NORTHERN DREAD OF FREE NEGROES
If the people of the North thus regarded their few negroes as a dangerous and perplexing element, how much more should the people of Virginia hesitate in face of the conditions and problems which confronted them? If Indiana and Illinois, with populations of over three million whites and less than twenty thousand blacks, felt constrained to deny free negroes the right to enter their states, how much more should their sister, Virginia, with only one million whites and nearly a half million black slaves, fear to add to her already large free negro population?
LINCOLN'S ESTIMATE OF THE DANGER
This sense of danger to their political and social well-being arising from the threatened presence of negroes in large numbers was felt by the whites of the free states even after two years of civil war had wrought its changes in sentiment, and Mr. Lincoln's first Proclamation of Emancipation had been given to the world. In his message to Congress in December, 1862, the President, in urging his plan for national aid to facilitate emancipation and deportation, endeavored to meet and allay these fears. He said:
"But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth and cover the whole land. Are they not already in the land? Will liberation make them more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the whole country, and there would be but one colored to seven whites. Could the one in any way disturb the seven?...
"But why should emancipation South send the free people North? People of any color seldom run unless there be something to run from. Heretofore colored people to some extent have fled North from bondage and now perhaps from both bondage and destitution. But if gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted they will have neither to flee from.... And in any event cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?"[[254]]
These appealing words of Mr. Lincoln show that in the very hour when the inspiring vision of emancipation was being held up before the people of the free states, they were balancing the satisfaction of its achievement with the dangers to their peace which might follow any substantial increase in their negro population.
"Cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?" were the reassuring words of Mr. Lincoln. Virginia had no such alternative.
| [233] | History of Slavery in Virginia, Ballagh, p. 132. |