This government is under obligation to compensate, and does compensate, parents, masters of apprentices, masters of slaves, for service and labor of those subjects who are enlisted in the army and navy, for the Constitution recognizes slaves as "persons held to labor or service." Removal by compensation might have prevented the war.
England compelled the abolition of slavery in her colonies, and she paid in compensation for services, to the slave owners, the sum of one hundred million dollars. Out of this, for instance, Cape Colony obtained fifteen million dollars, which was about four hundred dollars per slave.
If slavery was believed to be fatal to the permanence of the Union, it could have been removed by compensation, as in the case of England, and not by hatred and fanaticism.
View it as we may, the fact exists that the confiscation act, although unconstitutional, did, in effect, rob the Southern people of about two thousand million dollars ($2,000,000,000), computing four million slaves at five hundred dollars each, which is only about half their value; and this was done as a punishment for secession. In law it was void; but the property was of such a character that it became useless to the owners, because it was enticed away. So this act and Lincoln's proclamation caused the slaves to leave their owners. And so without a crime, without an indictment, without a trial by jury or conviction, this property was taken from the owners. It was the largest steal ever committed by a nation; and, furthermore, they stole from the South slaves that they had sold the South. Call it by what name you will, it was robbery. It exceeds in magnitude, in money value, any of the invasions of India, from Genghis Khan down to the English East India Company; or the robbery of the proconsuls of Rome; or the wealth Spain derived from Mexico and Peru by the infamous acts of Cortez and Pizarro. And, after all, the loss from confiscating the "labor" of the slaves, great as it is, becomes but one item of loss to which the Southern people were subjected.
It would perhaps be unjust for me to assign the inducements that moved Mr. Lincoln to issue this proclamation, considering Congress had already confiscated them. I do not know if possession of property is, or is not, necessary before it can be sold by confiscation.[42] If a slave not in possession of the United States marshal, being in the interior of the Confederacy, can be confiscated, then also could all property be confiscated by a paper bulletin posted on the wall. But in that proclamation there was a sinister object in view, and that was to array against the Confederate States the sympathies of the Christian world, by trying to make it appear that we made the war in defense of, and to perpetuate, slavery. Others there are who think that the "loyal governors" who met at Altoona, Pa., obtained it by insidious threats. But, be this as it may, the proclamation, as a legal paper, was worthless. The slaves were afterwards legally emancipated by the several States, by the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution, and by taking the oath prescribed in the President's proclamation, dated May 29, 1865; and all the owners of slaves who were worth twenty thousand dollars, being disfranchised, had to make oath "not hereafter, at any time, to acquire any property whatever in slaves, or make use of slave labor, or make claim for slaves liberated." The numerous oaths and various proceedings required to set the negro legally free, and make it binding, remind me of many loyal friends in the North going before some judicial officer and renewing their oaths of allegiance every new moon, to make it sure and clear by accumulated recorded evidence.
When Jephthah made his vow there was no power to restrain him from fulfilling it. Lincoln could not perform his; he was not an abolitionist from principle, and there is very much evidence that he was not in favor of emancipation; his proclamation set free (on paper) only the slaves in a part of the Confederate States, leaving slavery untouched in the United States. That is, the Yankees retained slavery in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, and part of Louisiana and the North, and tried to abolish it where they could not, and maintained it where they could have abolished it. At this malignant confiscation of the slaves only in the Confederacy, Fanueil Hall went wild with delight, and Exeter Hall, England, was jubilant.
I have no desire to discuss annexation (reconstruction) here, and hasten on, only to relate some of my experiences under it, so that you may know the patience, forbearance, and charity of the Southern people under persecution. No one possessing knowledge has a right to withhold it from his fellow-men, if it will be valuable to them; and so I write.
And now came reconstruction (annexation), with all its evils. President Abraham Lincoln had been foully murdered, and Vice President "Andy" Johnson reigned in his stead.
It is stated that he disliked the refined and best class of people in the South; and now, in authority, he thirsted for vengeance against them. He declared that "treason should be made odious," and would have arrested Gen. R. E. Lee and other Confederate army officers and punished them if possible, had not Gen. Grant declared that they could not be molested without violating the paroles he had given them, and so prosecution was abandoned and persecution substituted, as will be shown after a while.
Having surrendered and signed a written agreement, and made oath to the same, I desired to go to my home in Mississippi, as stipulated in the parole.