The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 / Devoted to Literature and National Policy

by Various

There is no lack of earnest and confident opinions in the public mind in relation to this class of questions. It is in respect to this very side of the negro question, that prejudices the most intense and inveterate are widely prevalent; prejudices, too, which have exerted the most decisive influence on the controversy, through every stage of its progress. The masses of the American people believe in those principles of political equality upon which all our constitutions are founded. They not only believe in them, but they cherish and love them. They perceive, too, by a kind of instinct, what many a would-be philosopher has failed to see, that the application and carrying out of those principles necessarily involve the fusion of the entire mass to which they are applied, into one homogeneous whole; that we cannot have a government founded on political equality, consistently with our having an inferior and proscribed class of citizens; a class from whose daughters our sons may not take their wives, and to whose sons we are not willing, either in this or in any future generation, to give our daughters in marriage. Political equality implies that the son of any parents may be raised to the highest offices in the government, and wear the most brilliant honors which a free people can confer. And the masses of the people instinctively see, or rather feel, that it is impossible to admit to such equality a class to whom we deny, and always intend to deny all equality in the social state; and with whom we are shocked at the very thought of ever uniting our race and our blood.

I am not now saying where the moral right of this matter lies; or whether, in this inveterate hostility to a social equality with the negro, the masses of the people are right or wrong. I am only affirming, what certainly cannot be successfully denied, that while they retain and cherish it, they will never be willing to apply to him this doctrine of political equality. They will always resist it, as carrying with it, by inevitable consequence, that social equality to which they are determined never to submit. If the doctrine of political equality, so fundamental, to our system of government, is ever to be extended so as to embrace the colored man, it can only be done by overcoming and utterly obliterating this social aversion.

If it were proved to be ever so desirable to effect such a change in the tastes and prejudices of the American people, history does not lend any countenance to the belief that it is possible. Wherever one people has conquered another, the conquerors and their descendants have always asserted for themselves a political superiority for ages; and that political superiority has extended itself into all the relations of social life. This has taken place with such uniformity, as to impress upon the mind the belief that it occurs in obedience to some great law of human nature, which may be expected to baffle all attempts at resistance in the future, as it has done in the past. The testimony of history is, that equality can be the law of national life only when the nation was originally formed from equal elements. But two peoples never met on the same soil, and under the same government, under conditions so widely unequal as the European and the African populations of this country. The Europeans are, to a great extent, the descendants of the most enlightened men of the world, heirs by birth to the highest civilization of the nineteenth century. The Africans, on the contrary, are the known descendants of parents who were taken by force from their own country, and brought hither as merchandise, sold as chattels and beasts of burden to the highest bidder; and have even now no civilization except what they have acquired in this condition of abject slavery; separated, too, from the dominant class, not only by this stigma of slavery, but by complexion and features so marked and peculiar, that a small taint of the blood of the servile class can be detected with unerring certainty. If history decides anything, it is that a system of political equality cannot be formed out of such elements. The experience of the world is against it.

This deeply seated aversion to the recognition of the equality of the white man and the black man is a potent force, which has been incessantly active in all our history, and furnishes the only satisfactory explanation of the fact that slavery did not perish, at least from all the Northern slave-holding States, long ago. There is, especially in the Border Slave States, a large non-slave-holding class, who know that the existence of slavery is utterly prejudicial to their interests and destructive of their prosperity as free laborers. They are so keenly sensible of this, that they regard with almost equal hatred the system of slavery, the negro, and the slave owner. But one consideration, which is never absent from their minds, always prevails, even over their regard for their own interests, and receives their steady and invariable coöperation with the slave owner in perpetuating the enslavement of the colored man. That consideration is the dread of negro equality. If, say they, the colored man becomes a freeman, then why not entitled to all the privileges and franchises which other freemen enjoy? And if admitted to political, then surely to social equality also.

And to many it seems perfectly clear that the universal emancipation of the negro carries with it by inevitable necessity his admission to the full enjoyment of all equality, political and social, and his becoming homogeneous with the mass of the American people; and the fact that they think so is the only adequate explanation of the inflexible energy of will with which they resist all measures which are supposed to tend in the smallest degree toward emancipation. And they think themselves able to give unanswerable reasons for the bitterness with which they note everything which is expressed by the word 'abolitionism.' They assume it for a fact, which admits no contradiction, that the natural increase of the negro race in this country is more rapid than that of the white man. So far as my observation extends, the great majority of the people believe this with an undoubting faith. It is constantly asserted in conversation, and in the most exaggerated form in newspaper paragraphs; although (as I shall presently show) a mere glance at our census tables disproves it. It is also assumed, with a faith equally undoubting, that if the slaves were all emancipated, the negro race would still increase as rapidly in freedom as in slavery. Emancipation, it is said, would at once cast upon the country four millions and a half of free negroes; and by the rapidity of their increase, they would, at no distant day, become a majority of the whole population.

If then, it is further argued, you emancipate them, and yet withhold from them a full participation in all our political privileges, they will be hostile to our government, a great nation of aliens in the midst of us, who would be the natural enemies of our institutions. An internecine war of races, it is said, must follow. Even here it would be well for persons who entertain such gloomy apprehensions, to remember that if these assumptions were all true (though I will show in the sequel that they are not), even then, emancipation could not make of the negroes more dangerous enemies to our institutions than slavery has made of the masters. It is also said that the only possible mode of escaping all these horrible results, would be to admit the negro, if he must be freed, to all the privileges and franchises of the Constitution, and amalgamate him entirely with the mass of American society. Thus it is taken for proved that emancipation would carry with it the equality of the negro and the white man in all their relations.

I believe it to be true beyond reasonable doubt, that the great majority of the American people do at this time accept this substantially as their creed on the question of emancipation. They do not mean to justify slavery; they abhor and hate it; they regard it as economically, socially, politically, and morally wrong. But they regard emancipation as tending directly and inevitably to incorporate the negro into the mass of American society, and compel us to treat him as homogeneous with it. To such a solution of the question they feel an unconquerable aversion. It shocks their taste; it violates their notions of propriety and fitness; they resist it by a sort of instinct, rather than from set conviction and purpose.

Nor is there one man in a thousand of us, who is not conscious in himself of a certain degree of sympathy with this view of the subject, however much we may think that we morally disapprove it. With enslaving the negro, and reducing him to an article of merchandise, or depriving him of one of those moral rights which God has given him as a man, we have no sympathy. But if, in full view of a proposition to break down all the social barriers which now divide the races, so that our descendants and those of the colored man shall form one homogeneous people, we interrogate our own consciousness, we shall discover that we, even those of us who have most eloquently and indignantly denounced 'prejudice against color,' are compelled to own ourselves in sympathy with the great mass of the American people, in utter and unconquerable aversion to such an arrangement.

It is probable that this article may fall into the hands of some friends of mine whose judgment I greatly respect, and whose feelings I should be most reluctant to wound, to whom these sentiments will at first view be far from agreeable. But for many years I have entertained them with undoubting confidence of their truth; and at this solemn crisis of our nation's destiny it becomes us to lay aside all our prejudices, and to endeavor to reach the truth on this momentous question. I repeat it: this side of the subject has not been fairly met and considered in this discussion. The time has come when we must meet it. Emancipation is an indispensable condition of the restoration and perpetuity of the Union, perhaps even of our continued national existence. The one great objection to emancipation, in the minds of the people, North and South, is the belief, so confidently and even obstinately entertained, that it carries with it as an inevitable consequence, either an internecine war of races, which would destroy us, or the amalgamation of our race and blood with that of the negro. If we mean, as practical men and statesmen, to seek our country's salvation by means of emancipation, we must, in some way, relieve the national mind from the pressure of this objection. Till we do so, the masses of the people will say to us: 'We do not approve of slavery; we abhor it; but if we are to have the negro among us, we believe in keeping him in slavery.' All of us, who are in the habit of talking with the people on this subject, know that almost in these very words we are met at every street corner. We must answer it, or in some form slavery will still continue to be the curse of our country, and to hurry it on to an untimely and ignominious end.

Let it be distinctly borne in mind that it is not the moral equality of the negro to the white man, which is under consideration. That indeed is only indirectly assailed by the inveterate national prejudice of which I speak. Those masses of the people who have no pecuniary interest in slavery, trample on the moral rights of the colored man only because they are made to believe themselves placed under the hard necessity of doing so, in order to resist any approach toward that political and social equality with him to which they are determined never to submit. Show them how they can concede to him the former without conceding the latter, and they will gladly do it. For myself, nothing can be added to the intensity of my conviction not only that the colored man must be protected in the full enjoyment of all the moral rights of humanity, as a condition of our prolonged national existence; but that the masses of the people never will consent to a political and social equality with the negro race.