Speaking ten years later in the Peace Conference, at Washington,
Ex-Senator William C. Rives, of Virginia, said: "It has occupied the
attention of the wisest men of our time.... In fact, it is not a
question of slavery at all. It is a question of race."[235]
These two great Virginians were strong anti-slavery men, yet they
stood appalled before the problems of immediate emancipation without
deportation or colonization. That their views were not the product of
their environment, will appear from expressions of eminent men not so
situated.
M. de Tocqueville, whose work, _Democracy in America_, is the subject
of the widest appreciation, has given to the world in his notable
book, published in 1838, his conclusions with respect to this subject.
"The most formidable of all the ills," he writes, "which threaten the
future existence of the Union, arises from the presence of a black
population upon its territory."[236]
Again he writes: "I do not imagine that the white and black races will
ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the
difficulty to be still greater in the United States than
elsewhere."[237]
In conclusion, he says:
"When I contemplate the condition of the South I can only discover
the alternative which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of
those states, namely, either to emancipate the negroes and to
intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep
them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate
measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the
most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one
or the other of the two races."[238]