BRITAIN AND THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICA (1863).
Source.—Annual Register, 1863, pp. 128, 129.
Mr. Roebuck’s Speech on Motion in favour of Recognising the Southern States as a Government.
June.—Mr. Roebuck repudiated with scorn the argument that the cause of the North was the cause of the slave. We are met by the assertion: “Oh, England cannot acknowledge a State in which slavery exists.” Indeed, I ask, is that really the case, and is any man so weak as to believe it? Have we not acknowledged Brazil? Are we not in constant communication with Russia? And is there not slavery in both those countries? Moreover, does anybody believe that the black slave would be at all improved in his condition by being placed in the same position as the free black in the North? I ask whether the North, hating slavery, if you will, does not hate the slave still more? (“No, no!”) I pity the ignorance of the gentleman who says “No.” The blacks are not permitted to take an equal station in the North. They are not permitted to enter the same carriage, to pray to God in the same part of the church, or to sit down at the same table as the whites. They are like the hunted dog whom everybody may kick. But in the South the feeling is very different. There black children and white children are brought up together. In the South there is not that hatred, that contempt, of the black man which exists in the North. There is a kindly feeling in the minds of the Southern planters towards those whom England fixed there in a position of servitude. England forced slavery upon the Southern States of America. It was not their doing. They prayed and entreated England not to establish slavery in their dominions, but we did it because it suited our interests, and the gentlemen who now talk philanthropy talked the other way. Every man who has studied the question will distinctly understand the difference between the feeling of the Northern gentleman and that of the Southern planter towards the black. There is a sort of horror—a sort of shivering in the Northerner when he comes across a black. He feels as if he were contaminated by the very fact of a black man being on an equality with him. That is not the case in the South. I am not now speaking in favour of slavery. Slavery is to me as distasteful as it is to anyone; but I have learnt to bear with other men’s infirmities, and I do not think every man a rogue or a fool who differs from me in opinion. But though I hate slavery I cannot help seeing the great distinction between the condition of the black in the North and his condition in the South. I believe that if to-morrow you could make all the blacks in the South like the free negroes in the North, you would do them a great injury. The cry of the North in favour of the black is a hypocritical cry, and to-morrow the North would join with the South, and fasten slavery on the necks of the blacks, if the South would only re-enter the Union. But the South will never come into the Union, and, what is more, I hope it never may. I will tell you why I say so. America, while she was one, ran a race of prosperity unparalleled in the world. In eighty years, not America, but Europe, made the Republic such a Power that, if she had continued as she was a few years ago, she would have been the great bully of the world. Why, sir, she—
“... bestrode the narrow world,
Like a Colossus; and we petty men
Walked under her huge legs, and peeped about
To find ourselves dishonourable graves.”
As far as my influence goes, I am determined to do all I can to prevent the reconstruction of the Union, and I hope that the balance of power on the American Continent will in future prevent any one State from tyrannising over the world as the Republic did.
[For opposing view see next extract.]