Mr. Hunter, a Virginian, had assumed that, if the South consented to peace on the basis of the Emancipation Proclamation, the slaves would precipitate ruin on not only themselves, but the entire Southern society.
Mr. Lincoln said to Henry J. Raymond, of the Times, New York, that:
"I waited for Seward to answer that argument, but, as he was silent, I at length said: 'Mr. Hunter, you ought to know a great deal better about that than I, for you have always lived under the slave system. I can only say in reply to your statement of the case that it reminds me of a man out in Illinois, by the name of Case, who undertook to raise a very large herd of hogs. It was a great trouble to feed them, and how to get around this was a puzzle to him. At length he hit upon a plan of planting a great field of potatoes, and, when they were sufficiently grown, turned the whole herd into the field and let them have full swing, thus saving not only the labor of feeding the hogs, but also that of digging the potatoes. Charmed with his sagacity, he stood one day leaning against the fence, counting his hogs, when a neighbor came along.
"'Well, well,' said he; 'this is all very fine, Mr. Case. Your hogs are doing very well just now, but, you know, out here in Illinois the frost comes early, and the ground freezes for a foot deep. Then, what are you going to do?'
"This was a view of the matter Mr. Case had not taken into account. Butchering time for hogs was 'way on in December or January! He scratched his head, and at length stammered:
"'Well, it may come pretty hard on their snouts, but I don't see but it will be "Root, hog, or, die!"'"
The speaker had no need to draw this moral as to the fate of the South after the war, for black or white, from a Case in Illinois; the negro minstrel song was current then which supplied the apt allusion, and was called "Root, Hog, or Die." It may well be that the sailors conveying the baffled commissioners to Richmond, or the soldiers about the "other government," were chanting the instructive and prophetic chorus: "It doan' make a bit of difference to either you or I, but Big Pig or Little Pig, it is Root, Hog, or Die."
Mr. Raymond, in chronicling this anecdote, tells of the New York Herald giving the story in a mangled and pointless copy. But it was current in conversation. Mr. Lincoln was in hopes that "it would not leak out lest some oversensitive people should imagine there was a degree of levity in the intercourse between us."
Quite otherwise, for the majority thought the illustration as good as any argument, and would have deemed the speaker prophet if they could have foreseen that the South would have to buckle down to hard work to redeem the losses.