The anti-slavery societies in the Northern and Middle States are doing all they can to destroy our domestic harmony by sending among us pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers—for the purpose of exciting dissatisfaction and insurrection among our slaves.... Meetings have been held in Mobile, in Montgomery, in Greensboro, and in Tuscaloosa, and in different parts of all the Southern States. At these meetings resolutions have been adopted, disclaiming (sic) and denying the right of the Northern people to interfere in any manner in our internal domestic concerns.... It is my solemn opinion that this question (to wit, slavery) will ultimately bring about a dissolution of the Union of the States.
It should be remembered that in 1832 the massacre in Santo Domingo of all the whites by the blacks was fresh in mind. It had occurred in 1814—after manumission—and had produced, especially in the minds of statesmen and of all observers of the many signs of antagonism between the two races, a profound and lasting impression.
The fear that the races, both free, could not live together was in the mind of Thomas Jefferson, of Henry Clay, and of every other Southern emancipationist. And deportation, its expense, and the want of a home to which to send the negro—here was a stumbling-block in the way of Southern emancipation.
Indeed, the incompatibility of the races was an appalling thought in the minds of Southerners for the whole thirty years of anti-slavery agitation. It was even with Abraham Lincoln, and weighed upon his mind when, at last, in 1862, military necessity placed upon his shoulders the responsibility of emancipating the Southern slaves. Serious as was the responsibility, the question was not new to him. When Mr. Lincoln said, in his celebrated Springfield speech in 1858, "I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free," and added that he did not expect the government to fail, he certainly expected that emancipation in the South was coming; and, of course, he thought over what the consequences might be.
In that same debate with Douglas, in his speech at Charleston, Illinois, Mr. Lincoln said: "There is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I believe, will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality."
In his memorial address on Henry Clay, in 1852, he had said: "If, as the friends of colonization hope, the present and coming generations of our countrymen shall by some means succeed in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery, and at the same time in restoring a captive people to their long lost father-land, ... it will, indeed, be a glorious consummation. And if to such a contribution the efforts of Mr. Clay shall have contributed ... none of his labors will have been more valuable to his country and his kind."
In his famous emancipation proclamation he promised "that the effort to colonize persons of African descent upon this continent or elsewhere, with the consent of the government existing there, will be continued."
It must have been with a heavy heart that the great President announced the failure of all his efforts to find a home outside of America for the freedmen, when he informed Congress in his December message, 1862, that all in vain he had asked permission to send the negroes, when freed, to the British, the Danish, and the French West Indies; and that the Spanish-American countries in Central America had also refused his request. He could find no places except Hayti and Liberia. He even made the futile experiment of sending a ship-load to a little island off Hayti.[32] Hume, in "The Abolitionists," tells us that Mr. Lincoln for a time considered setting Texas apart as a home for the negroes—so much was he disturbed by this trouble.