unlikely the immediate effectual enfranchisement of the slaves: the
President's proclamation will reach with but little efficacy beyond the
mere borders of the Southern States. The war is assuming an aspect of
indefinite duration; and it is difficult to conceive what will be the
condition of the blacks, freed _de jure_ but by no means _de facto_, in
the vast interior regions of the Southern States, as long as the struggle
raging all round their confines does not penetrate within them. Each of
the combatants is far too busily absorbed in the furious strife to afford
thought, leisure, or means, either effectually to free the slaves or
effectually to replace them in bondage; and in the meantime their
condition is the worst possible for the future success of either
operation. If the North succeeds in subjugating the South, its earliest
business will be to make the freedom of the slaves real as well as
nominal, and as little injurious to themselves as possible. If, on the
other hand, the South makes good its pretensions to a separate national
existence, no sooner will the disseverment of the Union be an established
fact than the slaveholders will have to consolidate once more the system
of their 'peculiar institution,' to reconstruct the prison which has half
crumbled to the ground, and rivet afresh the chains which have been all
but struck off. This will be difficult: the determination of the North to
restrict the area of slavery by forbidding its ingress into future
territories and States has been considered by the slaveholders a wrong,
and a danger justifying a bloody civil war; inasmuch as, if under those
circumstances they did not abolish slavery themselves in a given number of
years, it would infallibly abolish them by the increase of the negro
population, hemmed with them into a restricted space by this _cordon
sanitaire_ drawn round them. But, bad as this prospect has seemed to
slaveholders (determined to continue such), and justifying--as it may be
conceded that it does from their point of view--not a ferocious civil war,
but a peaceable separation from States whose interests were declared
absolutely irreconcileable with theirs, the position in which they will
find themselves if the contest terminates in favour of Secession will be
undoubtedly more difficult and terrible than the one the mere anticipation
of which has driven them to the dire resort of civil war. All round the
Southern coast, and all along the course of the great Mississippi, and all
across the northern frontier of the Slave States, the negroes have already
thrown off the trammels of slavery. Whatever their condition may be--and
doubtless in many respects it is miserable enough--they are to all intents
and purposes free. Vast numbers of them have joined the Northern invading
armies, and considerable bodies of them have become organised as soldiers
and labourers, under the supervision of Northern officers and employers;
most of them have learned the use of arms, and possess them; all of them
have exchanged the insufficient slave diet of grits and rice for the
abundant supplies of animal food, which the poorest labourer in that
favoured land of cheap provisions and high wages indulges in to an extent
unknown in any other country. None of these slaves of yesterday will be
the same slaves to-morrow. Little essential difference as may yet have
been effected by the President's proclamation in the interior of the
South in the condition of the blacks, it is undoubtedly known to them, and
they are waiting in ominous suspense its accomplishment or defeat by the
fortune of the war; they are watching the issue of the contest of which
they well know themselves to be the theme, and at its conclusion, end how
it will, they must be emancipated or exterminated. With the North not only
not friendly to slavery, but henceforward bitterly hostile to
slaveholders, and no more to be reckoned upon as heretofore, it might have
been infallibly by the Southern white population in any difficulty with
the blacks (a fact of which the negroes will be as well aware as their
former masters)--with an invisible boundary stretching from ocean to
ocean, over which they may fly without fear of a master's claim following
them a single inch--with the hope and expectation of liberty suddenly
snatched from them at the moment it seemed within their grasp--with the
door of their dungeon once more barred between them and the light into
which they were in the act of emerging--is it to be conceived, that these
four millions of people, many thousands of whom are already free and
armed, will submit without a struggle to be again thrust down into the
hell of slavery? Hitherto there has been no insurrection among the
negroes, and observers friendly and inimical to them have alike drawn from
that fact conclusions unfavourable to their appreciation of the freedom
apparently within their grasp; but they are waiting to see what the North
will really achieve for them. The liberty offered them is hitherto
anomalous, and uncertain enough in its conditions; they probably trust it
as little as they know it: but slavery they _do_ know--and when once they
find themselves again delivered over to _that_ experience, there will not
be ONE insurrection in the South; there will be an insurrection in every
State, in every county, on every plantation--a struggle as fierce as it
will be futile--a hopeless effort of hopeless men, which will baptise in
blood the new American nation, and inaugurate its birth among the
civilised societies of the earth, not by the manumission but the massacre
of every slave within its borders.
Perhaps, however, Mr. Jefferson Davis means to free the negroes. Whenever
that consummation is attained, the root of bitterness will have perished
from the land; and when a few years shall have passed blunting the hatred
which has been excited by this fratricidal strife, the Americans of both
the Northern and Southern States will perceive that the selfish policy of
other nations would not have so rejoiced over their division, had it not
seemed, to those who loved them not, the proof of past failure and the
prophecy of future weakness.
Admonished by its terrible experiences, I believe the nation will reunite
itself under one government, remodel its constitution, and again address
itself to fulfill its glorious destiny. I believe that the country sprung
from ours--of all our just subjects of national pride the greatest--will
resume its career of prosperity and power, and become the noblest as well
as the mightiest that has existed among the nations of the earth.