenerated from the proper human type, but it has degenerated the least of any of the known varieties of the human family. Whether we consider the Caucasian man, physically, intellectually, or morally, he is the nearest approach to the integral man now to be found.
Between one variety and another there is an interval. This interval is greatest between the negro and the Caucasian, and between these it is too great to be leaped by a single bound. The two varieties do not easily amalgamate. Their amalgamation is in some sense unnatural and violent, and the amalgam is a deterioration. We know amalgamation is not contemplated by the abolitionists generally; but how is it to be prevented? Do you propose to forbid it by law? By what right, if you deny all distinction in the case, and assert the black and white races are equal? Do you say that intermarriage between blacks and whites will not be sought; that white persons will prefer to marry white persons, and black persons will prefer to marry black persons? You may be right. We believe such will be the case. We believe that there is an instinctive aversion on both sides, but especially on the part of the white race, to such intermarriage. It is doubtful if a white man or a white woman ever cohabits with a black of the other sex, unless moved to it by lust or some morbid affection; and we believe the black man prefers a black woman for his wife, or a black woman a black man for her husband. Intermarriage between the two races, we apprehend, strikes both as improper and undesirable, and is pretty sure not to take place to any considerable extent.
But in saying this, we say all; we settle the question that blacks and whites do not and cannot without more or less violence form one and the same community, and live together in one and the same society on the footing of equality. There can be no society between persons who have a mutually instinctive aversion to intermarriage; for marriage is the basis of the family, and the family is the basis of general society; when therefore the different races or varieties are separated by too broad an interval for the family union. It is clear that they cannot form one and the same society. They cannot live in one and the same civil and political society as equal, but one will be held superior and the other inferior. There is no real society or community where there is no intermarriage, and if they inhabit the same territory, the blacks and the whites, not intermarrying, cannot form one people. They will be two distinct peoples in one state, in which the stronger will predominate and oppress the weaker. This is evident and conclusive against the notion of forming the liberated slaves of the negro family into one people and society with the freemen of the white family.
The amalgamation of the two varieties, separated as they are by so great an interval, would be undesirable, even if it were less impracticable than it evidently is. Intermarriage between them would deteriorate the superior variety, without a compensating elevation of the inferior. The mulatto, if in some respects superior to the full-blooded negro, is, as a rule, in all respects inferior to the full-blooded white man. In all countries where the mingling of the two races has gone on to any considerable extent, we find a great deterioration in the white race, as may be seen in Spanish and Portuguese America. A marked deterioration would result in our southern society, were intermarriages between them to become frequent. But, excluding amalgamation, as to most Americans at least, and especially to the non-slaveholding whites of the South, a thing too shocking to be quietly named, we can see only degradation and oppression for the black race so long as it inhabits the same territory with the white. They can never take their places as equal members in free-white American society; never form with free-white Americans one people, and as they are now in most, and soon would be in all of the states, the minority, poor and uneducated, they would be not only a distinct, but an inferior people, and consequently an impassable barrier to the realization of that idea of right and equality, in contradistinction from mediaeval privilege and inequality, on which our American order of civilization is founded.
We do not in this deny the negro to be a man. We recognize distinctly his manhood; we assert for him all the rights of man; and maintain for him all the civil and political rights we claim for ourselves, only not in one and the same civil and political societv with white men, because so great is the interval between him and us, that he cannot enjoy the same civil and political rights except in a society of his own, where color will be no badge of an inferior caste. It is not that we ask less for the negro than the abolitionists do, but that we ask more for him, and at the same time pay more attention to the tastes, habits, inclinations and interests of free white American society. We recognize with the abolitionists the original brotherhood of the human race, but we do not recognize the present equality of the black and white varieties, or admit that the two can form in the present state of their respective development society together. For the benefit of each, we wish them to live in free and independent separate communities.
We cannot admit that the government in denying to the liberated slave the right to pursue his happiness where he pleases, necessarily infringes his liberty. No one has the right in all cases to pursue his happiness where he pleases. No one can do it by living against my will on my farm, in my house, in my family, or by eating at my table. Every
man's right is necessarily limited by every other man's right. The negro's right to live in free white society is limited by the right of free white society to exclude persons, not born in it, whom its members do not wish to associate with. Nor can we admit that the functions of government are merely negative, and that it can never take in any thing the initiative, and act as a positive providence. We are no admirers of the paternal governments of Europe, administered on the principle, "All for the people, nothing by the people;" we defend the largest individual liberty compatible with social order, and social well-being; but individualism may be carried to a fatal extreme, so as to exclude all government, or so as to convert what is called government into a machine to be worked by individuals for their own private benefit, as was rapidly becoming the case with us before the breaking out of the present civil war. The government has positive as well as negative functions, and may even restrain a man's freedom for his own benefit. It may found at the public expense, institutions of learning, universities, colleges, seminaries; it may encourage science and art, this or that special industry for the national independence or prosperity; it may found hospitals and asylums, and establish bureaus of beneficence. It may act, and should act as a general social providence. As the social providence it is the natural guardian of the weak and the friendless. It may, then, without assuming any illegitimate power or violating any individual freedom take the guardianship of the emancipated negro slaves, and exercise over them the control necessary to place them in a condition where their freedom can be practically secured, and their rights and interest protected. On this score we have no scruples, and believe the government might forcibly remove them from its territory to another where they could be better off in a community by themselves, if it saw proper to do so.
But we wish it distinctly understood that we propose no resort to force, and therefore nothing that can be called deportation. We rely on voluntary emigration to affect the end we have in view, and to voluntary emigration no abolitionist can object. We want no forced emigration. We demand, first of all, the clear, distinct, and unconditional recognition of the negroes as persons entitled to freedom. We demand this immediately. Slavery everywhere in the United States must be outlawed. We demand this as a political necessity, and as an act of justice to the negro race. Slavery must cease. On this point we are and, God helping us, will be abolitionists, so long as there is a single slave to be liberated.
Heretofore we have demanded the recognition of the slaves as free persons, on the ground of military necessity. Some pretend, since our late victories, that the plea of military necessity can no longer be urged. We do not concede it. The war is not yet ended. We have gained some important advantages over the rebels; but if they have any of the characteristic pluck of the stock from which they have sprung, they will not acknowledge themselves beaten, and are not yet beaten, and will give us some hard fighting yet. We cannot say what a few weeks may bring forth, but at the time we are writing, the early part of March, the shouts of victory appear to us to be premature, and it is not impossible that we shall still find it, in order to secure a complete and final triumph, necessary to deprive the rebels of their slaves, and use the services of these slaves in such way as they can best contribute to the defence of the national integrity and life. But be this as it may, if events have weakened the plea of military necessity, they have strengthened the plea of political necessity. The total cessation of slavery in the United States is a political necessity. It is absolutely necessary to create union and harmony, to mould the people of the North and the people of the South into one homogeneous people, to consolidate and strengthen the nation, to develop its resources, to provide for the general defence, and to enable the American people to work out the great social and political problem committed to them by Providence for solution. It is, happily, a political necessity to which we can yield without violating any private right, or disturbing any vested interests. Slavery in the adhering border states can present no difficulty, when it is once abolished in the seceding states, and in the seceding states it has now no longer any constitutional rights or legal existence in the way of federal action. It existed there only by local law, and the local law, as we have shown in the foregoing article, has lost its force there; for state rebellion is state suicide. We can therefore yield to political necessity, without compromising private rights or private interests. The whole question of slavery in the seceded states is now within the jurisdiction of the United States. The plea of justice to the slave, like the Irishman's plea, justice to Ireland, always stands good, and never to be disregarded by statesmen, any more than by moralists. On each and all these grounds we demand the total extinction of slavery, and the recognition of all persons heretofore held to service in the seceded suites by the laws thereof, as free persons, and as no longer held to service anywhere.
This is the first question, and with this question it would have been well to stop till after the war, and not have inopportunely complicated it with the question. What shall be done with the emancipated slaves? But this latter question has been raised, and we cannot now refuse to consider it, for on its solution depends in no small degree the practical answer that will be given to the question of emancipation. We are disposed to agree with Mr. Lincoln, Mr. Blair, and many distinguished members of both houses of congress, that the best mode of dealing with the emancipated slaves is to colonize them outside of the United States, at the earliest reasonable moment. We do not for ourselves, however, make emancipation turn on colonization. We insist on emancipation for its own sake, colonization, or no colonization. We hold that the government, as the necessary and natural guardian of the emancipated slaves, has the right to insist on their emigration, and that emigration, and colonization after emancipation, is best for both blacks and whites; but we are persuaded if government will secure a territory suitable to their tastes, habits, and temperament, and facilitate their migration to it, the emancipated negroes will, in a reasonable time, nearly all migrate to it of their own accord. We know the strong local attachment of the negro, and his little enterprising or adventurous disposition, but it must be borne in mind that the negroes have leaders of their own race, or with some mixture of white blood perhaps, who are men of ability, intelligence, and enterprise. These men can be nobody in a community where the white race predominates, and therefore can easily be induced to emigrate and to lead their people with them. Many of these, wearing their life out in slavery, are not wholly unfitted by their genius and ability to lead forth the millions of their race to a new territory, and to found there and govern a state. Seeing that they and their people, if remaining in the United States, must remain there, in spite of all philanthropy can do, as slaves or as outcasts, pariahs, as we have said, they will feel for themselves, and without much difficulty make their people feel, that the best thing for them is to migrate to a country where they can live in a community of their own race, or where at least their own will be the dominant race. Such migration or exode will be the beginning of the uprising of their race. It will quicken a new spirit in them, and be the commencement of their return toward the type from which they have departed so far, and their recompense for the long ages of slavery and oppression they have endured from the white race.
Still we do not conceal from ourselves, the opposition of the other class mentioned at the North, not merely to colonization, but to emancipation, under any form or any condition, is the most formidable obstacle to justice to the slave to be encountered. We have been surprised to find how completely wedded to negro slavery have become our old Democratic politicians, and how widely pro-slavery sentiments are cherished in the free states. We had so long been living out of the political world, engrossed with our theological and philosophical studies, that we had taken little note of the changes in public opinion favorable to slavery, which had been effected during the last ten or fifteen years, and we find, very much to our regret, the North, as a whole, less abolition than the South. Our commercial cities had become almost completely southernized in their views of slavery, and opposition to the existence of slavery, or even to its extension into new territory, has had very little influence with the merchants of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and the interests of trade, far more than patriotism or loyalty, have moved them to support the administration in suppressing the rebellion. The Morrill tariff moved them more than the fall of Sumter. The commercial class in no country and in no age is remarkable for patriotism, and finds usually its country where its profits are largest, or best secured, ft with us seeks to preserve the integrity of the Union, for if that should be lost, they would lose a large portion of their trade. But for the same reason they are opposed to the abolition of slavery. The abolition of slavery, and the great changes it would effect in southern society, would at least, for a time, seriously lessen the amount of business, and diminish its profits. They want the Union restored as speedily as possible, but at the same time they want slavery retained, so that buying and selling may go on as before, and hence as soon as they thought it likely that slavery might be interfered with, and their old customers at the South crippled in their resources, they became less willing to furnish the government with the means of carrying on the war.
But the politicians, to some extent, of all parties, but more especially of the old Democratic party, are the most inveterate enemies of the policy of emancipation, and from them we hear it proclaimed, over and over again, that the armies of the Union will throw down their arms, if the war were made, in any sense, a war of liberation. They keep up a continued howl against abolitionists and radicals, and would seem to regard slavery as more than the Union, as the corner stone of the republic, as the essential condition of its prosperity, and the very palladium of its safety. Remove slavery and we should be obliged to sing, in our grief, Ilium fuit. These politicians had for some time a great advantage over us, in making it appear that they had the administration on their side, and that we, in opposing them, were deserting the very president we had helped to elect. Since the sixth of March last, this pretense has been taken from them, and the president, by his message to congress on that day, shows that the administration is at least on the side of emancipation, and is prepared to initiate it, if, indeed, it be not prepared to go further.
But the reason of the advocacy of slavery by those old politicians is no secret. If slavery goes, they lose their stock in trade, and their vocation is gone. The Democratic party was always a southern party. It had its chief strength in the South, and its ablest and most important allies. Let slavery go, and that party is defunct. It can no longer rule the nation, and will be henceforth remembered only as the party that, under pretence of fidelity to the constitution, as done its best to sacrifice the life of the nation. If slavery be abolished, it can never have the South with it again. If the Union ceases to be the union of freedom and slavery, it can have no charms for it; for no class of people, than those who composed it, will be more utterly distrusted and despised by the South. They will, therefore, do all in their power to save the “patriarchal institution," and to rear once more their Democracy on the slavery of the Negro race, as its basis. But we trust they will fail, and the logic of the movement, represented by the Republican Party, will carry the nation on, we had almost said, in spite of itself, to the final emancipation of itself from the political power of slavery, by the complete destruction of slavery as property. We think we have shown how this end can be obtained under the constitution, without violating any constitutional provision or existing law. If we have so done, the way is clear for the final obliteration from our soil of the curse of slavery.