Again says our writer under review: 'When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a chance to assert itself.' Very true, if the mode of doing so be not foolishly misunderstood. The error here is in speaking of the South as one, whereas from this time forward and for some years to come, there will be an Old South, rebellious at heart, malignant, defiant, cruel, and revengeful to the last degree—bold, accustomed to rule with unquestioned authority—and, when conquered, refusing to remain conquered, except as the grapple of the conqueror is still at its throat; and a New South, loyal, loving, and devoted to its deliverers, but timid, shrinking, and tentative of its powers—liberty-loving, and truly American in sentiment, but unused to the exercise of political supremacy, unorganized, and weak;—an old South, refusing every appeal to reason, and only thirsting for vengeance; and a new South, ready to reason and to be reasoned with, and looking gratefully to the National Government as its guide and protector in the unequal contest before it—more fearful to it than ever—at the close of the war. How, then, shall we 'give the reason of the South a chance to assert itself'? By withdrawing our support from our friends, and the friends of America, and of man, in the South, and turning them over, like sheep to the wolves, to their unreasoning and vindictive enemies; or by standing by them in the weakness of their first essay to depend on reason and justice in the place of force or fraud; by developing, in fine, the reason of the South, which has been for a century overridden and suppressed by the incubus of an organized despotism, from which there is now, for the first time, the chance of a redemption, if these friends of Southern reason do not commit a blunder in their understanding of the case?
'Whenever,' says the Times writer, 'there is sound reason to believe that a sound loyal majority of the State want it (reconstruction), let them have it—and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery.' That is to say, abandon the Proclamation of Emancipation, betray the colored man, who, trusting to our faith, is now enrolling himself in our armies; betray the timid friends of freedom, who, by our encouragement, have dared to proclaim their love of liberty, and subject themselves to inevitable banishment or extermination, unless the programme of a new free South be executed triumphantly and to the letter; furnish to the most malignant slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of 'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the rattlesnake. The most imbittering and offensive thing that can ever be done to those men is done the moment you pronounce the words of freedom and human rights, in conjunction with each other, as if they were the same thing. That done, every other measure grows mild. To territorialize the whole South, and place a satrap over every parish and county of it—saying no word for freedom—would be a gentle and conciliating procedure compared with the most innocent utterance of a mere sentiment in behalf of emancipation and the elevation of the negro to the status of a man. Why, then, strain at a gnat when we have already swallowed a camel? If we mean anything by Emancipation Proclamations, the organization of negro troops, or even by our own inherent love of liberty, nothing after that need ever be handled gingerly with the South. Every recommendation to abstain from giving her offence is simply a recommendation to recede, not only from our whole war policy now so happily inaugurated, but to recede from every genuine and efficient sentiment the Northern people may entertain, or ever have entertained, in behalf of the distinctively American idea: the freedom and equality before the law of all men.
'If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out,' continues our editor, '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'.
Now it is precisely this simple-minded and easy credence that everything will go right if it be at once handed over to the management of the men who may have been whipped in the battle field—this overweening confidence on the part of good men, and intelligent men, too, in the ordinary sense of intelligence, at the North, which is the most dangerous feature of the whole matter. We are just entering upon the real crisis of the war, when the war, by many, will be thought finished. It is exceedingly doubtful whether in any single Border State the Anti-slavery Movement has received as yet any such impetus or gained any such secure foothold that it could maintain the struggle for a six months, if the influence growing out of the presence of the war in their midst were withdrawn, and the political power were remanded in full to the local authorities; and, in respect to the States farther South, and wholly committed to the institution, it is certain that Slavery has hardly received what would prove a serious scratch upon its epidermis, if such changes were now to take place.
Indeed, on the contrary, there was never a time when temptation to slaveholding was a third part what it is to-day, aside from the threat of danger hanging over it from the continuance of the war, and the supposed determination of the Northern conquerors to put an end to it. The vital principle of Slavery which overrides every other consideration, is the extra-profitable nature and state of slave-labor products. The writer has himself seen Slavery firmly seated in the saddle and unassailable in an exposed region of the South, with cotton at from eight to twelve cents on the pound, and the same institution trembling toward its downfall when cotton fell to four and a half and five cents on the plantation. What must then be its hold on the cupidity of Southern men when the condition of Slavery, by virtue of the same state of war which threatens its existence on the one hand, has caused the price of cotton to rule, on the other hand, from twenty-five to seventy-five cents a pound, and has affected, in a somewhat similar way, every other product of the sort! An immense premium is thus offered for the continuance of the institution, and the danger is not slight that our own Northern men, thrown into the South, would be seduced, in great numbers, by the temptation, into becoming themselves slavery propagandists, unless the exigencies of the war, the esprit du corps, and the solidarity of interests springing up between them and the negro soldiers, and the prompt and energetic activity of the Government in behalf of an emancipation policy were all to combine to prevent it. In talking of Slavery, its power, its weakness, or its prospects, men, unless they have been intimately mixed up with its workings, are apt to be reckoning without their host. Our own sentiment of justice in the matter, North, poor and feeble as it is in most of us, is immensely aided by the negative fact that our interests do not happen to be immediately involved adversely. Not one in ten thousand of Northern men or Europeans, thrown into the South previous to the war, ever withstood the infection of pro-slavery sentiment and action. Our soldiers do so now, only because they are in large bodies, because they are fighting the Southern men, and because they are becoming more and more identified with a distinct national policy in behalf of emancipation and the rights of man. Withdraw these causes, and the effects would be rapidly reversed. Northern officers and men could not be trusted to fraternize with the slave-holding aristocracy, previous to the time when the backbone of the institution of Slavery should have been effectually broken; not because they are bad men, but because they are men, and would act, under similar circumstances, as men—alike Northern, Southern, and European men—have acted in the years that are past. There is a far more reliable and trustworthy party of Southern anti-slavery men than are as yet their Northern allies; men who have suffered intensely from actual contact and struggle with the institution, and who have felt, in some measure, the steel of Slavery enter their own souls; but they are not numerous enough to stand without the aid of these same untrustworthy Northern auxiliaries, who already, at the first indication of incipient success for our arms, propose, like this writer, to remand them to the tender mercies of a Southern majority rule. It is the fear of this treachery which makes them so few as they are, and so weak. It is these men whom we wish to see sustained, recognized as the loyal and the new South, and aided in the work of reconstruction, when the somewhat distant period for it to be safe and wise shall have arrived. They are the men who will teach us wisdom, if we will follow their advice; and they, be assured of it, will not clamor for any early and thoughtless surrender of our present advantages, for fear of hurting the sensibilities of the South by imposing a sense of 'subordination.' With the agony of despair, such men would remonstrate against any such suicidal policy, and entreat the Government of the United States and the people of the North to stand by them in their great distress, through, until the end. While writing, the following newspaper paragraph attracts our attention, and is a fair expression of the truth we are seeking to inculcate:
'The Hon. Silas Casey, of Kentucky, brings news of the most intense feeling, on the subject of holding slaves in the Border States, among Union men. They contend that the restriction in the President's Proclamation has made Kentucky and Tennessee a 'national slave pen,' where slaves, fleeing from the 'confederate' States, are bought and sold by the thousand. He says the Unionists to a man are in favor of immediate and sweeping emancipation of all slaves within their borders—that there can be no protection for a Unionist as long as aristocratic secessionists are allowed to hold all their old slaves, and are protected in buying human beings, once freed by the President's Proclamation. The last and most important step to be taken by the Government, to insure Unionism in the Border States, is to emancipate the slaves of disloyalists in Kentucky and Tennessee. The military once removed from Kentucky, and again would commence the barbarism of slavery. Defenders of the Government would be murdered—freedom of speech be denied; the expulsion of Northern ministers, and the tar-and-feathering of Northern schoolmasters, for only preferring Union to secession, freedom to slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville, his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again, with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.'
The following comments are equally true:
'Again we call the attention of thoughtful men to the current phases of 'Border State' politics, and ask that they be deeply considered. If we open a hundred 'conservative' journals in succession, we shall find at least ninety of them asserting or assuming that the revolted States are to be reconciled to the Union by new concessions, new guarantees to slavery. But those States themselves emphatically repel this assumption. Every man in Delaware, in Maryland, in Tennessee, in Missouri, who is heartily and thoroughly anti-rebel is also anti-slavery, and nearly every one is for immediate, not gradual, emancipation. They were not Republicans; not one in twenty of them voted for Lincoln; they make no special pretensions to philanthropy; but they mean to live and die in the Union, and they do not choose to have their throats cut by rebels; so they desire that slavery should die, knowing by practical experience, by personal observation, that slavery and the rebellion are but two phases of the same thing—two names for one reality.'
Slavery, as things are, is neither 'crippled' nor 'half dead.' It is only a little sick, and threatened with being made more so, if the same effectual blows which have been dealt it are followed up hereafter with other blows still more effectual.
We have reason to believe that the writer of the Times article we have been reviewing, has passed some time with the Army of the Cumberland; that he has viewed the subject impartially from what he deems a large field of observation; and that he speaks honestly what he believes. But no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case. Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band of patriots—reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies—and he will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the confederacy is already knocked out; that Slavery is already dead, and cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc. With profound respect for General Grant as a man and a soldier, we would still prefer the opinion, on this point, of any earnest member of the young and feeble anti-slavery party of the South, who resides a few miles away from the actual reach of the authority and influence of a Federal army.