“God will find a way,” returned Vance. “He infatuates before he destroys; and the infatuation which foreruns destruction has seized upon the leading men of the South. Plagiarizing from Satan, they have said to slavery, ‘Evil, be thou our good!’ They are bent on having a Southern Confederacy with power to extend slavery through Mexico into Central America. That can never be attempted without civil war, and civil war will be the end of slavery.”
“Would you not,” asked Berwick, “compensate those masters who are willing to emancipate their slaves?”
“I deny,” said Vance, “that property in slaves can morally exist. No decision of the State can absolve me from the moral law. It is a sham and a lie to say that man can hold property in man. The right to make the black man a slave implies the right to make you or me a slave. No legislation can make such a claim valid. No vote of a majority can make an act of tyranny right,—can convert an innocent man into a chattel. All the world may cry out it is right, but they cannot make it so. The slaveholder, in emancipating his slave, merely surrenders what is not his own. I would be as liberal to him in the way of encouragement as the public means would justify. But the loss of the planter from emancipation is greatly over estimated. His land would soon double in value by the act; and the colored freedmen would be on the soil, candidates for wages, and with incentives to labor they never had before.”
The bell for dinner broke in upon the conversation. It was not till evening that the parties met again on the upper deck.
“I have been talking with Peek,” said Berwick, “and to my dismay I find he was betrayed by the husband of my step-mother. You must help me cancel this infernal wrong.”
“I have laid my plans for taking all these negroes ashore at midnight at our next stopping-place,” replied Vance. “I am to personate their owner. The keepers of the boat, who have seen me so much with Hyde, will offer no opposition. He is already so drunk that we have had to put him to bed. He begged me to look after his niggers. Whiskey had made him sentimental. He wept maudlin tears, and wanted to kiss me.”
“Here’s a check,” said Berwick, “for twenty-five hundred dollars. Give it to Peek the moment he is free.”
Vance placed it in a small water-proof wallet.
What’s the matter?
A rush and a commotion on the deck! Captain Crane left the wheel-house, and jumped over the railing down to the lower deck forward, his mouth bubbling and foaming with oaths.