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]]
VIEWS OF DOUGLAS AND SHERMAN
Stephen A. Douglas, speaking at Ottawa, Ill., August 21st, 1858, said:
"For one I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I believe this Government was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever; and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men,—men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other inferior races."[[239]]
General William T. Sherman, writing in July, 1860, said: