“Suppose they are emancipated, what then? Are they freemen in fact? Will they have the rights of freemen? Sir, such an idea is utterly fallacious. It will practically amount to nothing. You cannot enact the slave into a freeman by bill in Congress. A charter of his liberty may be engrossed, enrolled, and passed into a law, with all the formalities of legislation, and still he must remain virtually a slave.”[212]
Pursuing this same strain in a later debate on the Confiscation Bill, which provided for Emancipation in certain cases, the Senator said:—
“Sir, what will be the necessary and inevitable result of this policy, if it be carried into effect? It will be that Virginia, by this increase of the free negro population under the operation of this bill, will be driven not only to reënslave those who may be manumitted under the operation of the present bill, but also to reënslave the sixty thousand free negroes already there.… Sir, the evil will be unendurable, and the result will be the reënslavement of the slaves thus manumitted, as well as those already free in our State.”[213]
I quote these words with extreme pain. Their author is not known as a fanatic of Slavery. Therefore do they reveal the terrible peril against which Congress must provide.
“Once free, always free.” This is a rule of law and an instinct of humanity. It is a self-evident axiom, which only tyrants and slave-traders have denied. The brutal pretension thus flamingly advanced already puts us all on our guard. There must be no chance or loophole for such intolerable, Heaven-defying iniquity. Alas! there have been crimes in human history, but I know of none blacker than this. There have been acts of baseness, but I know of none more utterly vile. Against the possibility of such a sacrifice we must take a bond which cannot be set aside; and this can be found only in the powers of Congress.
Congress has already done much. Besides its noble Act of Emancipation, it has provided that every person guilty of treason, or of inciting or assisting the Rebellion, shall be “disqualified to hold any office under the United States”[214]; and by another Act it has provided, that every person, elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the Government of the United States, shall, before entering upon its duties, take and subscribe an oath or affirmation that he has “never voluntarily borne arms against the United States since he has been a citizen thereof,” or “voluntarily given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility thereto,” or “sought, or accepted, or attempted to exercise the functions of any office whatever, under any authority or pretended authority in hostility to the United States.”[215] This oath is a bar against return to national office of any taking part with the Rebels. It shuts out in advance the whole criminal company. But these same persons, rejected by the National Government, are left free to hold office in the States; and here is another motive to further action by Congress. The oath is well as far as it goes; more must be done in the same spirit.
But enough. The case is clear. Behold the Rebel States in arms against that paternal government to which, as the supreme condition of constitutional existence, they owe duty and love; and behold all legitimate powers, executive, legislative, and judicial, in these States, abandoned and vacated. It only remains that Congress should enter and assume the proper jurisdiction. If we are not ready to exclaim with Burke, speaking of revolutionary France, “It is but an empty space on the political map,” we may at least adopt the response hurled back by Mirabeau, that this empty space is a volcano red with flames and overflowing with lava-floods. But whether we deal with it as “empty space” or as “volcano,” the jurisdiction, civil and military, centres in Congress, to be employed for the happiness, welfare, and renown of the American people,—changing Slavery into Freedom, and present Chaos into a Cosmos of perpetual beauty and power.