“Now, sir, you cannot but perceive that, the cause of this hatred removed, the effect must be removed also. Slavery is abolished. The cause of antagonism is removed; and you must see that it is altogether illogical—‘putting new wine into old bottles, mending new garments with old clothes’—to legislate from slave-holding and slave-driving premises for a people whom you have repeatedly declared your purpose to maintain in freedom. Besides, even if it were true, as you allege, that the hostility of the blacks toward the poor whites must necessarily be the same in a state of freedom as in a state of slavery, in the name of Heaven, we reverently ask, how can you, in view of your professed desire to promote the welfare of the black man, deprive him of all means of defence, and clothe him whom you regard as his enemy in the panoply of political power?
“Can it be that you would recommend a policy which would arm the strong and cast down the defenceless? Can you, by any possibility of reasoning, regard this as just, fair, or wise?
“Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest. Peace between races is not to be secured by degrading one race, and exalting another; by giving power to one race, and withholding it from another: but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all parties,—first pure, then peaceable.
“On the colonization theory that you were pleased to broach, very much could be said. It is impossible to suppose, in view of the usefulness of the black man in time of peace as a laborer in the South, and in time of war as a soldier at the North, and the growing respect for his rights among the people, and his increasing adaptation to a high state of civilization in this his native land, that there can ever come a time when he can be removed from this country without a terrible shock to its prosperity and peace.
“Besides, the worst enemy of the nation could not cast upon its fair name a greater infamy than to suppose that negroes could be tolerated among them in a state of the most degrading slavery and oppression, and must be cast away and driven into exile for no other cause than having been freed from their chains.”
The most unhandsome and untruthful remarks of the President to the delegation are those in which he charges the slave-masters and the slave with combining to keep the poor whites in degradation.
The construction which he put upon his promise to the blacks of Tennessee—to be the “Moses to lead the black race through the Red Sea of bondage” to—expatriation—was mean in the extreme, and shows a mind whose moral degradation is without its parallel.