Not a word is here said of the important question of Slavery. The proposition is pure and simple to readmit the rebellious State of Arkansas to the Union, upon precisely the same footing as that upon which we retained the allegiance of Missouri—to treat, in other words, loyal and rebellious States in the same way.
In a subsequent article of the same able journal, one of the organs of the Republican party, this easy-going policy, the laissez-faire of statesmanship, is expanded at large, and explicitly adopted and recommended. The appearance of such an article in such a quarter is such a remarkable index of the existence in the public mind of the delusions we are exposing, that we transfer it bodily to our columns, for the sake of commenting upon its positions. Calhoun's famous expression, 'masterly inactivity,' is significantly adopted as a caption:
'Civil Policy toward Slavery.—There is a class of men who stick to the idea that something positive must be done by the Federal Government to end slavery. Even the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, a military measure for military ends solely, does not satisfy them. They want civil power exercised, and would gladly have even a breaking down of State lines and a reconstruction of the Government itself, as the only effectual means of destroying the institution of their special abhorrence.
'Now we, too, claim a good hearty hatred of slavery. We are as anxious as any to see it under the sod, beyond resurrection. But we don't believe in making any superfluous sacrifice to get it there. Seeing that it is dying, we are quite content to let it die quietly, without any attempt to pull the house down about its ears and our own ears. This seems to us to be a very absurd sort of impatience—prompted by giddy passion rather than sober reason.
'But how do we know slavery is dying? We know it from the unanimous testimony of all personal observers of its condition. There is not a man within the Union lines South, however friendly he may be to the institution, who pretends that there is any chance whatever of its being saved, if present causes continue. Two things are killing it.
'The first is the wear and tear of the war. Military operations always tend to disjoint and break up, within their scope, all the relations of society. They inevitably remit, to a greater or less extent, the social man to a state of nature. Inter arma leges silent. This is felt in every social connection, even the closest and strongest; for they all are, more or less, dependent on civil law. But it must be felt particularly in that connection, which of all others is the most forced and arbitrary—the connection between master and slave. Liberty is a natural instinct. The caged bird is not surer to fly through the parted wires than the slave, in his ordinary condition, from the broken chain—and the chain must be broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes away. There are men who complain of the anti-slavery war policy of the President. A policy that was anything else would not be a war policy at all. The war upon the rebellious slaveholding people of necessity involves an interruption of their laws; and unless the advancing army should make good this absence of civil rule by applying its own military power to keeping watch and ward over the slaves, and thus abandon its proper military business, the result is inevitable that the institution must melt away as the war goes on. Abraham Lincoln might be as much attached to slavery as Jefferson Davis himself, and yet no human sagacity would enable him to fight Jefferson Davis honestly and effectually without mortal injury to slavery. It is the war which kills slavery, and not the man who leads the war.
'The other destroying agency in open discussion. Slavery can live only in silence. There is a deadly antagonism between itself and free speech. Where the one exists the other cannot. The vitality of the one rests in pure force, and force and reason never agree. It always has been, and always will be, that force must either suppress reason or reason will subvert force. One of the first acts of the slavery propagandists in Kansas was to pass enactments through their spurious Legislature, making it a felony, punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, for any man to 'assert or maintain by speaking or writing that persons have not the right to hold slaves in this Territory.' It has been so in every Slave State, and worse. Not only have slave codes interdicted, in every one of them, all adverse discussion of the institution, but a mob power has always been at hand to take summary vengeance upon it with Lynch law. These resorts were not a mere caprice; they were a necessity. Slavery being once accepted as the prime object, there was no alternative but to protect it just in this manner. But the war has ended all that. There can be no mobs where the bayonet governs; nor arbitrary local laws where general military law is paramount. The discussion of slavery is as free now in New Orleans as in New York. It is no more within the province of the military Governor, Shepley, to interfere with fair discussion there, than it is within the rightful power of the civil Governor, Seymour, to interfere with it here. And in the Border States, where the civil laws still prevail, hostility to the rebellion has excited such a dissatisfaction with slavery as its cause, that by general consent perfect freedom is allowed in arguing against the institution. The consequence of this freedom has been that Missouri has already determined to abolish it; Maryland and Delaware have put declared emancipationists in places of their highest trusts by unprecedented majorities; and Kentucky is visibly casting about to see how she can best rid herself of the curse.
'We say, then, that even if the National Government had the right to institute new civil measures against slavery, it would not be necessary. The unavoidable military operations of the war, and the free discussion which is sure to attend it, are enough of themselves to break down the institution. The Government has simply to stand quiet, and let these agencies work.'
The italics are our own, inserted for the sake of more easy reference. Not only is it unnecessary, according to this writer, to take any active and positive steps against Slavery at the South, but so soon as the rebel States wish to return within the Union, with all their old privileges and with Slavery surviving, they should be permitted to do so, and should be received with open arms. The Proclamation of Emancipation itself is thus quietly wiped out, and a policy sketched which, in the event of mere military defeat on their part, would, in the next place, be the most acceptable of all possible policies;—not to the loyal black men who are now struggling, fighting, and dying alongside of us, in the ranks; not to the small and feeble but growing anti-slavery party, which, in the presence of, and under the protection of our armies of the North, is just springing up and consolidating itself in the South;—but to Jefferson Davis himself, and to all the devoted and fanatical adherents of the slaveholding system in the South, and their 'Copperhead' friends in the North. The Times article concludes as follows:
'But we go farther, and say, that any other interference would not only be superfluous, but positively mischievous. To insure that slavery, when it dies, shall never rise again, you have got to depend largely upon the disposition of the Southern people. That disposition should not be needlessly embittered. It can't help becoming so if, as some propose, their States are reduced to the condition of mere territorial dependencies. Americans can never be satisfied to be underlings. Whatever the fortunes of war legitimately bring, they are sensible enough to submit to; but it is not in their spirit to consent to any permanent degradation. Undertake to deprive them permanently of their civil rights, and you simply make them your permanent enemies. Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable effect will be that you will only make them love slavery the more, and hate you the more. This could not always continue. State rights, sooner or later, would have to be restored. We don't believe that three years would elapse after the close of the war before the keeping those States in a territorial condition would be abandoned as an insufferable anomaly in our system of government. State rights once restored, the people, maddened by the thrall that had been put upon them, would be very likely to vindicate these rights by rehabilitating slavery. Every incentive of high pride and every impulse of low spite would combine to urge this; and the National Government would have no legitimate way of preventing it.