"By your acts you attempt to free the slaves. You will not have them among you. You leave them where they are. Then what is to be the result?—I presume that local State governments will be preserved. If they are, if the people have a right to make their own laws, and to govern themselves, they will not only reënslave every person that you attempt to set free, but they will reënslave the whole race."
Nor has the horrid menace of reënslavement proceeded from the Senator from Delaware alone. It has been uttered even by Mr. Willey, the mild Senator from Virginia, speaking in the name of State Rights. Newspapers have taken up and repeated the revolting strain. That is to say, no matter what may be done for Emancipation, whether by Proclamation of the President, or by Congress even, the State, on resuming its place in the Union, will, in the exercise of its sovereign power, reënslave every colored person within its jurisdiction; and this is the menace from Delaware, and even from regenerated Western Virginia! I am obliged to Senators for their frankness. If I needed any additional motive for the urgency with which I assert the power of Congress, I should find it in the pretensions thus savagely proclaimed. In the name of Heaven, let us spare no effort to save the country from this shame, and an oppressed people from this additional outrage!
"Once free, always free." This is a rule of law, and an instinct of humanity. It is a self-evident axiom, which only tyrants and slave-traders have denied. The brutal pretension thus flamingly advanced, to reënslave those who have been set free, puts us all on our guard. There must be no chance or loop-hole for such an intolerable, Heaven-defying iniquity. Alas! there have been crimes in human history; but I know of none blacker than this. There have been acts of baseness; but I know of none more utterly vile. Against the possibility of such a sacrifice we must take a bond which cannot be set aside,—and this can be found only in the powers of Congress.
Congress has already done much. Besides its noble Act of Emancipation, it has provided that every person guilty of treason, or of inciting or assisting the Rebellion, "shall be disqualified to hold any office under the United States." And by another act, it has provided that every person elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the Government of the United States shall, before entering upon its duties, take an oath "that he has not voluntarily borne arms against the United States, or given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility thereto, or sought or accepted or attempted to exercise the functions of any office whatever under any authority, or pretended authority, in hostility to the United States."[30] This oath will be a bar against the return to National office of any who have taken part with the Rebels. It shuts out in advance the whole criminal gang. But these same persons, rejected by the National Government, are left free to hold office in the States. And here is another motive to further action by Congress. The oath, is well as far as it goes; more must be done in the same spirit.
But enough. The case is clear. Behold the Rebel States in arms against that paternal government to which, as the supreme condition of their constitutional existence, they owe duty and love; and behold all legitimate powers, executive, legislative, and judicial, in these States, abandoned and vacated. It only remains that Congress should enter and assume the proper jurisdiction. If we are not ready to exclaim with Burke, speaking of Revolutionary France, "It is but an empty space on the political map," we may at least adopt the response hurled back by Mirabeau, that this empty space is a volcano red with flames and overflowing with lava-floods. But whether we deal with it as "empty space" or as "volcano," the jurisdiction, civil and military, centres in Congress, to be employed for the happiness, welfare, and renown of the American people,—changing Slavery into Freedom, and present chaos into a Cosmos of perpetual beauty and power.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
The Thoughts of the Emperor M. Aurelius Antoninus. Translated by GEORGE LONG. London: Bell & Daldy.
Dulness is usually reckoned the prescriptive right of kings; at least, they are supposed to be officially incapable of literary eminence. And yet it is a curious fact, that, of those idiomatic works which literature will not "let die," of those marked productions which survive by their individuality, three, at least, bear the impress of royal names.
Devotion has found, in the contributions of three thousand years, no utterance so fit as the lyrics of a Hebrew king; satiety has breathed no sigh so profound as "The Words of the Preacher, the Son of David, King of Jerusalem"[31]; and the wisdom of the Stoics has no worthier exponent than the meditations of a sovereign who ruled the greatest empire known to history, and glorified it with his own imperial spirit,—the noblest that ever bore the burden of state.