I ask my reader to add here mentally the full description which in my last two chapters I have given of the lower class of the negroes in the south—this description showing them to be ninety-five per cent of the whole, far below their average condition in American slavery, and steadily becoming worse.
I believe that in due time the people of the north will make these admissions:
1. Any and every evil of southern slavery to the negro was accidental, and not a necessary incident of the system, just as the occasional evils of marriage to the parties are not necessarily incidental to that institution.
2. As this slavery had improved and was still improving the negroes so prodigiously in every particular, and as their condition during the forty years following emancipation has been going uninterruptedly from bad to worse, until now the extinction of the great body is frightfully probable, as I shall show in my last two chapters, the sudden and sweeping abolition of 1865 was an unutterable misfortune to these dependent creatures. Emancipation ought to have been gradual. Especially ought there to have been established something like the Roman patronate, under which the freedman would have been sure of wise advice, beneficial overlooking, and efficient protection from his former master.
3. The grant at once of right to vote and hold place and office to the southern negroes indiscriminately exceeds all blunders of democracy in madness and stupidity.
4. Southern slavery, so far from being wrong morally, was righteousness, justice, and mercy to the slave. The federal constitution was simply obeying the commands of good conscience in recognizing the slave as the property of his owner, and protecting that property. Therefore, when the federal government emancipated the slaves it ought to have given the masters just compensation.
So much for what American slavery was to the negro, and what its abolition has done for him in the south. This can be told now. But for years the powers watching over our union kept the subject in the dark. It did not suit their purpose that the people of the union-preserving section should see and understand. They had decreed that northern resistance to slavery, as the solitary root of disunion, should go beyond refusing it extension into the Territories. They chose to add another provocation of the secession which they had planned as the means of abolishing slavery. This new provocation was that the north be induced to make the fugitive slave law a dead letter. To drive the south into early secession, perhaps it would not be enough merely to deny her new territory. But unite the north against the law mentioned, and encourage both running away and the underground railroad by an active public opinion, then soon all along the southern border slavery will lose its hold, some of the slaves escaping and the rest going south. This zone will, after a while, be settled by the friends and employers of free labor, who from year to year will push the southern non-slave district further in. The menace of this hostile occupation will steadily become greater to the slaveholders, and finally it will convince them that they cannot protect slavery in the union.
Many northerners who declared it was wrong to interfere with slavery in the States, at the same time sympathized with the public opposition to restoring the fugitive to his master. It is clear that they did not regard this opposition to be what it really was; that is, actual war upon slavery where it existed. To oppose execution of the law was both to invite and help runaways. And if such invitation and help was persisted in, from one end of Mason and Dixon’s line to the other, the risk of escape of slaves and their consequent depreciation in market value would both steadily increase. The refusal to enforce the fugitive slave law was therefore a deadly attack upon slavery in the States; and this was so plain that the union-loving people of Georgia declared in the famous Georgia Platform of 1850 that the union could not be preserved if that law was not faithfully executed.
The faithful guardians of the American union had “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” written of purpose to prevent the execution of the fugitive slave law. They hypnotized the root-and-branch abolitionists and Mrs. Stowe into believing that to abet in any way the restoration of a flying slave was an unpardonable crime; and that the obligation of conscience to refrain from committing such a crime imperatively commanded disregard of all counter provisions of the constitution and the law of the land. One cannot at all understand the mighty abolition movement if he stop with the professed motives of Phillips, Whittier, Garrison, Mrs. Stowe, and the rest. They believed in their hearts, and declared, its purpose was to wipe out the great national disgrace of slavery, to lift the slave out of an abyss of unspeakable outrage and injustice, and to better his condition. As we have shown you, they were, in their very extreme of conscientiousness, as wide from the facts and right as wide can be. They were not doing their own wills, as they thought they were. They but did the will of the fates. The latter ruthlessly—so it seems to us now—sacrificed both the prosperity and comfort of the southern people for several generations, and the very existence, it may be, of nearly all the negroes in America, besides also making a laughing-stock of the abolitionists—all to the end to kill that nationalization which threatened the integrity of the American union.