Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and Godlike reason,
To rust unused.”
What a dangerous sentiment to come by any chance to a slave! Is it not? Are you, then, prepared to burn your Shakespeare? I will not ask if you will have another book “expurgated,” of all passages the tendency of which is to set the bondmen free.
If the security of life and property at the South must for ever be dependent on the thoroughness with which the negro population is prevented from acquiring knowledge; from thinking of themselves and for themselves, it will never be felt to be greater than it is to-day. Efforts made to increase this security will of themselves occasion agitation, and agitation must counteract those efforts. Knowledge, knowledge of what is going on elsewhere, of the condition of men elsewhere, of what is thought elsewhere, must have increased currency with every class of mankind in all parts of this continent, as it increases in population, and the movements of its population increase in activity and importance. No human laws, embargoes, or armies and navies can prevent it. Do our utmost, we cannot go back of the steam-engine, the telegraph, the cotton-gin, and the cylinder press. The South has admitted steamboats and railroads. It was not practicable to stop with these, and bar out all the rest that is peculiar to the nineteenth century. Is it practicable to admit the machinery of modern civilized life, and not stir up its free people? Is it practicable to stir up its intermediate class, and keep its lowest torpid? Assuredly the security which depends upon preventing either of these steps can never be permanently increased; spite of all possible further extension of slave territory, and dispersion and disconnection of plantations, it must gradually lessen. As it lessens, the demand upon the nation to supply new grounds of security must increase—increase continually, until at length, this year, next year, or another, they conclusively and hopelessly fail. It may cost us much or it may cost us little to reach that point, but it is inevitably to be reached. It may be after long and costly civil war, or longer and more costly foreign wars, or it may be peaceably, sensibly, and soon, but it must come. The annexation of Cuba, international fugitive slave laws,[74] the African slave trade, judgments of the Supreme Court, and whatever else may be first asked and given, will not prevent it—nothing the North will do, nothing the North can do, will prevent it. The proximity of a people who cannot hold labour in contempt; who cannot keep labourers in ignorance and permanent dependence each upon another man; who cannot have an effective censorship of the press, or a trustworthy army of mouchards, prevents, and must always prevent, the South from standing with the slightest confidence of safety on that policy which it proclaims to be its only ground of safety. Nothing but a reversal of the current of our Northern history for half a century, nothing, in fact, but the enslavement of labour at the North, could in the nature of things, give that security, even temporarily, to the capitalists of labour at the South which they need.[75] Some demand of the South upon the nation, acquiescence in which it holds essential to its safety, must then at length be distinctly refused. And when, ten or twenty years hence, if so be, this shall come to pass, what then is to happen to us?
Dissolution?
This is what many Southern politicians avow, whenever they contemplate such a contingency.
Why?
Because it is known that the people of the North are unwilling that the Union should be dissolved, whereas they have no indisposition to the only course which it will then be possible for the South to adopt, for the sake of increasing the security of its citizens, against insurrectionary movements of its slaves. This plainly would be to arrange a systematic opportunity and method for the slaves to labour, whenever they chose, and as much as they might choose, in an orderly, peaceable, and wise way, for their own release and improvement, each man for himself and those most dear to him; each man by himself, independently, openly, with no occasion for combination, secrecy, plots, or conspiracy. To prepare, for those disposed to avail themselves of it, a field, either here or elsewhere, in which their capability and Godlike reason, such as it may be, little or great, need not be forced by law to rust unused, or brighten only to the material advantage of a master. This I must think to be consciously, even now, the only final course of safety before every reflective Southern mind. This, or——dissolution, and the chances of war.