The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 3, March, 1864

'But we go farther, and say, that any other interference would not only be superfluous, but positively mischievous. To insure that slavery, when it dies, shall never rise again, you have got to depend largely upon the disposition of the Southern people. That disposition should not be needlessly embittered. It can't help becoming so if, as some propose, their States are reduced to the condition of mere territorial dependencies. Americans can never be satisfied to be underlings. Whatever the fortunes of war legitimately bring, they are sensible enough to submit to; but it is not in their spirit to consent to any permanent degradation. Undertake to deprive them permanently of their civil rights, and you simply make them your permanent enemies. Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable effect will be that you will only make them love slavery the more, and hate you the more. This could not always continue. State rights, sooner or later, would have to be restored. We don't believe that three years would elapse after the close of the war before the keeping those States in a territorial condition would be abandoned as an insufferable anomaly in our system of government. State rights once restored, the people, maddened by the thrall that had been put upon them, would be very likely to vindicate these rights by rehabilitating slavery. Every incentive of high pride and every impulse of low spite would combine to urge this; and the National Government would have no legitimate way of preventing it.

'It will never do to try to give slavery its lasting quietus by mere arbitrary force. To secure this we have got to rely in no small measure upon reason. We must never forget that just as Force is the natural ally of Slavery, just so Reason is the natural ally of Freedom. When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a fair chance to assert itself. Military authority over each reclaimed State should last until the majority of the people have made up their mind to resume, in good faith, their old relations to the Government, and have had a fair opportunity to canvass how that resumption shall best be inaugurated. Of course the machinery of the State Government cannot be given over to traitors; but whenever there is sound reason to believe that a fair loyal majority of the State want it, let them have it—and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery. If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out, and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will. For slavery, after having been crippled as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way.'

Compare, now, in the fair spirit of criticism, the beginning and the end of this unstatesman-like editorial. Slavery, we are emphatically told, is dying; first, because the presence of the war in its immediate vicinity is killing it; and, secondly, because free discussion, excited by the war and the presence of Northern influence incidental to the war, is killing it—therefore let us hasten to withdraw the military power, and the causes of free discussion, where, for a century, it has been annihilated until now, and has only now begun to exist, and leave in full activity all the causes of reaction and the reëstablishment of the old STATUS. 'There is not the slightest chance, whatever,' says the writer, 'of slavery being saved, IF PRESENT CAUSES CONTINUE.' Therefore hasten to discontinue present causes, by all means, and surrender the field to the operation of the old causes. 'The chain' of the slave 'must be broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes away.' Therefore hasten to restore the civil law to its old and tyrannical potency over the destiny of the slave. 'The institution must melt away as the war goes on.' Therefore, hasten not merely to finish the active stage of the war, but to surrender the power which victory will place in your hands to continue the same emancipating influences; and to surrender it into the hands of men avowedly hostile to your policy, and who have been conquered fighting for their franchise to enslave.

'Not only,' continues our editor, 'have slave codes interdicted, in every one of the Slave States, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a necessity.' Hasten, therefore, to reëstablish these engines of terrorism and the institution which inevitably demands their existence. Ignore and set aside the Proclamation of Emancipation; betray the auxiliary black man; throttle and destroy the incipient party of freedom in its birth; turn the Young South, just rising into existence as the friend of liberty and progress, over, stripped and unprotected, into the hands of the Old South, with its thongs, its thumbscrews, and its Lynch law; throw aside, the moment it is acquired, the power to civilize and regenerate the South—not because the war and the free discussion which accompany the war have killed slavery, but because they are killing it, and will be sure to kill it unless they are speedily withdrawn.

'But the war,' we are told, 'has ended all that. There can be no mobs where the bayonet governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans as it is in New York.'True: therefore, hasten to restore the reign of mobs, or you will hurt the feelings of the men who make the mobs. Withdraw speedily 'the general military law,' and its 'paramount' control, expressly in order that the operation of 'the arbitrary local laws' may be resumed. Urge up the measures which will put an end to the state of affairs in which 'the discussion of slavery is as free in New Orleans as it is in New York.'

'And in the Border States, where the civil laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that, by general consent, perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution.' This is true while a United States force is in the vicinity to overawe traitors—while the friends of freedom feel confident that they have the strength of a nation at their back to aid them in resisting the local tyranny; hasten, therefore, to remove these supports, and leave them to struggle single handed and hopelessly against an inveterate and hoary despotism, which knows no law higher than its own will; and which has always been competent to crush out every rising aspiration toward freedom; until the accidental advantages of the war encouraged that timid utterance of true American sentiment in those quarters which is just now beginning feebly to make itself heard and felt. Hasten, therefore, to withdraw that support at the instant of time when the local friends of freedom have just been induced to declare themselves, and so to become the unshielded victims of slaveholding vindictiveness the instant the provisional security of the new party derived from abroad ceases to exist. What would 'the dissatisfaction with slavery' from 'hostility to the rebellion' have amounted to in Maryland, as a power, against the haughty and overbearing authority of the slaveholding Despotism, at the commencement of the war, without the intervention of General Butler; or that of Missouri, without that of General Fremont? What would that same dissatisfaction with Slavery amount to at this very day even, in those States, against the reflex wave of pro-slavery influence and power, if all influence from the armies and authority of the United States were completely withdrawn? Or, granting even that in those two Border States, the most advanced of all, the most under ordinary influences from the Free States, there is already inaugurated an Anti-slavery Movement which would retain energy enough to carry on the struggle without foreign aid—which even is extremely doubtful; the case would stand wholly otherwise in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or Arkansas, where no well-constituted Party of Freedom has as yet achieved any successes, and where the slaveholding interest and desperation are ten times stronger than they are in the Border States.

''We say, then, says the Times writer, 'that even if the National Government had the right to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply to stand quiet and let those influences work.'

All this, urged for the purposes for which it is here urged, is simply crying, Peace! peace! when there is no peace. If these influences, the presence of the war power and free discussion, be to continue, very good. Then, indeed, is there a chance, amounting almost to a certainty, that Slavery will have to succumb, and all of these considerations, urged as a reason why the war power should be retained for an adequate period over the Slave States, even after their nominal submission, and free discussion encouraged and protected by that power—which we understand to be the policy recommended by General Butler—are consequent, logical, and patriotic; but put forth as reasons why we should hasten to surrender the influence over the destiny of man which has been so providentially, and yet with such immense sacrifice, placed in our hands, they are practically hostile to the vital purposes of the war, however honest and simple minded may be the individuals who recommend them.

Again: 'Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable result will be that you will only make them love slavery the more,' etc.

It is not our purpose to insist on the technical process of territorializing the conquered rebel States. What we do insist on is that the military authority, which the nation has so laboriously asserted and acquired over them, shall not be withdrawn until the natural and necessary and appropriate consequences of the war shall have been attained; and that among these is the inauguration of Freedom instead of the reinstitution of that hideous anomaly of the nations, American Slavery. We insist that the rising, but as yet the feeble and timid Freedom Party of the South, including the blacks and a growing number of the poor whites, so fast as they become rightly informed, with a small number of enlightened, generous, and noble-minded men of the planter class, who sympathize with freedom, and are truly loyal in sympathy and soul to American principles and the American Government, be regarded and treated as the new and loyal South; and not a trumped-up party, which may arise any day, of as bitter traitors as ever lived, but who, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, which is, at bottom, Slavery, and nothing else, under the present issue of war, shall give in a hollow and pretended profession of loyalty, in order to secure, by other means, the same end. Does this truly loyal party at the South anywhere as yet wish the withdrawal of the protection of the General Government, and desire to be turned over to the tender mercies of their false and subtle enemy—which are unheard-of cruelties? Let the representation of the thousand loyal men from Middle Tennessee, recently made to the President of the United States, answer. On the contrary, there is nothing which those men so greatly dread—nothing which so checks their more rapid development as a party—as the fear that they may be so abandoned before their work is sufficiently advanced to secure its completion.

The three years which the Times writer concedes to the existence of an anomaly in our Government, may be amply enough to accomplish all that is required. So far from imbittering the feelings of the true friends of the Union in the South, assurance of the continuance of such a protection over them, even for that length of time, would infuse new confidence and new activity into all their movements. It is clearly the right of the policeman to judge when the mob is effectually suppressed, and as much his duty not to allow himself to be surprised and over-mastered by a pretended and hollow submission for the sake of seizing an advantage, as it is to inflict effectual blows of his cudgel while the row is in its more flagrant stages of development. The United States, having interfered by force to suppress a national riot, has a clear right, and a bounden duty, not to abandon the region of the disturbance until the animus of rebellion is subdued as effectually as its open manifestation; and knowing that that animus is identical with the spirit, purposes, and designs of the slaveholding class—a conspiracy, in fine, to overthrow the Government in that sole behalf—it is alike bound effectually to cripple or actually to exterminate that malign influence.

Again says our writer under review: 'When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a chance to assert itself.' Very true, if the mode of doing so be not foolishly misunderstood. The error here is in speaking of the South as one, whereas from this time forward and for some years to come, there will be an Old South, rebellious at heart, malignant, defiant, cruel, and revengeful to the last degree—bold, accustomed to rule with unquestioned authority—and, when conquered, refusing to remain conquered, except as the grapple of the conqueror is still at its throat; and a New South, loyal, loving, and devoted to its deliverers, but timid, shrinking, and tentative of its powers—liberty-loving, and truly American in sentiment, but unused to the exercise of political supremacy, unorganized, and weak;—an old South, refusing every appeal to reason, and only thirsting for vengeance; and a new South, ready to reason and to be reasoned with, and looking gratefully to the National Government as its guide and protector in the unequal contest before it—more fearful to it than ever—at the close of the war. How, then, shall we 'give the reason of the South a chance to assert itself'? By withdrawing our support from our friends, and the friends of America, and of man, in the South, and turning them over, like sheep to the wolves, to their unreasoning and vindictive enemies; or by standing by them in the weakness of their first essay to depend on reason and justice in the place of force or fraud; by developing, in fine, the reason of the South, which has been for a century overridden and suppressed by the incubus of an organized despotism, from which there is now, for the first time, the chance of a redemption, if these friends of Southern reason do not commit a blunder in their understanding of the case?

'Whenever,' says the Times writer, 'there is sound reason to believe that a sound loyal majority of the State want it (reconstruction), let them have it—and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery.' That is to say, abandon the Proclamation of Emancipation, betray the colored man, who, trusting to our faith, is now enrolling himself in our armies; betray the timid friends of freedom, who, by our encouragement, have dared to proclaim their love of liberty, and subject themselves to inevitable banishment or extermination, unless the programme of a new free South be executed triumphantly and to the letter; furnish to the most malignant slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of 'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the rattlesnake. The most imbittering and offensive thing that can ever be done to those men is done the moment you pronounce the words of freedom and human rights, in conjunction with each other, as if they were the same thing. That done, every other measure grows mild. To territorialize the whole South, and place a satrap over every parish and county of it—saying no word for freedom—would be a gentle and conciliating procedure compared with the most innocent utterance of a mere sentiment in behalf of emancipation and the elevation of the negro to the status of a man. Why, then, strain at a gnat when we have already swallowed a camel? If we mean anything by Emancipation Proclamations, the organization of negro troops, or even by our own inherent love of liberty, nothing after that need ever be handled gingerly with the South. Every recommendation to abstain from giving her offence is simply a recommendation to recede, not only from our whole war policy now so happily inaugurated, but to recede from every genuine and efficient sentiment the Northern people may entertain, or ever have entertained, in behalf of the distinctively American idea: the freedom and equality before the law of all men.

'If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out,' continues our editor, 'and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will; for slavery, after having been crippled, as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way'.

Now it is precisely this simple-minded and easy credence that everything will go right if it be at once handed over to the management of the men who may have been whipped in the battle field—this overweening confidence on the part of good men, and intelligent men, too, in the ordinary sense of intelligence, at the North, which is the most dangerous feature of the whole matter. We are just entering upon the real crisis of the war, when the war, by many, will be thought finished. It is exceedingly doubtful whether in any single Border State the Anti-slavery Movement has received as yet any such impetus or gained any such secure foothold that it could maintain the struggle for a six months, if the influence growing out of the presence of the war in their midst were withdrawn, and the political power were remanded in full to the local authorities; and, in respect to the States farther South, and wholly committed to the institution, it is certain that Slavery has hardly received what would prove a serious scratch upon its epidermis, if such changes were now to take place.

Indeed, on the contrary, there was never a time when temptation to slaveholding was a third part what it is to-day, aside from the threat of danger hanging over it from the continuance of the war, and the supposed determination of the Northern conquerors to put an end to it. The vital principle of Slavery which overrides every other consideration, is the extra-profitable nature and state of slave-labor products. The writer has himself seen Slavery firmly seated in the saddle and unassailable in an exposed region of the South, with cotton at from eight to twelve cents on the pound, and the same institution trembling toward its downfall when cotton fell to four and a half and five cents on the plantation. What must then be its hold on the cupidity of Southern men when the condition of Slavery, by virtue of the same state of war which threatens its existence on the one hand, has caused the price of cotton to rule, on the other hand, from twenty-five to seventy-five cents a pound, and has affected, in a somewhat similar way, every other product of the sort! An immense premium is thus offered for the continuance of the institution, and the danger is not slight that our own Northern men, thrown into the South, would be seduced, in great numbers, by the temptation, into becoming themselves slavery propagandists, unless the exigencies of the war, the esprit du corps, and the solidarity of interests springing up between them and the negro soldiers, and the prompt and energetic activity of the Government in behalf of an emancipation policy were all to combine to prevent it. In talking of Slavery, its power, its weakness, or its prospects, men, unless they have been intimately mixed up with its workings, are apt to be reckoning without their host. Our own sentiment of justice in the matter, North, poor and feeble as it is in most of us, is immensely aided by the negative fact that our interests do not happen to be immediately involved adversely. Not one in ten thousand of Northern men or Europeans, thrown into the South previous to the war, ever withstood the infection of pro-slavery sentiment and action. Our soldiers do so now, only because they are in large bodies, because they are fighting the Southern men, and because they are becoming more and more identified with a distinct national policy in behalf of emancipation and the rights of man. Withdraw these causes, and the effects would be rapidly reversed. Northern officers and men could not be trusted to fraternize with the slave-holding aristocracy, previous to the time when the backbone of the institution of Slavery should have been effectually broken; not because they are bad men, but because they are men, and would act, under similar circumstances, as men—alike Northern, Southern, and European men—have acted in the years that are past. There is a far more reliable and trustworthy party of Southern anti-slavery men than are as yet their Northern allies; men who have suffered intensely from actual contact and struggle with the institution, and who have felt, in some measure, the steel of Slavery enter their own souls; but they are not numerous enough to stand without the aid of these same untrustworthy Northern auxiliaries, who already, at the first indication of incipient success for our arms, propose, like this writer, to remand them to the tender mercies of a Southern majority rule. It is the fear of this treachery which makes them so few as they are, and so weak. It is these men whom we wish to see sustained, recognized as the loyal and the new South, and aided in the work of reconstruction, when the somewhat distant period for it to be safe and wise shall have arrived. They are the men who will teach us wisdom, if we will follow their advice; and they, be assured of it, will not clamor for any early and thoughtless surrender of our present advantages, for fear of hurting the sensibilities of the South by imposing a sense of 'subordination.' With the agony of despair, such men would remonstrate against any such suicidal policy, and entreat the Government of the United States and the people of the North to stand by them in their great distress, through, until the end. While writing, the following newspaper paragraph attracts our attention, and is a fair expression of the truth we are seeking to inculcate:

'The Hon. Silas Casey, of Kentucky, brings news of the most intense feeling, on the subject of holding slaves in the Border States, among Union men. They contend that the restriction in the President's Proclamation has made Kentucky and Tennessee a 'national slave pen,' where slaves, fleeing from the 'confederate' States, are bought and sold by the thousand. He says the Unionists to a man are in favor of immediate and sweeping emancipation of all slaves within their borders—that there can be no protection for a Unionist as long as aristocratic secessionists are allowed to hold all their old slaves, and are protected in buying human beings, once freed by the President's Proclamation. The last and most important step to be taken by the Government, to insure Unionism in the Border States, is to emancipate the slaves of disloyalists in Kentucky and Tennessee. The military once removed from Kentucky, and again would commence the barbarism of slavery. Defenders of the Government would be murdered—freedom of speech be denied; the expulsion of Northern ministers, and the tar-and-feathering of Northern schoolmasters, for only preferring Union to secession, freedom to slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville, his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again, with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.'

The following comments are equally true:

'Again we call the attention of thoughtful men to the current phases of 'Border State' politics, and ask that they be deeply considered. If we open a hundred 'conservative' journals in succession, we shall find at least ninety of them asserting or assuming that the revolted States are to be reconciled to the Union by new concessions, new guarantees to slavery. But those States themselves emphatically repel this assumption. Every man in Delaware, in Maryland, in Tennessee, in Missouri, who is heartily and thoroughly anti-rebel is also anti-slavery, and nearly every one is for immediate, not gradual, emancipation. They were not Republicans; not one in twenty of them voted for Lincoln; they make no special pretensions to philanthropy; but they mean to live and die in the Union, and they do not choose to have their throats cut by rebels; so they desire that slavery should die, knowing by practical experience, by personal observation, that slavery and the rebellion are but two phases of the same thing—two names for one reality.'

Slavery, as things are, is neither 'crippled' nor 'half dead.' It is only a little sick, and threatened with being made more so, if the same effectual blows which have been dealt it are followed up hereafter with other blows still more effectual.

We have reason to believe that the writer of the Times article we have been reviewing, has passed some time with the Army of the Cumberland; that he has viewed the subject impartially from what he deems a large field of observation; and that he speaks honestly what he believes. But no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case. Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band of patriots—reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies—and he will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the confederacy is already knocked out; that Slavery is already dead, and cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc. With profound respect for General Grant as a man and a soldier, we would still prefer the opinion, on this point, of any earnest member of the young and feeble anti-slavery party of the South, who resides a few miles away from the actual reach of the authority and influence of a Federal army.

It is refreshing to know that to this opinion of the victorious general, of exceedingly doubtful value, upon the specific point in question, he adds these memorable and patriotic words:

'I never was an Abolitionist, not even what would be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not, therefore, be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.'

Almost the only men in the nation who are really competent to judge when Slavery is really dead, in any region, are those Northern and Western anti-slavery men who have come into long and deadly collision with its spirit and power in Kansas and upon the western border of Missouri. Even Northern and Eastern Abolitionists, better versed perhaps in the theory of the subject, would prove very incompetent if matched in practical hostility with slaveholding opinion and might—slaveholding vindictiveness, cunning, treachery, and recklessness of every consideration, human or divine, but the gaining of their one end, the retention of their hold over the slave.

It is again refreshing, in the midst of the open or covert defence and protection among us of the surviving remnant of Slavery at the South, granting for the moment that it is now reduced to that, and in the midst of such easy and over-credulous and mistaken assumptions of its complete, virtual destruction already, by undoubted friends of freedom, as in the case of the Times editor, General Grant, and numerous others, to listen to such hearty utterances, in the keynote of the right policy, as were made by Secretary Chase in his recent speech at Cincinnati, and to be able to believe that they foreshadow the course of the Administration in this trying epoch of our country's history. We quote the following report:

'It was never intended to interfere with States that were loyal. This Proclamation comes up as a great feature in this war. In my judgment the Proclamation was the right thing in the right place, and without it I am just as sure as I am of my own existence that we could not have made the progress we have made. And I hold that the man who denounces the Proclamation either speaks ignorantly, speaks about that of which he knows little or nothing, or else he really desires that the rebellion should succeed.

'There are two classes of States in the South; there is the class of States that is affected by the Proclamation, and a class of States that is not. With this last class of States, which is not affected by the Proclamation, we have simply nothing to do, except to bid God speed to the unconditional Union men of those States, that they will do their own work in their own way and in their own time, and all we have to do is to stand by them.

'But in the States which are affected by the Proclamation the case is different. Either the Proclamation was a great, monstrous sham, and an imposition in the face of the world, or else that Proclamation was an effectual thing, and there are no slaves to-day in the rebel States. They are all enfranchised by the Proclamation, for what says it? All the slaves of these States are declared now and forever free, and the executive power is pledged to the maintenance of their freedom. If it were not so it would be a national imposture, and I would no more be guilty of that piece of infamy than I would steal into your house at night and rob your pantry. But what have we to do with this Proclamation in the rebellious Slave States? It is a very simple thing: just simply recognise the Union men who remain in those States. Such men as Mr. Flanders, and Mr. May, and a whole host of others, who were known as slaveowners, are now satisfied that the Union men of the South must see to it that slavery must never be permitted to be reëstablished in those States. Take such a man as the Hon. Charles Anderson. When he went home and stood up for the Union, what did the slave aristocracy do for him? They drove him from the State, and his wife and little ones were obliged to take shelter in the bush. And so with multitudes of Union men in Texas at the present day. But all of them wish to get back and establish a Free State in Texas; because, they say, no other than a Free State can ever protect them from the enemies of human freedom, and, I was going to say, of human nature. Again, in Florida there were many who were driven away who are now anxious to return. Is there a man here who wants these noble, generous Union men of the South to go back to be trampled under foot by restored rebels! Let them go back, but let them go back under the ægis of the American Union, and the protection of the Government pledged to them, and then they will take care to settle this question of slavery. They will amend the Constitution so as to put the slavery question where it ought to be. When that is done, who is going to talk about the Proclamation? You have here, my fellow citizens, an intelligent statement, as it seems to me, of the manner in which this thing can be settled: simply by standing by the unconditional Union men—who almost all of them have embraced the doctrine of emancipation in the Border States—and standing by the Union men in the rebellious States, and letting them protect themselves against the institution of slavery.'

At this stage of the present writing, and having just transferred these manly, patriotic, and statesmanlike sentiments to our columns, hoping that they might foreshadow the fixed policy of the Administration, of which Mr. Chase is so able and distinguished a member, we are overtaken by more than a full fruition of the hope in the publication of the President's Message and Proclamation of Amnesty to the South, upon the sole condition of the perpetual maintenance of the Proclamation of Emancipation issued a year ago; in other words, upon the condition of the total and definitive extinction of Slavery in the South. The men of the South who are ready for this are to be recognized as the loyal citizens, the New South—precisely what ought to be done. The machinery of the old State Governments is to remain intact, but to be turned over to this regenerated Southern party for administration. The whole military and civil force of the Union is to retain its guardianship over the South, during the transition, and to remain pledged to the maintenance of the status of freedom united with loyalty, until, by the growth and stability of the new order of things, the conquered territory shall dispense with its continued intervention. The plan devised by the President is admirable, and symptoms already exist that, like so many other of his leading measures, it is destined to meet with unbounded acceptance and popularity, from even the most diverse and disharmonious quarters. Trusting, therefore, that the practical administration of the war is drifting into the right policy, based on the true theory of its causes and legitimate termination, we may leave these merely political and military questions, and revert, in conclusion, to the possible remaining eventualities of the war. These may be, for the time, (1.) Seemingly prosperous and fortunate, or, (2.) Seemingly accompanied with disaster, discouragement, and dismay—ulterior even to the eventual triumph of our arms over the open enemies of the existing order of things.

Firstly, then, it may happen, that from this time out we shall be more and more decisively triumphant over the 'rump' of the rebellion still extant in the South; that the new policy of emancipation now so favorably inaugurated may work like a magical charm, and that among the happy and startling surprises to which we are daily becoming addicted, may be that of an unexpected readiness in the exhausted and repentant South to acquiesce in the new order of things; that our new financial scheme may develop germs of commercial prosperity more than adequate to compensate for all the strain upon our national energy and resources imposed by the war; that an immense and unparalleled expansion of national prosperity, hardly marred by the ripple of our financial encumbrances, may be in waiting for the future United States of America, and lie spread out in the immediate future before us; that untold wealth may be unearthed from our mines, marvellous discoveries and inventions made to increase our manufactures and means of locomotion, and new sources of learning and art and practical action be opened.

Suppose even less brilliant and rapid results. Suppose that the war lingers; that numerous and desperate battles have yet to be fought, and some reverses to be endured; but that we continue to hold the heart of the South up to our present lines in Georgia and East Tennessee; that the new system of things is gradually established and becomes solidified within the States already possessed: even this state of things, if providentially enforced on us after our best exertions have been put forth to succeed, may, again, unexpectedly prove to have concealed under seeming failure a more fortunate termination of our herculean work. Perhaps there is even yet not enough national virtue among us to leaven the whole lump, and thus, by being delayed of our too greedy aspirations for success, we may only the more surely succeed. A halt at this period of the war was foreshadowed, it will be remembered by the reader, in the earlier portion of this series of papers, written more than two years ago. At any rate, if the remaining resistance of the rebel government should prove more obstinate and prolonged than is now generally anticipated, let there be no discouragement, and no serious disappointment. Remember again, in that event, that our supreme triumphs are moral and social, for which our military successes are merely a basis; and that moral and social changes demand time to be consolidated and secured. Immense changes are being rapidly effected in the public sentiment and the prospective action of the reconquered portions of the South; but such changes are not made in a day; and some retardation of the national aspiration for a speedy termination of the war may prove our providential security against evils which, our own precipitancy might possibly otherwise incur. The retention of our present hold, the gradual but slow progress to a complete final conquest, and the steady assimilation of the reintegrated portions of the South with our Northern and the truly American character and sentiment, would still, therefore, deserve to be reckoned upon the side of seeming or obvious success.

But on the other hand, let us consider, for a moment, the other alternative—that of apparent disaster, incurred from the war, not so much in the light of overwhelming military defeats, which need hardly now to be seriously apprehended, as from financial exhaustion and other secondary causes introduced into the working of our national and social life through the operation and influence of the war. Mr. Cobden, undoubtedly a friend of our nation, and a shrewd observer of the world's affairs on the basis of experience, or a knowledge of the past, warns us to look forward to a period of almost utter prostration after the war shall have terminated, and to a train of serious consequences from the terrific strain put by it upon our energies and resources. Forebodings of a similar kind haunt the imaginations of many of our own citizens. The history of past wars and their results justify the anticipation. Perchance all this may prove an unnecessary fear. It may happen that the almost boundless recuperative energies of this young American civilization of ours may be destined to astonish our enemies, our friends, and ourselves, as much as the extent of our resources for action have already done—that the strain put upon us, instead of enfeebling us in the least, has been merely a healthy exercise for the growing muscles and thews of a young giant just now ripening into a first manhood, and never heretofore called upon for any adequate exertion to display his strength. We once heard an enthusiastic and progressive orator, referring to the marvels of modern development, utter, with a sublime and audacious eloquence, the startling assertion that 'Experience is a fool.' There is a sense, no doubt, in which the sentiment is true. Neither the growth, nor the inherent power, nor the elasticity of the rebound from seeming exhaustion, nor the immense acceleration of the rapidity of the future career of the American people, is to be safely measured by a reference to what has occurred with former nationalities, in other and different times. Our experience of the future, whatever it may be, will be, no doubt, essentially different from any of the past.

But assume, on the contrary, that the prediction is essentially well founded; that we have before us, in the immediate future, a period of extreme exhaustion, depression, and even of temporary discouragement in the public mind. All this need not, to the philosophic mind, cause the slightest apprehension of permanent evil results—of any serious check even, to our inevitable destiny, as the heirs of unbounded prosperity and the leaders of the vanguard of the progress of the world. A halt, in this sense, in the rapidity of our career, would be only the necessary price of our immense and invaluable achievement, the elimination of chattel slavery from the constitution of our social and political life. We have still other and great social evils remaining behind. The scientific and harmonious adjustment of the relations of capital to labor, of the employers to the employed, in the constitution of our free competitive society as it will still remain after Slavery is dead, is the next great practical question which will force itself upon our attention, and insist upon being definitively settled, before we can enter upon that ulterior triumphant national development which is reserved, in the decrees of destiny, for us as a people. This problem, seemingly so difficult, will be found unexpectedly easy of solution, so soon as the thinking and practical mind of the people is seriously called to its consideration. It is worthy of observation, that periods of great pecuniary depression are favorable to the progress of ideas. It is written in the Providence of God that the American people must, within the few years to come, solve the whole problem of justice to the laboring man; must, indeed, accept its office as the Champion and the Illustrator, in a practical way, of Universal Justice, in all the relations of life. Are we prepared to enter on this career, intelligently, lovingly, and with voluntary alacrity, from affection to the True and the Good; or must we be again scourged into the consideration of great questions lying immediately in our way, by the providential inflictions of disaster and distress?

We can now see easily enough, that had we been ready and desirous, as a people, to do justice to the black man, we should have escaped the horrors of a great war. We may predict, with the assurance of a religious faith, backed, we might almost affirm, by the certainty of a scientific demonstration, that if we are already sufficiently prepared to be simply just, we shall be saved from the serious infliction of more national suffering; and that if, on the contrary, this preparation of the heart and the head has not been wrought in us by what we have already endured, we shall be called directly and continuously to the suffering of more and perhaps greater inflictions. 'Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth,' but not blindly nor uselessly, and not, therefore, after the right frame of mind has been wrought in the subject of the punishment. The law is precisely the same, whether we speak theologically or from the profoundest philosophical principles; and it may almost be said that the American people have only to choose whether they will immediately enter, with the close of the war, upon a higher career of prosperity, or whether they will endure an additional term of tuition in the school of adversity. These words may seem mystical, unaccompanied with further illustration and elaboration of the ideas, but it is not the place here to pursue them.

Let us proceed with the supposition that we have before us, at the conclusion of this war, a period of great national suffering. Such periods, we have already said, are favorable to the development of thought. We may add, they are alike favorable to the growth of earnest purpose. Through suffering we are perfected. Thought and high purpose are secure bases of noble achievement. If we are not yet prepared to be inducted into our national mission, through providential favor, then let us come to it through the inverse method: through Ulterior and Reactionary Consequence.

It may be that we are to endure still more grievous afflictions than pecuniary and commercial revulsion and depression. Our political constitution still bears in its bosom, even after Slavery is removed, dangerous seeds of anarchy and prospective revolution. Within the two years past, grave mutterings, to which American ears have been heretofore altogether unused, have been heard in various quarters, touching the superior advantages of 'strong government,' the speakers, mostly of the higher or wealthier order of life, meaning thereby, the old and retrograde forms of monarchy, or something of that sort. Periods of disaster tend to reveal a latent lack of confidence in the permanency of existing things. Investigations in Sociology impeach the wisdom of our institutions, in common with that of all others that have been tried in the past, from another point of view. Periods of distress and privation stimulate the turbulence of the 'dangerous classes.' All national experience reveals, in fine, the existence, in the very nature of human society, of great antagonistic principles struggling with each other in mighty conflict, and with which no political or governmental arrangements heretofore extant have been adequate rightly to cope.

The great and bloody contest with Slavery, now going on, is an instance of such a conflict; and the fact that we, in the midst of this nineteenth century, had arrived at the knowledge of no better solution of it than an appeal to the old, barbarous, uncertain, and terrible ordeal of battle, is an illustration of the incompetency in question. Slavery, bad as it is, is the representative of a great social principle, which, separated from the special mode of its manifestation, has in it that which is good and right. Mr. Cobden justly characterizes the great American war as an insurrection of aristocracy against the principle of democracy. But aristocracy is not wholly wrong, nor is democracy wholly right, in the nature and constitution of things. These are two great antagonistic principles, when sifted to the bottom; one the principle of Order, through Subordination, the soul of Conservatism; and the other the principle of Freedom, through Individuality, the soul of Progression. Neither will ever expunge or expel the other from the constitution of man, individually or collectively; and it pertains to Science, the Science of Politics, based on the Unity of the Sciences below that level, to be arrived at by humanity in the future, to discover and lead in the complete harmony and reconciliation between the two. The writer of these papers has in manuscript a labored document upon the Slavery question from this more radical and philosophical point of view, which was prepared just previous to the outbreak of the existing war, in the hope of attracting the leading minds, North and South, to the peaceable and scientific solution of the whole Slavery question. But the antagonism was too far advanced, passions too much aroused, the popular ignorance of the existence of higher methods of solution too dense, and the crisis too imminent for the existence of any demand for such considerations then; and the publication of the document was withheld. In it were shown the significance of Slavery as a Fact in History and a Principle in Nature; its Compensations and Advantages; its positive value, in fact, in the larger sense, in the development of human society on the planet; then its destiny to give way in our advancing civilization to the higher doctrine of abstract rights and individual culture through intellectual means; and again, the insufficiency of the latter doctrine, when taken for the whole truth; and finally, to show how, by the intervention of the science of the subject, the value of both the Principles in conflict could be extracted and made coöperative, and their evils completely neutralized. The world not being ripe for the adoption of the superior and rational methods here intimated for the adjustment of our difficulties—the readiness of one party even, without the equal readiness of the other, being inadequate—the crisis and the conflict could not be averted; and that again being the case, it is of the utmost importance that the second in order of the two adverse principles, the principle of democracy, be completely triumphant; not because it is more true, but because it is a more advanced truth, and one step nearer, therefore, to the final solution, which will then lap back, and subsume and assimilate and reconcile the whole family of fundamental principles upon which the existence of human society is inexpugnably based. It is upon this lower ground of adaptation to the exigency of the age and the occasion, and as a means to the development of still higher truths, that we urge the inestimable importance of the effectual conquest over the South by the North.

But the two Principles, thus brought face to face with each other, in deadly array, under the present guise of chattel slavery and republican freedom, are not extinguished in the world, nor in America even, nor are they to be permanently reconciled with each other by any outcoming whatsoever of the present war. These principles are the Aristocratic and the Democratic; the principle of conservative order and progressive freedom. Both are vital and essential forces, ever living, ever active; always antagonistic; never reconciled in the past; never to be reconciled in the future, till it be done finally, effectually, and forever, through the SCIENCE of the subject. By the contingencies of this war still future, by the lingering and disastrous sequelæ of the war, or by other and possible eventualities not yet sufficiently developed to be distinctly cognizable, the inherent and unconquerable antagonism (until reconciled through science) of the great opposing forces in human society is liable to be burst upon us with a conflagration in comparison with which even the devastations of the present war will seem trifling. The writer of these papers anticipated and predicted for a long time, and has not yet fully ceased to anticipate, that the present conflict may gradually shape itself into a desperate and universal struggle, North and South, between these two principles, in their bald, undisguised, and unmitigated hostility; that, in other words, as a party of freedom should be developed at the South, there would be developed pari passu at the North a great reactionary party; assimilating the elements of a bogus democracy and all those who by organization or position are inherently and overweeningly aristocratic; a party bold, powerful, and desperate enough to bring home the civil war to our own doors; in other words, that the war would become a war wholly of Ideas; and those defined down to their sharpest and most ultimate differences of logical significance. In that case, the events of the French Revolution would have been, or will be, repeated in America, on a more gigantic scale. Warning symptoms have already appeared among us of the possibilities of all this. If it be in the good providence of God that we are to escape this terrible ordeal—if it be permitted that this cup of national evils pass from us—it can only be that we are a step farther on in the completion of our education, as a nation, than was obviously revealed to the investigation of the observer; that, as a people, we are nearer to a genial and willing acceptance of truth and obedience to the dictates of justice than appeared.

Still the conflict of principles endures in the world at large—the Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy, and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism, with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during the thirty years past; so, for the whole century gone by, the threatening cloud of the final conflict between the two great governing ideas in the world has been gathering. Occasional sharp and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage—not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently prevailed, and are we in truth prepared to investigate with sobriety, accept with simple honesty, and faithfully to practise the lessons of wisdom which the experience of the past or the new discoveries of the present or the future may bring? The religious world is becoming deeply penetrated with the conviction that we are, in the world at large, upon the verge of great events—that we are nearing the termination of an Old Dispensation and the commencement of a New; without, perhaps, defining very clearly, or attempting even to define distinctly to the imagination the nature of the change. The deepest philosophy of the age forecasts similar eventualities for an early day and for the whole earth. Thus it is that the investigation of The Great American Crisis, actual and urgent, might properly lead us up to the consideration of a Great World Crisis, impending and probable. On some other occasion it may be thought proper to give to this latter subject a distinct and more elaborate treatment. The object which we have proposed in the present series is now sufficiently accomplished, and the writer takes leave of the reader, with a profound conviction that to the anxious cry, What of the night? the answer, All is well, can be conscientiously returned. Even should the seemingly disastrous features sketched above in the alternative programme of our national future yet providentially reveal themselves in the scroll of our nation's history, let not the patriot or the lover of mankind for a moment despair. It will be but the intensified darkness preceding the light—the crisis of a deep-seated disease prognosticating health. The destiny of America is the destiny of man; and that is, that we come soon into the inheritance of new glories—an unlimited development and prosperity, founded on Religion married to Science, eventuating in the reconciliation of Order and Progression, in Universal Justice, and in the elevation, protection, mutual coöperation and happiness of all.

THISTLE-DOWN

Pale and fleecy, ghosty and white,
Onward borne in their unknown flight—
Flimsy and fragile, pure and fair—
Mystic things the thistles are.

Drifting about on a windy day—
Ghosty children at their play—
Revelling up above the trees,
Hither and thither on the breeze.

Slow and sadly, how they fly,
Chasing shadows in the sky!
Never resting, never still,
Through the valley, o'er the hill.

Walking round o'er the churchyard mould,
Up above the bosoms cold;
Flitting past each marble door,
Sadly breathing: 'Gone before!'