“Surely yes; for the people in rebellion are at once subjects and belligerents. They are public enemies, and as such are entitled only to such privileges as we may choose to concede. They are subjects, and as such must fulfil their obligations to the Republic.”
“But you say nothing of confiscation, Mr. Vance.”[confiscation, Mr. Vance.”]
“I would be as generous as possible in this respect, Mr. President. Loyal men who have been robbed by the secession fury must of course be reimbursed, and the families of those who have been hung for their loyalty must be provided for. I see no fairer way of doing this than by making the robbers give up their plunder, and by compelling the murderers to contribute to the wants of those they have orphaned. But beyond this I would be governed by circumstances as they might develop themselves. I would practice all the clemency and forbearance consistent with justice. Those landholders who should lend themselves fairly and earnestly to the work of substituting a system of paid labor for slavery should be entitled to the most generous consideration and encouragement, whatever their antecedents might have been. I would do nothing for vengeance and humiliation; everything for the benefit of the Southern people themselves and their posterity. Questions of indemnification should not stand in the way of a restored Union.”
“Undoubtedly, Mr. Vance, the interests of the masses, North and South, are identical.”
“That is true, Mr. President, but it is what the Rebel leaders try to conceal from their dupes. The most damnable effect of slavery has been the engendering at the South of that large class of mean whites, proud, ignorant, lazy, squalid, and brutally degraded, who yet feel that they are a sort of aristocracy because they are not niggers. Having produced this class, Slavery now sees it must rob them of all political rights. Hence the avowed plan of the Secession leaders to have either a close oligarchical or a monarchical government. The thick skulls of these mean whites (or if not of them, of their children) we must reach by help of the schoolmaster, and let them see that their interests lie in the elevation of labor and in opposition to the theories of the shallow dilettanti of the South, who, claiming to be great political thinkers and philosophers, maintain that capital ought to own labor, and that there must be a hereditary servile race, if not black, then white, in whom all mental aspiration and development shall be discouraged and kept down, in order that they may be content to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. As if God’s world-process were kept up in order that a few Epicurean gentlemen may have a good time of it, and send their sons to Paris to eat sumptuous dinners and attend model-artist entertainments, while thousands are toiling to supply the means for their base pleasures. As if a Frederick Douglas must be brutified into a slave in order that a Slidell may give Sybarite banquets and drive his neat span through the Champs Elysées!”
“What should we do with the blacks after we had freed them?”
“Let them alone! Let them do for themselves. The difficulties in the way are all those of the imagination.”
“I like the moderation of your views as to confiscation.”
“When the mass of the people at the South,” continued Vance, “come to see, as they will eventually, that we have been fighting the great battle of humanity and of freedom, for the South even more than for the North, for the white man even more than for the black, there will be such a reaction as will obliterate every trace of rancor that internecine war has begotten. But I have talked too much. I have occupied too much of your time.”
“O no! I delight to meet with men who come to me, thinking how they may benefit, not themselves, but their country. The steam-tugs you gave us off the mouths of the Mississippi we would gladly have paid thirty thousand dollars for. I wish I could meet your views in regard to the enlistment of black troops; but—but—that pear isn’t yet ripe. Failing that, you shall have any place you want in the Butler and Farragut expedition against New Orleans. As for your young friends,—what did you say their names are?”