“In my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed or war. I am not in favor of such a course; and I may say in advance that there will be no bloodshed, unless it be forced upon the Government, and then it will be compelled to act in self-defence.”[213]
And so issue was joined.
It was plain from the first cannon-shot, that the Rebellion was nothing but Slavery in arms; but such was the power of Slavery, even in the Free States, that months elapsed before the giant criminal was directly assailed. Generals in the field were tender towards it, as if it were a church, or a work of the fine arts. Only under the teaching of disaster was the country moved. The first step in Congress followed the defeat at Bull Run. Still the President hesitated. Disasters thickened and graves opened, until at last the country saw that by justice only could we hope for Divine favor, and the President, who leaned so closely upon the popular heart, pronounced that great word by which slaves were set free. Let it be named forever to his glory, that even tardily he grasped the thunderbolt under which the Rebellion staggered to its fall; that, following up the blow, he enlisted colored citizens as soldiers, and declared his final purpose never to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor to return into Slavery any person free by the terms of that instrument, or by any Act of Congress,—saying, grandly, “If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to reënslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”[214]
It is sometimes said that the Proclamation was of doubtful constitutionality. If such criticism does not proceed from sympathy with Slavery, it evidently proceeds from prevailing superstition with regard to this idol. Future jurists will read with astonishment that such a flagrant wrong could be considered at any time as having any rights which a court was bound to respect, and especially that rebels in arms could be considered as having any title to the services of people whose allegiance was primarily due to the United States. But, turning from these conclusions, it seems obvious that Slavery, standing exclusively on local law, without support in natural law, must have fallen with the local government, both legally and constitutionally: legally, inasmuch as it ceased to have any valid legal support; and constitutionally, inasmuch as it came at once within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Constitution, where Liberty is the supreme law. The President did not act upon these principles, but, speaking with the voice of authority, said, “Let the slaves be free.” What Court and Congress hesitated to declare he proclaimed, and thus enrolled himself among the world’s Emancipators.
From the Proclamation of Emancipation, placing its author so far above human approach that human envy cannot reach him, I carry you for one moment to our Foreign Relations. The convulsion here was felt in the most distant places,—as at the great earthquake of Lisbon, when that capital seemed about to be submerged, there was commotion of the waters in our Northern lakes. All Europe was stirred. There, too, was the Slavery question in another form. In an unhappy moment, under an ill-considered allegation of “necessity,”—which Milton tells us was the plea by which the Fiend “excused his devilish deeds,”—England accorded to Rebel Slavery the rights of belligerence on the ocean, and then proceeded to open her ports, to surrender her workshops, and to let loose her merchant ships in aid of this wickedness: forgetting all relations of alliance and amity with the United States, forgetting all logic of English history, forgetting all distinctions of right and wrong, and forgetting, also, that a New Power founded on Slavery was a moral monster, with which a just nation could have nothing to do. To appreciate the character of this concession, we must comprehend clearly the whole, vast, unprecedented crime of the Rebellion, taking its complexion from Slavery. Undoubtedly it was criminal to assail the Unity of this Republic, and thus destroy its peace and impair its example in the world; but the attempt to build a New Power on Slavery as a corner-stone, and with no other declared object of separate existence, was more than criminal,—or rather it was a crime of that untold, unspeakable guilt, which no language can depict and no judgment can be too swift to condemn. The associates in this terrible apostasy might rebuke each other in the words of an old dramatist:—
“Thou must do, then,
What no malevolent star will dare to look on,
It is so wicked; for which men will curse thee
For being the instrument, and the blest angels