The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 3, March, 1864 / Devoted to Literature and National Policy

by Various

'It will never do to try to give slavery its lasting quietus by mere arbitrary force. To secure this we have got to rely in no small measure upon reason. We must never forget that just as Force is the natural ally of Slavery, just so Reason is the natural ally of Freedom. When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a fair chance to assert itself. Military authority over each reclaimed State should last until the majority of the people have made up their mind to resume, in good faith, their old relations to the Government, and have had a fair opportunity to canvass how that resumption shall best be inaugurated. Of course the machinery of the State Government cannot be given over to traitors; but whenever there is sound reason to believe that a fair loyal majority of the State want it, let them have it—and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery. If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out, and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will. For slavery, after having been crippled as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way.'

Compare, now, in the fair spirit of criticism, the beginning and the end of this unstatesman-like editorial. Slavery, we are emphatically told, is dying; first, because the presence of the war in its immediate vicinity is killing it; and, secondly, because free discussion, excited by the war and the presence of Northern influence incidental to the war, is killing it—therefore let us hasten to withdraw the military power, and the causes of free discussion, where, for a century, it has been annihilated until now, and has only now begun to exist, and leave in full activity all the causes of reaction and the reëstablishment of the old STATUS. 'There is not the slightest chance, whatever,' says the writer, 'of slavery being saved, IF PRESENT CAUSES CONTINUE.' Therefore hasten to discontinue present causes, by all means, and surrender the field to the operation of the old causes. 'The chain' of the slave 'must be broken when the civil law, which alone gives it strength, passes away.' Therefore hasten to restore the civil law to its old and tyrannical potency over the destiny of the slave. 'The institution must melt away as the war goes on.' Therefore, hasten not merely to finish the active stage of the war, but to surrender the power which victory will place in your hands to continue the same emancipating influences; and to surrender it into the hands of men avowedly hostile to your policy, and who have been conquered fighting for their franchise to enslave.

'Not only,' continues our editor, 'have slave codes interdicted, in every one of the Slave States, 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.' Hasten, therefore, to reëstablish these engines of terrorism and the institution which inevitably demands their existence. Ignore and set aside the Proclamation of Emancipation; betray the auxiliary black man; throttle and destroy the incipient party of freedom in its birth; turn the Young South, just rising into existence as the friend of liberty and progress, over, stripped and unprotected, into the hands of the Old South, with its thongs, its thumbscrews, and its Lynch law; throw aside, the moment it is acquired, the power to civilize and regenerate the South—not because the war and the free discussion which accompany the war have killed slavery, but because they are killing it, and will be sure to kill it unless they are speedily withdrawn.

'But the war,' we are told, '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 it is in New York.' True: therefore, hasten to restore the reign of mobs, or you will hurt the feelings of the men who make the mobs. Withdraw speedily 'the general military law,' and its 'paramount' control, expressly in order that the operation of 'the arbitrary local laws' may be resumed. Urge up the measures which will put an end to the state of affairs in which 'the discussion of slavery is as free in New Orleans as it is in New York.'

'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.' This is true while a United States force is in the vicinity to overawe traitors—while the friends of freedom feel confident that they have the strength of a nation at their back to aid them in resisting the local tyranny; hasten, therefore, to remove these supports, and leave them to struggle single handed and hopelessly against an inveterate and hoary despotism, which knows no law higher than its own will; and which has always been competent to crush out every rising aspiration toward freedom; until the accidental advantages of the war encouraged that timid utterance of true American sentiment in those quarters which is just now beginning feebly to make itself heard and felt. Hasten, therefore, to withdraw that support at the instant of time when the local friends of freedom have just been induced to declare themselves, and so to become the unshielded victims of slaveholding vindictiveness the instant the provisional security of the new party derived from abroad ceases to exist. What would 'the dissatisfaction with slavery' from 'hostility to the rebellion' have amounted to in Maryland, as a power, against the haughty and overbearing authority of the slaveholding Despotism, at the commencement of the war, without the intervention of General Butler; or that of Missouri, without that of General Fremont? What would that same dissatisfaction with Slavery amount to at this very day even, in those States, against the reflex wave of pro-slavery influence and power, if all influence from the armies and authority of the United States were completely withdrawn? Or, granting even that in those two Border States, the most advanced of all, the most under ordinary influences from the Free States, there is already inaugurated an Anti-slavery Movement which would retain energy enough to carry on the struggle without foreign aid—which even is extremely doubtful; the case would stand wholly otherwise in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, or Arkansas, where no well-constituted Party of Freedom has as yet achieved any successes, and where the slaveholding interest and desperation are ten times stronger than they are in the Border States.

''We say, then, says the Times writer, '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 those influences work.'

All this, urged for the purposes for which it is here urged, is simply crying, Peace! peace! when there is no peace. If these influences, the presence of the war power and free discussion, be to continue, very good. Then, indeed, is there a chance, amounting almost to a certainty, that Slavery will have to succumb, and all of these considerations, urged as a reason why the war power should be retained for an adequate period over the Slave States, even after their nominal submission, and free discussion encouraged and protected by that power—which we understand to be the policy recommended by General Butler—are consequent, logical, and patriotic; but put forth as reasons why we should hasten to surrender the influence over the destiny of man which has been so providentially, and yet with such immense sacrifice, placed in our hands, they are practically hostile to the vital purposes of the war, however honest and simple minded may be the individuals who recommend them.

Again: 'Territorialize them because you hate slavery, and the inevitable result will be that you will only make them love slavery the more,' etc.

It is not our purpose to insist on the technical process of territorializing the conquered rebel States. What we do insist on is that the military authority, which the nation has so laboriously asserted and acquired over them, shall not be withdrawn until the natural and necessary and appropriate consequences of the war shall have been attained; and that among these is the inauguration of Freedom instead of the reinstitution of that hideous anomaly of the nations, American Slavery. We insist that the rising, but as yet the feeble and timid Freedom Party of the South, including the blacks and a growing number of the poor whites, so fast as they become rightly informed, with a small number of enlightened, generous, and noble-minded men of the planter class, who sympathize with freedom, and are truly loyal in sympathy and soul to American principles and the American Government, be regarded and treated as the new and loyal South; and not a trumped-up party, which may arise any day, of as bitter traitors as ever lived, but who, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, which is, at bottom, Slavery, and nothing else, under the present issue of war, shall give in a hollow and pretended profession of loyalty, in order to secure, by other means, the same end. Does this truly loyal party at the South anywhere as yet wish the withdrawal of the protection of the General Government, and desire to be turned over to the tender mercies of their false and subtle enemy—which are unheard-of cruelties? Let the representation of the thousand loyal men from Middle Tennessee, recently made to the President of the United States, answer. On the contrary, there is nothing which those men so greatly dread—nothing which so checks their more rapid development as a party—as the fear that they may be so abandoned before their work is sufficiently advanced to secure its completion.

The three years which the Times writer concedes to the existence of an anomaly in our Government, may be amply enough to accomplish all that is required. So far from imbittering the feelings of the true friends of the Union in the South, assurance of the continuance of such a protection over them, even for that length of time, would infuse new confidence and new activity into all their movements. It is clearly the right of the policeman to judge when the mob is effectually suppressed, and as much his duty not to allow himself to be surprised and over-mastered by a pretended and hollow submission for the sake of seizing an advantage, as it is to inflict effectual blows of his cudgel while the row is in its more flagrant stages of development. The United States, having interfered by force to suppress a national riot, has a clear right, and a bounden duty, not to abandon the region of the disturbance until the animus of rebellion is subdued as effectually as its open manifestation; and knowing that that animus is identical with the spirit, purposes, and designs of the slaveholding class—a conspiracy, in fine, to overthrow the Government in that sole behalf—it is alike bound effectually to cripple or actually to exterminate that malign influence.