The impracticability of African colonization[5] had long since become
a foregone conclusion, so far as it could be made applicable to the
present or prospective transfer of 4,000,000 of negroes from this
republic to Liberia. A mathematical solution of that problem shows the
cost of purchase and transportation to be no less a sum than
$2,400,000,000, or ten times the amount of all the gold and silver
coin in the United States. The purchase of these Negroes, alone,
would cost $2,000,000,000, or eight times the amount of all our coin;
and if we add to this the cost of transportation to Central America,
the entire cost would not be less than $2,200,000,000. It will be seen
that one scheme is as practicable as the other; and the alternative
remains, of either robbing the people of nearly half the States of the
Union of their property, or the Negro must remain a slave. No sane man
will say that the purchase of this property is practicable or
possible. Fancy, if you please, the Negroes bought and paid for; the
estates of all the people of this country involved in the vain chimera
of transferring to our Southern States, in remuneration, all the coin
in Europe and America, and all that will be added thereto in a hundred
years to come, and you have a picture not very suggestive of
practicability or expediency.
But, even if the citizens of our Southern States should magnanimously
propose the totally improbable act of voluntary and gratuitous
manumission of their slaves, for the purpose of elevating them to
political equality, what would be the effect upon our country? Three
millions and a half of Negroes let loose upon our community, in
competition, in the main departments of industry, with free white
labor. Or would you, in accordance with the legislation of many of the
States, exclude the negro from the Northern, Middle, and Western
States, and the Territories, and thus, by confining him to the South,
give him political preponderance over the white man in many of the
States of the Union? Imagine the pure crystal pillars of this temple
of freedom turned to ebony; the radiant eyes of Freedom's Goddess
shocked at the gloomy spectacle of symbolic night, and suffused with
tears at such a desecration of her shrine!