an acknowledgment of the human nature of the negro by the very
Sanhedrim of the South, thus removing his case from the court of ethics
to that of political economy; and a suspicion on the part of the
Southern majority that something has been wrong, which makes them
readier to see and accept what is right. We do not mean to say that
there is any very large amount of even latent Unionism at the South,
but we believe there is plenty of material in solution there which
waits only to be precipitated into whatever form of crystal we desire.
We must not forget that the main elements of Southern regeneration are
to be sought in the South itself, and that such elements are abundant.
A people that has shown so much courage and constancy in a bad cause,
because they believed it a good one, is worth winning even by the
sacrifice of our natural feeling of resentment. If we forgive the negro
for his degradation and his ignorance, in consideration of the system
of which he has been the sacrifice, we ought also to make every
allowance for the evil influence of that system upon the poor whites.
It is the fatal necessity of all wrong to revenge itself upon those who
are guilty of it, or even accessory to it. The oppressor is dragged
down by the victim of his tyranny. The eternal justice makes the
balance even; and as the sufferer by unjust laws is lifted above his
physical abasement by spiritual compensations and that nearness to God
which only suffering is capable of, in like measure are the material
advantages of the wrong-doer counterpoised by a moral impoverishment.
Our duty is not to punish, but to repair; and the cure must work both
ways, emancipating the master from the slave, as well as the slave from
the master. Once rid of slavery, which was the real criminal, let us
have no more reproaches, justifiable only while the Southern sin made
us its forced accomplices; and while we bind up the wounds of our black
brother who had fallen among thieves that robbed him of his rights as a
man, let us not harden our hearts against our white brethren, from whom
interest and custom, those slyer knaves, whose fingers we have felt
about our own pockets, had stolen away their conscience and their sense
of human brotherhood.
The first question that arises in the mind of everybody in thinking of
reconstruction is, What is to be done about the negro? After the war is
over, there will be our Old Man of the Sea, as ready to ride us as
ever. If we only emancipate him, he will not let us go free. We must do
something more than merely this. While the suffering from them is still
sharp, we should fix it in our minds as a principle, that the evils
which have come upon us are the direct and logical consequence of our
forefathers having dealt with a question of man as they would with one
of trade or territory,--as if the rights of others were something
susceptible of compromise,--as if the laws that govern the moral, and,
through it, the material world, would stay their operation for our
convenience. It is well to keep this present in the mind, because in
the general joy and hurry of peace we shall be likely to forget it
again, and to make concessions, or to leave things at loose ends for
time to settle,--as time has settled the blunders of our ancestors. Let
us concede everything except what does not belong to us, but is only a
trust-property, namely, the principle of democracy and the prosperity
of the future involved in the normal development of that principle.
We take it for granted at the outset, that the mind of the country is
made up as to making no terms with slavery in any way, large or
limited, open or covert. Not a single good quality traceable to this
system has been brought to light in the white race at the South by the
searching test of war. In the black it may have engendered that
touching piety of which we have had so many proofs, and it has
certainly given them the unity of interest and the sympathy of
intelligence which make them everywhere our friends, and which have
saved them from compromising their advantage, and still further
complicating the difficulties of civil war by insurrection. But what
have been its effects upon the ruling class, which is, after all, the
supreme test of institutions? It has made them boastful, selfish,
cruel, and false, to a degree unparalleled in history. So far from
having given them any special fitness for rule, it has made them
incapable of any but violent methods of government, and unable to deal
with the simplest problems of political economy. An utter ignorance of
their own countrymen at the North led them to begin the war, and an
equal misconception of Europe encouraged them to continue it. That
they have shown courage is true, but that is no exclusive property of
theirs, and the military advantage they seemed to possess is due less
to any superiority of their own than to the extent of their territory
and the roadless wildernesses which are at once the reproach and the
fortification of their wasteful system of agriculture. Their advantages
in war have been in proportion to their disadvantages in peace, and it
is peace which most convincingly tries both the vigor of a nation and
the wisdom of its polity. It is with this class that we shall have to
deal in arranging the conditions of settlement; and we must do it with
a broad view of the interests of the whole country and of the great
mass of the Southern people, whose ignorance and the prejudices
consequent from it made it so easy to use them as the instruments of
their own ruin. No immediate advantage must blind us to the real
objects of the war,--the securing our external power and our internal
tranquillity, and the making them inherent and indestructible by
founding them upon the common welfare.
The first condition of permanent peace is to render those who were the
great slaveholders when the war began, and who will be the great
landholders after it is over, powerless for mischief. What punishment
should be inflicted on the chief criminals is a matter of little
moment. The South has received a lesson of suffering which satisfies
all the legitimate ends of punishment, and as for vengeance, it is
contrary to our national temper and the spirit of our government. Our
great object should be, not to weaken, but to strengthen the South,--to
make it richer, and not poorer. We must not repeat the stupid and fatal
blunder of slaveholding publicists, that the wealth and power of one
portion of the country are a drain upon the resources of the rest,
instead of being their natural feeders and invigorators. Any general
confiscation of Rebel property, therefore, seems to us unthrifty
housekeeping, for it is really a levying on our own estate, and a
lessening of our own resources. The people of the Southern States will
be called upon to bear their part of the grievous burden of taxation
which the war will leave upon our shoulders, and that is the fairest as
well as the most prudent way of making them contribute to our national
solvency. All irregular modes of levying contributions, however
just,--and exactly just they can seldom be,--leave discontent behind
them, while a uniform system, where every man knows what he is to pay
and why he is to pay it, tends to restore stability by the very
evenness of its operation, by its making national interests familiar to
all, and by removing any sense of injustice. Any sweeping confiscation,
such as has sometimes been proposed in Congress with more heat than
judgment, would render the South less available for revenue, would
retard the return of industry to its legitimate channels, by lessening
its means, and would not destroy the influence of the misgoverning
aristocracy. On the contrary, it would give them that prestige of
misfortune whose power over the sentiments of mankind is the moral of
the story of Stuarts and Bourbons and Bonapartes. Retribution they
should have, but let them have it in the only way worthy of a great
people to inflict. Let it come in a sense of their own folly and sin,
brought about by the magnanimity of their conquerors, by the return of
a more substantial prosperity born of the new order of things, so as to
convince, instead of alienating. We should remember that it is our
country which we have regained, and not merely a rebellious faction
which we have subdued.
Whether it would not be good policy for the general government to
assume all the wild lands in the rebellious States, and to devote the
proceeds of their sale to actual settlers to the payment of the
national debt, is worth consideration. Texas alone, on whose public
lands our assumption of her indebtedness gives us an equitable claim,
would suffice to secure our liabilities and to lighten our taxation,
and in all cases of land granted to freedmen no title should vest till
a fair price had been paid,--a principle no less essential to their
true interests than our own. That these people, who are to be the
peasantry of the future Southern States, should be made landholders, is
the main condition of a healthy regeneration of that part of the
country, and the one warranty of our rightful repossession of it. The
wealth that makes a nation really strong, and not merely rich, is the
opportunity for industry, intelligence, and well-being of its laboring
population. This is the real country of poor men, as the great majority
must always be. No glories of war or art, no luxurious refinement of
the few, can give them a sense of nationality where this is wanting. If
we free the slave without giving him a right in the soil, and the
inducement to industry which this offers, we reproduce only a more
specious form of all the old abuses. We leave all political power in
the hands of the wealthy landholders, where it was before. We leave the
poorer whites unemancipated, for we leave labor still at the mercy of
capital, and with its old stigma of degradation. Blind to the lessons
of all experience, we deliberately make the South what Ireland was when
Arthur Young travelled there, the country richest in the world by
nature, reduced to irredeemable poverty and hopeless weakness by an
upper class who would not, and a lower class who could not, improve. We
have no right to purchase dominion, no right to purchase even
abolition, at such a price as that. No _uti possidetis_ conveys any
legitimate title, except on the condition of wise administration and
mutual benefit.
But will it be enough to make the freedmen landholders merely? Must we
not make them voters also, that they may have that power of
self-protection which no interference of government can so safely,
cheaply, and surely exercise in their behalf? We answer this question
in the affirmative, for reasons both of expediency and justice. At
best, the difficulty, if not settled now, will come up again for
settlement hereafter, when it may not be so easy of solution. As a
matter of expediency, it is always wisest to shape a system of policy
with a view to permanence, much more than to immediate convenience.
When things are put upon a right footing at first,--and the only right
footing is one which will meet the inevitable demands of the future as
well as the more noisy ones of the present,--all subsidiary relations
will of necessity arrange themselves by mutual adaptation, without
constantly calling for the clumsy interference of authority. We must
leave behind us no expectation and no fear of change, to unsettle men's
minds and dishearten their industry. Both the late master and the late
slave should begin on the new order of things with a sense of its
permanence on the one hand and its rightfulness on the other. They will
soon learn that neither intelligence can do without labor, nor labor
without intelligence, and that wealth will result only from a clearly
understood and reciprocally beneficial dependence of each upon the
other. Unless we make the black a citizen, we take away from the white
the strongest inducement to educate and enlighten him. As a mere
proletary, his ignorance is a temptation to the stronger race; as a
voter, it is a danger to them which it becomes their interest to
remove. It is easy to manage the mob of New York for the time with
grape-shot, but it is the power for evil which their suffrage gives
them that will at last interest all classes, by reform and education,
to make it a power for good.
Under the head of expediency comes also this other
consideration,--that, unless made citizens, the emancipated blacks,
reckoned as they must be in the basis of representation, and yet
without power to modify the character of the representatives chosen,
will throw so much more power into the hands of men certain to turn it
to their disadvantage, and only too probably to our own. This mass, if
we leave it inert, may, in any near balance of parties, be enough to
crush us; while, if we endow it with life and volition, if we put it in
the way of rising in intelligence and profiting by self-exertion, it
will be the best garrison for maintaining the supremacy of our ideas,
till they have had time to justify themselves by experience. Have we
endured and prosecuted this war for the sake of bringing back our old
enemies to legislate for us, stronger than ever, with all the
resentment and none of the instruction of defeat?
But as a measure of justice also, which is always the highest
expediency, we are in favor of giving the ballot to the freedmen. Our
answer to the question, What are we to do with the negro? is short and
simple. Give him a fair chance. We must get rid of the delusion that
right is in any way dependent on the skin, and not on an inward virtue.
Our war has been carried on for the principles of democracy, and a
cardinal point of those principles is, that the only way in which to
fit men for freedom is to make them free, the only way to teach them
how to use political power is to give it them. Both South and North
have at last conceded the manhood of the negro, and the question now is
how we shall make that manhood available and profitable to him and to
us. Democracy does not mean, to any intelligent person, an attempt at
the impossibility of making one man as good as another. But it
certainly does mean the making of one man's manhood as good as
another's and the giving to every human being the right of unlimited
free trade in all his faculties and acquirements. We believe the white
race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain
sufficient ascendency to prevent any serious mischief from the new
order of things. We admit that the whole subject bristles with
difficulties, and we would by no means discuss or decide it on
sentimental grounds. But our choice would seem to be between
unqualified citizenship, to depend on the ability to read and write, if
you will, and setting the blacks apart in some territory by themselves.
There are, we think, insuperable objections to this last plan. It would
put them beyond the reach of all good influence from the higher
civilization of the whites, without which they might relapse into
barbarism like the Maroons of Surinam, and it would deprive the whole
Southern country of the very labor it needs. As to any prejudices which
should prevent the two races from living together, it would soon yield
to interest and necessity. The mere antipathy of color is not so strong
there as here, and the blacks would form so very large a majority of
the laboring class as not to excite the jealousy of rivalry. We can
remember when the prejudice against the Celt was as strong in many of
the Free States as that against the African could ever be at the South.
It is not very long since this prejudice nearly gave a new direction to
the politics of the country. Yet, like all prejudices, it had not
coherence enough to keep any considerable party long together.
The objections to the plan are, of course, the same which lie against
any theory of universal suffrage. These are many and strong, if
considered abstractly; but we assume that theory to be admitted now as
the rule of our political practice, and its evils as a working system
have not been found so great, taking the country at large, as nearly to
outweigh, its advantages. Moreover, as we have said before, it compels
the redress of its own abuses, and the remedy is one which is a benefit
to the whole community, for it is simply to raise the general standard
of intelligence. It is superior, certainly, to the English system, in
which the body of the nation is alienated from its highest intellect
and culture. We think the objections are quite as strong to any
elective plan of government, for a select majority is as liable to be
governed by its interests and passions as any popular one. Witness the
elections at Oxford. Is the average wisdom or unselfishness of mankind
so high that there should be no narrow minds and no selfish hearts in
any body of electors, however carefully selected? The only infallible
sovereign on earth is chosen by the majority of a body in which passion
and intrigue and the influence (sometimes none of the purest) of
conflicting courts are certainly not inoperative. Man is perhaps not
the wisest of animals, but he has at least as keen a sense of his own
advantage in a hovel as in a palace, and what is for the interest of
the masses of the people is not very far from being for that of the
country. It is said, to be sure, that we are inadequately represented
in Congress; but a representative is apt to be a tolerably exact
exponent of the merits of his constituency, and we must look for relief
to the general improvement of our people in morals, manners, and
culture. We doubt if the freedmen would send worse members to Congress
than some in whose election merchants and bankers and even doctors of
divinity have been accomplices.
With the end of the war the real trial of our statesmanship, our
patriotism, and our patience will begin. The passions excited by it
will, no doubt, subside in due time, but meanwhile it behooves the
party in possession of the government to conciliate patriotic men of
all shades of opinion by a liberal, manly and unpartisan policy.
Republicans must learn to acknowledge that all criticisms of their
measures have not been dictated by passion or disloyalty, that many
moderate and honest men, many enlightened ones, have really found
reason for apprehension in certain arbitrary stretches of authority,
nay, may even have been opposed to the war itself, without being in
love with slavery, and without deserving to be called Copperheads. Many
have doubted the wisdom of our financial policy, without being
unpatriotic. It is precisely this class, dispassionate and moderate in
their opinions, whose help we shall need in healing the wounds of war
and giving equanimity to our counsels. We hope to see a course of
action entered upon which shall draw them to its support. In peace,
governments cannot, as in war, find strength in the enthusiasm and even
the passions of the people, but must seek it in the approval of their
judgment and convictions. During war, all the measures of the dominant
party have a certain tincture of patriotism; declamation serves very
well the purposes of eloquence, and fervor of persuasion passes muster
as reason; but in peaceful times everything must come back to a
specific standard, and stand or fall on its own merits. Our faith is
not unmixed with apprehension when we think of the immediate future,
yet it is an abiding faith nevertheless; and with the experience of the
last four years to sustain us, we are willing to believe almost
anything good of the American people, and to say with the saint,
_Credimus quia impossibile est_. We see no good reason why, if we
use our victory with the moderation becoming men who profess themselves
capable of self-government, conceding all that can be conceded without
danger to the great principle which has been at stake, the North and
the South should not live more harmoniously together in the future than
in the past, now that the one rock of offence has been blasted out of
the way. We do not believe that the war has tended to lessen their
respect for each other, or that it has left scars which will take to
aching again with every change of the political weather. We must bind
the recovered communities to us with hooks of interest, by convincing
them that we desire their prosperity as an integral part of our own.
For a long while yet there will be a latent disaffection, even when the
outward show may be fair, as in spring the ground often stiffens when
the thermometer is above the freezing point. But we believe, in spite
of this, that all this untowardness will yield to the gradual wooing of
circumstances, and that it is to May, and not December, that we are to
look forward. Even in our finances, which are confessedly our weakest
point, we doubt if the experience of any other nation will enable us to
form a true conception of our future. We shall have, beyond question,
the ordinary collapse of speculation that follows a sudden expansion of
paper currency. We shall have that shivering and expectant period when
the sails flap and the ship trembles ere it takes the wind on the new
tack. But it is no idle boast to say that there never was a country
with such resources as ours. In Europe the question about a man always
is, What _is_ he? Here it is as invariably, What does he _do_? And in
that little difference lies the security of our national debt for
whoever has eyes. In America there is no idle class supported at the
expense of the nation, there is no splendid poor-house of rank or
office, but every man is at work adding his share to the wealth, and to
that extent insuring the solvency, of the country. Our farm, indeed, is
mortgaged, but it is a mortgage which the yearly profits will pay off.