“Don’t trouble yourself.” returned Vance. “Peek will be free without money and without price, and he knows it. Those iron wristbands you see are already filed apart.”
“Are there many such as he among the negroes?”
“Not many, I fear, either among blacks or whites,” replied Vance. “But, considering their social deprivations, there are more good men and true among the negroes—ay, among the slaves—than you of the North imagine. Your ideal of the negro is what you derive from the Ethiopian minstrels and from the books and plays written to ridicule him. His type is a low, ignorant trifler and buffoon, unfit to be other than a slave or an outcast. Thus, by your injurious estimate, you lend yourselves to the support and justification of slavery.”
“Would you admit the black to a social equality?”
“I would admit him,” replied Vance, “to all the civil rights of the white. There are many men whom I am willing to acknowledge my equals, whose society I may not covet. That does not at all affect the question of their rights. Let us give the black man a fair field. Let us not begin by declaring his inferiority in capacity, and then anxiously strive to prevent his finding a chance to prove our declaration untrue.”
“But would you favor the amalgamation of the races?”
“That is a question for physiologists; or, perhaps, for individual instincts. Probably if all the slaves were emancipated in all the Cotton States, amalgamation would be much less than it is now. The French Quadroons are handsome and healthy, and are believed to be more vigorous than either of the parent races from which they are descended.”
“Many of the most strenuous opponents of emancipation base their objections on their fears of amalgamation.”
“To which,” replied Vance, “I will reply in these words of one of your Northern divines, ‘What a strange reason for oppressing a race of fellow-beings, that if we restore them to their rights we shall marry them!’ Many of these men who cry out the loudest against amalgamation keep colored mistresses, and practically confute their own protests. To marriage, but not to concubinage, they object.”
“I see no way for emancipation,” said Berwick, “except through the consent of the Slave States.”