Chapter VI: Part 6

"The Stonewall Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia," writes Dr.
McGuire, "was a fighting organization. I knew every man in it, for I
belonged to it for a long time; and I know that I am in proper
bounds when I assert, that there was not one soldier in thirty who
owned or ever expected to own a slave."[219]

But it is also urged that, while men without slaves filled the ranks
of the Virginia regiments, yet slaveholders led these soldiers into
battle as they had led the people into revolution.

SLAVEHOLDERS AMONG THE LEADERS

It is obviously impracticable to present the facts with reference to
each one of the prominent leaders which Virginia gave to the armies of
the Confederacy. By universal accord her five most notable generals
were, Robert E. Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson, Joseph E. Johnston, A. P.
Hill and J. E. B. Stuart—to whom may be added Fitzhugh Lee and
Matthew F. Maury, as only less prominent but no less representative of
her leading soldiers.

In dealing with these men, and their relation to slavery, we pass from
the domain of conjecture into the realm of fact.

Robert E. Lee never owned a slave, except the few he inherited from
his mother—all of whom he emancipated many years prior to the
war.[220]

"Stonewall" Jackson never owned but two slaves, a man and a woman,
both of whom he purchased at their own solicitation. He immediately
accorded to them the privilege of earning their freedom, by devoting
the wages received for their services to reimburse him for the
purchase money. This offer was accepted by the man, who, in due time,
earned his freedom. The woman declined the offer, preferring to remain
a servant in General Jackson's family.[221]

Joseph E. Johnston never owned a slave and, like General Lee, regarded
the institution with great disfavor.[222]

A. P. Hill never owned a slave, and regarded slavery as an evil, much
to be deplored.[223]

J. E. B. Stuart inherited one slave from his father's estate; and,
while stationed as a lieutenant in the United States Army at Fort
Leavenworth, Kansas, purchased another. Both of these he disposed of
some years prior to the war—the first, because of her cruelty to one
of his children, and the second, to a purchaser who undertook to
return the slave to his former home in Kentucky.[224]

Fitzhugh Lee never owned a slave.[225]

Matthew F. Maury never owned but one slave, a woman who remained a
servant and member of his family until her death, some years after the
war.[226] As we have seen, he characterized the institution as "a
curse."[227]

-----

Footnote 216:

_Slavery and Abolition_, Hart, p. 67.

Footnote 217:

_Idem_, p. 68.

Footnote 218:

_Four Years Under Marse Robert_, Stiles, p. 49.

Footnote 219:

_The Confederate Cause and Conduct, in the War Between the States_,
McGuire and Christian, p. 22.

Footnote 220:

See letter from his eldest son, General G. W. Custis Lee, to the
Author, dated February 4, 1907, on file in Virginia Historical
Society.

Footnote 221:

_The Confederate Cause and Conduct in the War Between the States_,
McGuire and Christian, p. 22.

Footnote 222:

See letter from his nephew, Dr. George Ben Johnston, of Richmond,
Va., dated April 17, 1907, to the Author, on file in Virginia
Historical Society.

Footnote 223:

See letter from his son-in-law, James Macgill, dated April 20, 1908,
to the Author, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 224:

See letter from his widow, Mrs. Flora Stuart, to the Author, dated
March 25, 1908, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 225:

See letter from his brother, Daniel M. Lee, to the Author, dated May
28, 1908, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 226:

See letter from his son, Colonel Richard L. Maury, to the Author,
dated June 1, 1907, on file in Virginia Historical Society.

Footnote 227:

See _Life of Matthew F. Maury_, Corbin, p. 131.

XXIII

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES
WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF
EMANCIPATION

The problems and difficulties which beset emancipation in Virginia may
be summarized as follows:

First: The legal rights of the slaveholders and their creditors;

Second: The moral and physical well-being of the slaves; and

Third: The political and social interests of the state.

To these inherent difficulties should be superadded the lack of free
discussion and the growth of bitterness and reactionary sentiments
occasioned largely by partisan and ofttimes criminal instigations
coming from beyond the state.

LEGAL RIGHTS OF SLAVEHOLDERS

It will not be questioned that of all men, except the slaves
themselves, the slaveholders were most deeply interested in the
subject of emancipation. They possessed a direct pecuniary interest in
the slaves and were usually the owners of large tracts of land
dependent, it was believed, for cultivation, upon their labor. Thus it
was thought that emancipation without compensation involved not only
the loss of their slaves, but a great depreciation in the value of
their lands. In addition to these direct losses would come the burden
of caring for the poor, the afflicted, and the criminal classes of the
ex-slaves, not to mention the cost of educating the rising
generation—the major part of all of which would fall upon the
communities where the ex-slaves lived, and thus upon the remnant of
property left to their former owners.

To the foregoing embarrassments must be added the rights of creditors.
A great majority of the slaves in Virginia descended to their owners
by the laws of inheritance, just as the plantations of which they were
virtually part. With the slaves and the lands, came the debts of the
ancestors, or, in the progress of time, new debts were incurred. In
all such instances the debts of creditors must be provided for before
any change could be made in the status of slaves bound for their
payment. All these considerations convinced fair-minded men that some
substantial measure of compensation must be made the slaveholders
before they could be expected to absolve their slaves from service.
But from what source was this great fund to be gathered? Despite the
widespread sentiment favorable to emancipation, neither state nor
nation gave sign of willingness to assume the burden.

But beyond the financial difficulties mentioned was the attitude of
that class of slaveholders who cherished no desire for emancipation
and resented every such suggestion as a wanton invasion of their
safety and their rights. They were satisfied with the status quo; they
neither desired change nor discussion of its supposed advantages. They
met every proposal with a resolute insistence upon their legal rights
under the constitutions, State and Federal, and manifested an
intolerance of thought and speech with respect to the institution
which filled the friends of moderation and progress with mournful
appreciation of the hindrances which beset their path.

THE WELL-BEING OF THE SLAVES

How far a conscientious regard for the moral and physical well-being
of the slaves entered into the considerations of the time as a
deterrent cause against their emancipation, cannot be determined.
Undoubtedly such sentiments existed among many earnest men favorable
thereto.

From the mass of facts and medley of voices certain conclusions can be
drawn.

Thus it may be affirmed that the slaves in Virginia were better off as
a result of their training and experience in servitude than they would
have been had their ancestors never set foot upon her soil. It is
equally true that theirs was but a partial development and that
freedom was necessary to the complete man. As the time comes in the
life of a child when the privileges and dangers of self-expression and
self-control must supplant the restraints of the home and the
school-room, so in the life of these children of larger growth,
freedom with its awesome dangers and soul-inspiring possibilities was
essential to any well-rounded and continuous advance.

Again, freedom was a help in the development of those who had made a
certain measure of progress in their moral, intellectual and physical
being; yet for those who were not thus prepared, its untimely coming
might prove the dawn of a darker day, unless accompanied by wise
nurture and sympathetic guidance of the feet, trained only for the
paths of dependence.

Mr. Jefferson doubtless expressed the sentiments of a large class of
thinkers when he said: "As far as I can judge from the experiments
which have been made, to give liberty to, or rather to abandon,
persons whose habits have been formed in slavery, is like abandoning
children."[228]

Experience with respect to emancipations made prior to the Civil War
strongly tended to confirm these views. The conditions, moral,
intellectual and physical, of the free negroes of Virginia contrasted,
as a rule, most unfavorably with that of their brethren still in
bonds.

CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES, 1830-1860

The results of emancipation where the slaves had been carried to free
states, were, on the whole, not much more encouraging.

Professor MacMaster, of the University of Pennsylvania, referring to
the condition of the free negroes in those states at the time of the
Missouri Compromise, writes: "In spite of their freedom they were a
despised, proscribed, and poverty-stricken class."[229]

Mr. Clay, speaking December 17, 1829, said:

"Of all the descriptions of our population and of either portion of
the African race, the free people of color are by far, as a class,
the most corrupt, depraved and abandoned. There are many honourable
exceptions among them, and I take pleasure in bearing testimony to
some I know. It is not so much their fault as the consequence of
their anomalous condition."[230]

Dr. Leonard Bacon, in a sermon before his congregation in New Haven,
Conn., July 4, 1830, said:

"Who are the free people of color in the United States, and what are
they? In this city there are from eight hundred to one thousand. Of
these, a few families are honest, sober, industrious, pious and in
many points of view, respectable. But what are the remainder? Every
one knows their condition to be a condition of deep and dreadful
degradation, but few have formed any conception of the reality. The
fact is, that as a class, they are branded with ignominy.... There
are in this country three hundred thousand freedmen, who are free
men only in name, degraded to the dust and forming hardly anything
else than a mass of pauperism and crime."[231]

The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison have recorded that at the
North, prior to the Civil War:

"The free colored people were looked upon as an inferior caste to
whom their liberty was a curse, and their lot worse than that of the
slaves, with this difference, that while the latter were to be kept
in bondage 'for their own good' it would have been very wicked to
enslave the former for their good."[232]

OUTLAY NECESSARY TO EMANCIPATION

We need not pause to consider the causes which reduced the free
negroes of the Northern States to the conditions here described. That
the free negroes of Virginia should have made little or no progress is
easily accounted for by the abnormal conditions amid which they lived.
There was confessedly scant chance for free negroes in communities
densely populated with negro slaves. Many of the friends of
emancipation, however, observing this same phenomenon in both slave
and free states, came to the conclusion that freedom under existing
conditions was hurtful rather than helpful. Others concluded that it
was not freedom, but the lack of freedom with all its normal
privileges, which had fettered the feet of these newly manumitted
slaves. Let the state pay the owners and emancipate the whole body of
slaves; let education and training for freedom go hand in hand with
opportunity for achieving, and then emancipation would be justified of
her children. For this immense outlay Virginia was confessedly not
ready, and so the earnest believer in emancipation looked to
colonization as the only door through which the slave might enter upon
liberty with a man's chance for progress and self-respecting
independence.

-----

Footnote 228:

_Writings of Jefferson_, Ford, Vol. X, p. 66.

Footnote 229:

_History of the United States_, McMaster, Vol. III, p. 558.

Footnote 230:

_The African Repository and Colonial Journal_, Vol. VI, No. 1, p.
12.

Footnote 231:

_Liberia Bulletin_, No. 15, p. 7.

Footnote 232:

_William Lloyd Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, pp. 253-254.

XXIV

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES
WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF
EMANCIPATION (Continued)

Beyond all the difficulties mentioned, there loomed the more
portentous problem of the effect upon the state's political and social
well-being of the introduction into her free population of a great
company of negroes, whether as citizens or suffragists, or mere
tenants at the will of their white brethren. What should be the
outcome of such an unparalleled experiment as universal emancipation
under the conditions existing in Virginia? The results of emancipation
in the free states furnished no assurance because there the number of
negroes was so small as to constitute a negligible quantity. What were
the voices of history which came from over-sea? In Spain, after
centuries of conflict, the whites had finally driven the remnant of
the Moors literally into the Mediterranean. In San Domingo, after the
carnival of blood had spent its force, the blacks had expelled all the
surviving whites from the island.

"It is futile," said Mr. Jefferson, "to hope to retain and
incorporate the blacks into the state. Deep-rooted prejudices of the
whites, ten thousand recollections of the blacks, of injuries
sustained, new provocations, the real distinction Nature has made,
and many other circumstances will divide us into parties, and
produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the
extermination of one or the other race."[233]

STATUS OF THE FREE NEGRO IN THE STATE

But casting aside these tragic warnings, the question of what would be
the result of the great experiment, stood unanswered. What place in
the life of the commonwealth were these people to fill? Should they be
trained for the obligations of freedom and then denied its privileges?
Should they be accorded the right of suffrage? If not, how would its
denial comport with the genius of our institutions and the aspirations
of our people? If entrusted with the suffrage how was the well-being
of communities to be assured where, having the majority, they would
become political masters? Had negroes ever, in the world's history,
ruled in peace and order a community largely populated by whites? Was
the race to be kept in a state of quasi-dependence—beholden for their
social and economic privileges to the very people with whom they must
come in competition? What provision for the pauperism, the vagrancy,
the lunacy and the crime which would certainly follow the removal of
the restraints of slavery? What measure and character of education for
the young and by whom provided? These and many more like them were the
questions, which, from the close of the Revolution, had confronted the
people of Virginia. What should be the relations, political and
social, of the two races after emancipation? Speaking in September,
1850, in Congress, on the Wilmot Proviso, Gov. James McDowell, of
Virginia, said:

"Physical amalgamation? ... ruinous, if it were possible....
Political and civil amalgamation just as impossible.... Emancipation
with rights of residence and property, but exclusion from social,
civil and political equality, would conduce, sooner or later, to a
war of colors."[234]

VIEWS OF RIVES AND DE TOCQUEVILLE

Speaking ten years later in the Peace Conference, at Washington,
Ex-Senator William C. Rives, of Virginia, said: "It has occupied the
attention of the wisest men of our time.... In fact, it is not a
question of slavery at all. It is a question of race."[235]

These two great Virginians were strong anti-slavery men, yet they
stood appalled before the problems of immediate emancipation without
deportation or colonization. That their views were not the product of
their environment, will appear from expressions of eminent men not so
situated.

M. de Tocqueville, whose work, _Democracy in America_, is the subject
of the widest appreciation, has given to the world in his notable
book, published in 1838, his conclusions with respect to this subject.
"The most formidable of all the ills," he writes, "which threaten the
future existence of the Union, arises from the presence of a black
population upon its territory."[236]

Again he writes: "I do not imagine that the white and black races will
ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the
difficulty to be still greater in the United States than
elsewhere."[237]

In conclusion, he says:

"When I contemplate the condition of the South I can only discover
the alternative which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of
those states, namely, either to emancipate the negroes and to
intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep
them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate
measures seem to me likely to terminate, and that shortly, in the
most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one
or the other of the two races."[238]

VIEWS OF DOUGLAS AND SHERMAN

Stephen A. Douglas, speaking at Ottawa, Ill., August 21st, 1858, said:

"For one I am opposed to negro citizenship in any and every form. I
believe this Government was made by white men, for the benefit of
white men and their posterity forever; and I am in favor of
confining citizenship to white men,—men of European birth and
descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians and other
inferior races."[239]

General William T. Sherman, writing in July, 1860, said:

"All the Congresses on earth can't make the negro anything else than
what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must
amalgamate or be destroyed. Two such races cannot live in harmony,
save as master and slave. Mexico shows the result of general
equality and amalgamation, and the Indians give a fair illustration
of the fate of negroes if they are released from the control of the
whites."[240]

William H. Seward, speaking at Detroit, Michigan, September 4th, 1860,
said:

"The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here is
a foreign and feeble element, like the Indians, incapable of
assimilation, ... and that it is a pitiful exotic, unwisely and
unnecessarily transplanted into our fields, and which it is
unprofitable to cultivate at the cost of the desolation of the
native vineyard."[241]

VIEWS OF LINCOLN

Let us turn to the more hopeful and yet halting conclusions of Abraham
Lincoln. In his speech at Quincy, Illinois, October 15th, 1858, in the
Lincoln-Douglas Debate, he said:

"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality
between the white and black races. There is a physical difference
between the two which, in my judgment, would probably forever forbid
their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and
inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference,
I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I
belong having the superior position."[242]

In the same debate at Charleston, Ill., September 18th, 1858, he had
said:

"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of
bringing about, in any way, the social and political equality of the
white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor
of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to
hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in
addition to this that there is a physical difference between the
white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two
races living together on terms of social and political
equality."[243]

How unsatisfactory would be the status of the two races in a state
where such conditions obtained, Mr. Lincoln must have appreciated, and
so, as we have seen, he turned to the colonization of the negroes as
the real solution of the problem.

CONDITION OF FREE NEGROES AT THE NORTH

Throughout the North as well as in Virginia there were thoughtful men
who knew that here was the difficulty. Slavery might be abolished, but
the presence of two non-assimilable races, separated by centuries in
their stages of development, endeavoring to live in peace under a
Republican form of government—these conditions presented the problem
which would tax to the utmost their resourcefulness and patience.

How strong was the sense of danger among the people of the free
states, which would result from such conditions, may be read in the
provisions of their constitutions and laws.

Probably in New England the laws were more favorable to free negroes
than in any other part of the North; but, even there, conditions were
far from normal, and certainly not such as to encourage the
immigration of the free blacks from Maryland and Virginia—where they
were most numerous.

LAWS AGAINST FREE NEGROES

In 1833, the Legislature of Connecticut, endeavoring to prevent the
establishment of schools in that state for non-resident negroes,
enacted a law prohibiting such schools, except with the consent "of a
majority of the civil authority and also of the selectmen of the town
in which such school, &c.,"[244] is to be located. The preamble of
this act justifies its passage by declaring that the establishment of
such schools "would tend to the great increase of the colored
population of the state, and thereby to the injury of the people, &c."
The negro populations of Vermont and New Hampshire had actually
decreased in the half century between 1810 and 1860, while that of
Massachusetts had increased less than three thousand.

The biographers of William Lloyd Garrison record the fact that there
existed a—

"Spirit which everywhere at the North, either by statute or custom,
denied to a dark skin, civil, social and educational
equality,—which in Boston forbade any merchant or respectable
mechanic to take a colored apprentice; kept the colored people out
of most public conveyances; and permitted any common carrier by land
or sea, on the objections of a white passenger, to violate his
contract with 'a nigger' however cultivated or refined."[245]

The states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania had by statutes
deprived free negroes of many of the privileges enjoyed in the period
immediately succeeding the Revolution. Thus, New Jersey in 1807, and
Pennsylvania in 1838, deprived them of the right of suffrage, and New
York in 1821 required of them as a prerequisite to voting a much
higher property qualification than was required of the white
citizens.[246] Professor A. B. Hart declares: "These exclusions
branded the negroes as of a different caste, even in the North, and it
was backed up by other unfriendly legislation."[247]

But it was chiefly in those free states on the same lines of latitude
as Virginia and Maryland, and in which the free negroes would
therefore be most liable to settle, that the laws obstructing or
forbidding their immigration were most pronounced.

EXCLUDED FROM VARIOUS STATES

Early in the century Ohio enacted laws inhibiting negroes from
settling in that state, unless they produced certificates of their
freedom, from a Court of Record, and executed bonds, with approved
security, not to become charges upon the counties in which they
settled. They were not permitted to give evidence in court in any
cause where a white man was party to the controversy or prosecution,
nor could they send their children to the public schools. About the
middle of the century many of these laws were repealed, but, by the
constitution adopted as late as 1851, they were denied the right to
vote, and were excluded from the militia.[248]

Indiana at first permitted free negroes to settle in the state,
provided they gave bonds, with approved security, not to become
charges upon the counties where they lived; but, in 1851, a new
constitution was adopted which specifically provided (Article XIII,
Section 1) that "no negro or mulatto shall come into or settle in the
state after the adoption of this constitution."[249]

This clause in the constitution was adopted by over ninety thousand
majority of the popular vote.[250]

In Illinois, following a series of laws of like import, an act was
passed in 1853, "to prevent the immigration of free negroes into this
state," the third section of which declared it a misdemeanor for a
negro or mulatto, bond or free, to come into the state with the
intention of residing.[251] Section four of this act provided that any
negro coming into the state in violation of the act should be fined
and sold for a time to pay the fine and cost.

In 1862, in the Constitutional Convention then in session, the
provisions of this statute were engrafted upon the organic law of the
state. Article XVIII provided:

Section 1. "No negro or mulatto shall immigrate or settle in this
state after the adoption of the constitution."

This article of the constitution was submitted to the popular vote
separately from the body of the constitution, and, though the latter
was rejected by over 16,000 majority, the former was made a part of
the organic law of Illinois by a majority of 100,590. This vote was
taken in August, 1862, and thus, barely a month before Mr. Lincoln's
first Proclamation of Emancipation, the people of his own state, by a
vote approaching unanimity, placed in their constitution this clause
preventing free negroes from coming into their commonwealth.[252]

By the constitution of Oregon, adopted on November 9th, 1857, it was
provided that:

"No free negro or mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of
the adoption of this constitution, shall come, reside or be within
this state ... and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal
laws for the removal by public officers of all such negroes and
mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for
the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state or
employ or harbor them."[253]

This provision of the constitution was adopted by a popular vote of
8040 to 1081 against it.

NORTHERN DREAD OF FREE NEGROES

If the people of the North thus regarded their few negroes as a
dangerous and perplexing element, how much more should the people of
Virginia hesitate in face of the conditions and problems which
confronted them? If Indiana and Illinois, with populations of over
three million whites and less than twenty thousand blacks, felt
constrained to deny free negroes the right to enter their states, how
much more should their sister, Virginia, with only one million whites
and nearly a half million black slaves, fear to add to her already
large free negro population?

LINCOLN'S ESTIMATE OF THE DANGER

This sense of danger to their political and social well-being arising
from the threatened presence of negroes in large numbers was felt by
the whites of the free states even after two years of civil war had
wrought its changes in sentiment, and Mr. Lincoln's first Proclamation
of Emancipation had been given to the world. In his message to
Congress in December, 1862, the President, in urging his plan for
national aid to facilitate emancipation and deportation, endeavored to
meet and allay these fears. He said:

"But it is dreaded that the freed people will swarm forth and cover
the whole land. Are they not already in the land? Will liberation
make them more numerous? Equally distributed among the whites of the
whole country, and there would be but one colored to seven whites.
Could the one in any way disturb the seven?...

"But why should emancipation South send the free people North?
People of any color seldom run unless there be something to run
from. Heretofore colored people to some extent have fled North from
bondage and now perhaps from both bondage and destitution. But if
gradual emancipation and deportation be adopted they will have
neither to flee from.... And in any event cannot the North decide
for itself whether to receive them?"[254]

These appealing words of Mr. Lincoln show that in the very hour when
the inspiring vision of emancipation was being held up before the
people of the free states, they were balancing the satisfaction of its
achievement with the dangers to their peace which might follow any
substantial increase in their negro population.

"Cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?" were the
reassuring words of Mr. Lincoln. Virginia had no such alternative.

-----

Footnote 233:

_History of Slavery in Virginia_, Ballagh, p. 132.

Footnote 234:

_Congressional Globe_, 31st Congress. 1st Session. App. 1678.

Footnote 235:

_Proceedings of Peace Convention_, Crittenden, p. 139.

Footnote 236:

_Democracy in America_, de Tocqueville, Vol. II, p. 214.

Footnote 237:

_Idem_, p. 238.

Footnote 238:

_Democracy in America_, de Tocqueville, Vol. II, p. 245.

Footnote 239:

_The Negro Problem, Abraham Lincoln's Solution_, Pickett, p. 446.

Footnote 240:

_General Sherman's Letters Home_, Howe, _Scribner's Magazine_,
April, 1909, p. 400.

Footnote 241:

_The Negro Problem, Abraham Lincoln's Solution_, Pickett, p. 449.

Footnote 242:

_Abraham Lincoln, Speeches, Letters and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol.
I, p. 458.

Footnote 243:

_Idem_, p. 457.

Footnote 244:

_William Lloyd Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, p. 321.

Footnote 245:

_William Lloyd Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, p. 253.

Footnote 246:

_Slavery and Abolition_, Hart, p. 83.

Footnote 247:

_Idem_, p. 83.

Footnote 248:

_History of Negro Race in America_, Williams, Vol. II, pp. 111-119.

Footnote 249:

_History of Negro Race in America_, Williams, Vol. II, pp. 119-122.

Footnote 250:

_Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America_, Wilson, Vol. II, p.
185.

Footnote 251:

_History of Negro Race in America_, Williams, Vol. II, p. 123.

Footnote 252:

_Illinois Convention Journal_, 1862, p. 1098.

Footnote 253:

_The Organic and Other General Laws of Oregon_, 1843-72, pp. 97-98.

Footnote 254:

_Messages and Papers of the Presidents_, Vol. VI, pp. 140-141.

XXV

SOME OF THE ALMOST INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES
WHICH EMBARRASSED EVERY PLAN OF EMANCIPATION
(Concluded)

"Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they
discuss it freely." In these words Lord Macaulay fixes free discussion
as a prime requisite to the right solution of problems, however
difficult. It was one of the baneful features of slavery and the
racial problems attending it that in the period just antedating the
Civil War tolerant discussion was almost banished from the arena. As a
rule, men of moderate views and sane counsels were driven to the rear,
while the Fanatics of the North and the Fire-eaters of the South held
the centre of the stage. Virginia was not wholly exempt from these
conditions which in her case had their origin and growth in causes
arising both within and beyond her borders.

LACK OF FREE DISCUSSION IN STATE

As we have seen, slavery in Virginia existed in certain well-defined
localities and was confined in ownership to a small minority of her
people. Thus the divergence of interests between the two classes of
her white population assumed a sectional character which was, in turn,
intensified by reason of an archaic arrangement with respect to
representation in her General Assembly. As heretofore explained, the
representatives in her Legislature were apportioned among the various
cities and counties of the commonwealth not on the basis of their
respective white populations, but upon what was known as the "mixed
basis"—that is—the quantum of property was taken into account along
with the number of white inhabitants. Slaves were assessed and taxed
as property and so the white people in the slave-owning sections
possessed a representative power in the State Legislature as against
their brethren in the non-slave-owning sections far beyond that to
which their numbers entitled them. Against this provision of
Virginia's constitution the whites of the growing western section,
with some assistance from the east, waged perpetual war. In this way
slavery in Virginia became involved in a controversy the heat and
conflicts of which served to intensify the feeling with respect to its
continuance or abolition. In like manner this controversy augmented
the power of the friends of slavery by rallying to their ranks the
conservative opponents of simple manhood suffrage, the property
interests and all those who, like John Randolph of Roanoke, looked, as
of old, to the East for light and leading. It was not until the
Convention of 1850 that this provision of Virginia's constitution was
amended, but as the change was not to be fully effective until 1865
the results of this augmentation of power to the people of the white
sections were never made manifest in her laws.

"Slavery is a cancer in your face," declared that master of epigram,
John Randolph of Roanoke. The world saw it. The victim of the disease
knew it was there. Between the pain of its presence and the dread lest
the surgeon's knife might not work a cure, the patient halted and
hesitated and, by manifold methods, sought to mitigate its pain or
banish the thought of its existence. Thus silence for to-day and hope
for to-morrow was his fatuous policy.

CAUSES IN THE STATE, WHICH HINDERED

Slavery was at war with the ideals upon which Virginians had founded
their commonwealth. It was a burden upon her advance along every line
of normal achievement. It was repugnant to the sensibilities of
thousands of her most devoted sons and yet, despairing of any present
remedy, they sternly deprecated discussion as a disloyal parading
before the world of this skeleton in her closet.

Slavery made its home among the great plantations spreading their
broad acres far from the centres of population, their owners living
distant one from the other. It required, therefore, some more
persuasive force than bolts and bars, to protect these isolated whites
from the fury of the blacks if ever roused to a maddened discontent
with their lot, and a consciousness of their power. Thus the daily
precepts of slavery,—obedience, submission and reverence for the
white man,—must not be dissipated by public discussions in which the
rightfulness of slavery was questioned and the glories of freedom held
up before the eyes of the wondering blacks. San Domingo sent its
warnings, the horrors of the Nat Turner Insurrection were still fresh
in the minds of men, and so the imperilled slave-holders denounced as
the enemies of their race white men who indulged in academic
discussions as to the advantages of emancipation.

The foregoing were some of the causes arising within the state which
served to discourage public discussions with respect to the abolition
of slavery, and to invest with unnatural heat and bitterness the
sentiments of those who nevertheless essayed the task.

CAUSES FROM WITHOUT, WHICH HINDERED

From beyond came movements and voices even more destructive of the
spirit of free discussion and which lent to the reactionary elements
in the state an advantage which they could never have acquired except
for this outside interference.

As far back as 1835 John Quincy Adams noted in his diary:

"Anti-slavery associations are formed in this country and in England
and they are already co-operating in concerted agency together. They
have raised funds to support and circulate inflammatory newspapers
and pamphlets gratuitously, and they send multitudes of them into
the Southern country into the midst of swarms of slaves."[255]

In the same year there assembled in Faneuil Hall what the biographers
of William Lloyd Garrison called "the social, political, religious and
intellectual elite of Boston," who, under the leadership of Theodore
Lyman, Jr., Abbott Lawrence, Peleg Sprague, and Harrison Gray Otis
adopted resolutions denouncing the Northern Abolitionists for seeking
by their inflammatory publications "to scatter among our Southern
brethren fire-brands, arrows, and death," and pledging the meeting to
support all constitutional laws for the suppression of all
publications, "the natural and direct tendency of which is to incite
the slaves of the South to revolt."[256]

Margaret Mercer, of Maryland, whose devotion to the cause of negro
emancipation was well attested by her act in manumitting her own
slaves, as well as in her life of service devoted largely to their
interests, writing to Gerrit Smith, laments the incendiary appeals of
William Lloyd Garrison and the direful forebodings which they aroused
among the Southern people especially in the imaginations of the women.
She says:

"For while the well-disposed and faithful servants of kind masters
will suffer and die with the whites in a general insurrection, the
lawless and vicious will have in their power to massacre men, women
and children in their sleep. This is my apology for feeling and
expressing the deepest indignation against the man who dares to
throw the fire-brand into the powder magazine while all are asleep
and stands himself at a distance to see the mangled victims of his
barbarous fury. I pray you, dear sir, in the strength of your
benevolence to conceive the state of families living remote from
assistance in the country. Suppose, as I have often witnessed, an
alarm of insurrection; think of the mother of a family startled from
her sleep by some unusual noise and seized with a horrid
apprehension of the scene which may await her in a few
moments."[257]

VIEWS OF ADAMS

Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited Virginia and the South in
1854, published the results of his observations, from which we take
the following extracts.

After describing the activities of the Northern Anti-slavery Societies
in scattering among the Southern negroes publications and pictures
tending to stimulate slave insurrections and to inculcate ideas of
racial equality, Dr. Adams writes:

"When these amalgamation pictures were discovered, husbands and
fathers at the South felt that whatever might be true of slavery as
a system, self-defense, the protection of their households against
servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they
broke into the post-office and seized and burned abolition papers;
indeed no excesses are surprising in view of the perils to which
they saw themselves exposed."[258]

Again he writes: "They seem to be living in a state of self-defense,
of self-preservation against the North."[259]

"As Northern zeal has promulgated bolder sentiments with regard to
the right and duty of slaves to steal, burn, and kill, in effecting
their liberty, the South has intrenched itself by more vigorous laws
and customs.... Nothing forces itself more constantly upon the
thoughts of a Northerner at the South who looks into the history and
present state of slavery, than the vast injury which has resulted
from Northern interference."[260]

In his message to Congress, December, 1860, President Buchanan writes:

"The incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question through
the North for the last quarter of a century has at last produced its
malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions
of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the
family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to
apprehension of servile insurrection. Many a matron throughout the
South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and
children before the morning."

VIEWS OF LUNT

Mr. George Lunt, of Boston, in his work, _The Origin of the Late War_,
writes:

"It thus appears that an active and alarming system of aggression
against the South was in operation at the North thirty years ago,
threatening to excite servile insurrection, to imperil union, to
stir up civil war. This fact rests upon testimony which cannot but
be considered impartial and conclusive."[261]

Again the same author, referring to the attempt of John Brown and his
associates, writes:

"Nothing was here wanting to insure a more widespread scene of
horror and desolation than the world perhaps had ever before
witnessed, except a totally different relation between the masters
and their servants in the South than that falsely imagined by the
conspirators and by those in sympathy with them either before or
after the fact."[262]

VIEWS OF BURGESS

Professor John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, in his work, _The
Civil War and the Constitution_, has portrayed the disastrous effects
upon the sentiment in favor of emancipation in various parts of the
South, occasioned by the virulence of these agitators and above all by
the attempt of John Brown and his followers to precipitate servile
insurrection.

"If the whole thing," writes Professor Burgess, "both as to time,
methods, and results, had been planned by his Satanic Majesty
himself, it could not have succeeded better in setting the sound
conservative movements of the age at naught, and in creating a state
of feeling which offered the most capital opportunities for the
triumph of political insincerity, radicalism and rascality over
their opposites. No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling
which occurred in the South between the 16th of October 1859 and the
16th day of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry
villainy as any other than one of the chiefest crimes of our
history. It established and re-established the control of the great
radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders,—the little
slaveholders, and the more liberal of the large slaveholders, which
had already begun to _be_ loosened."[263]

Professor Burgess then proceeds to show the still more disastrous
effects upon conservative sentiment in Virginia and the South which
resulted from the demonstrations at the North on the day of John
Brown's execution.

"Brown and his band," says Professor Burgess, "had murdered five men
and wounded some eight or ten more in their criminal movement at
Harper's Ferry.... Add to this the consideration that Brown
certainly intended the wholesale massacre of the whites by the
blacks in case that should be found necessary to effect his purposes
and it was certainly natural that the tolling of the church bells,
the holding of prayer-meetings for the soul of John Brown, the
draping of houses, the half-masting of flags, &c., in many parts of
the North should appear to the people of the South to be evidences
of a wickedness which knew no bounds and which was bent upon the
destruction of the South by any means necessary to accomplish the
result.... Especially did terror and bitterness take possession of
the hearts of the women of the South, who saw in slave insurrection
not only destruction and death, but that which to feminine virtue is
a thousand times worse than the most terrible death.

"From the Harper's Ferry outrage onward the conviction grew among
all classes that the white men of the South must stand together and
must harmonize all internal differences in the presence of the
mortal peril with which as a race they believed themselves
threatened. Sound development in thought and feeling was arrested,
the follies and hatreds born of fear and resentment now assumed the
places born of common sense and common kindliness."[264]

VIRGINIA'S POSITION IN ELECTION OF 1860

But, despite conflicts within and assaults from without, it must not
be concluded that the people of Virginia had entirely abandoned the
right of free discussion in regard to slavery, nor forfeited their
well-earned reputation for conservatism and self-poise. There were
still, as we have seen, many of her foremost men, who were frank to
deplore the existence of the institution and who had never surrendered
the faith of their fathers, that the day of abolition would surely
dawn. Neither did the outrage at Harper's Ferry with all its sinister
circumstances, nor the triumph of sectionalism in the National
elections of 1860, drive the state from its position of sanity and
conservatism. Virginia was one of three commonwealths in that
momentous election to cast her electoral vote for the Union
candidates, Bell and Everett, standing on the simple platform—the
preservation of the Union, the supremacy of the constitution and the
enforcement of the laws.

The foregoing recitals will serve to present the almost insuperable
difficulties with which emancipation in Virginia was invested during
the period just antedating the Civil War. That her people took counsel
of their fears, rather than their hopes, may be admitted. But for this
attitude who shall arraign them?

LINCOLN'S ESTIMATE OF THE DIFFICULTIES

Abraham Lincoln, speaking at Peoria, Ill., October 16th, 1854, said:

"When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for
the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it
is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to
get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and
appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing
what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were
given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing
institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and
send them to Liberia—their native land. But a moment's reflection
would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is)
there may be in this in the long run, its sudden execution is
impossible. If they were all landed there in a day they would all
perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and
surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times
ten days. What then? Free them all and keep them among us as
underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I
think I would not hold one in slavery at any rate; yet the point is
not clear enough to me to denounce people upon. What next? Free them
and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings
will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those
of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling
accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question, if
indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling whether well or
ill founded cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot then make them
equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation
might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this I will not
undertake to judge our brethren of the South."[265]

"If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as
to the existing institution!" Such was the frank avowal of Mr.
Lincoln.

Nearly a half century later, Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of
the "Old Man Eloquent," and himself a veteran of the Union Army,
wrote:

"The existence of an uneradicable and insurmountable race difference
is indisputable. The white man and the black man cannot flourish
together, the latter being considerable in number, under the same
system of government.... The negro squats at our hearthstone. We can
neither assimilate nor expel him."[266]

We need not yield completely to Mr. Lincoln's perplexity, nor to Mr.
Adams's despair in acknowledging the gravity of the situation which
confronted the people of Virginia and the almost insuperable
difficulties which attended its right solution.

-----

Footnote 255:

_Adams's Diary_, August 11, 1835. Quoted in _Life of William Lloyd
Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, p. 487.

Footnote 256:

_William Lloyd Garrison_, by his children, Vol. I, p. 495.

Footnote 257:

_Memoir of Margaret Mercer_, Morris, p. 126.

Footnote 258:

_A South Side View of Slavery_, Adams, p. 108.

Footnote 259:

_Idem_, p. 108.

Footnote 260:

_Idem_, p. 110.

Footnote 261:

_The Origin of the Late War_, Lunt, p. 104.

Footnote 262:

_Idem_, p. 329.

Footnote 263:

_The Civil War and the Constitution_, Burgess, Vol. I, p. 35.

Footnote 264:

_The Civil War and the Constitution_, Burgess, Vol. I, pp. 42-44.

Footnote 265:

_Lincoln-Douglass Debates_, p. 74. See also _Abraham Lincoln,
Letters, Speeches and State Papers_, N. & H., Vol. I, p. 187.

Footnote 266:

_Century Magazine_, March, 1906, p. 106.

XXVI

THE STATUS OF THE CONTROVERSY REGARDING
SLAVERY AT THE TIME VIRGINIA SECEDED
FROM THE UNION

In considering the status of the controversy with respect to slavery
just prior to the Civil War, and whether Virginia in seceding was
actuated by a desire to extend or perpetuate the institution, it will
assist to a clearer understanding if we present in detail the several
phases over which conflicts had arisen, and the parties to the same.

The right and obligation of the Federal Government to prevent, by
legislation, slaveholders from emigrating into the territories with
their slaves; the duty of the Federal Government to provide through
its officials for the capture and return to their owners of fugitive
slaves; and the existence or abolition of slavery in the Southern
States—these constituted the three principal subjects of discussion
and points of conflict.

Coupled with this three-fold aspect of the problem, Virginia was
confronted by four factors, more or less potential in their relation
to the subject—the Federal Government, the Republican Party, certain
of the Northern States, and the Abolitionists.

With respect to the Federal Government, neither Virginia nor her
slaveholders could lodge any complaint.

The compromise measures of 1850 had accorded slaveholders the right to
carry their slaves into the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which
embraced the present states of Nevada, Utah, a portion of Colorado,
and the present territories of Arizona and New Mexico); while the
Kansas-Nebraska Bill, enacted in 1854, repealed the restrictions
imposed by the Missouri Compromise.

Independent of these measures the Supreme Court of the United States
had, in 1857, in the Dred Scott case, decided that slaveholders
possessed the right under the constitution, to carry their slaves into
the territories, and that Congress could not deprive them of it. In
like manner, the Federal Government had enacted a fugitive slave law
with most efficient provisions for its enforcement by Federal
officials, and, finally, the continued existence of slavery in
Virginia found a sure defense from illegal assaults in the Federal
Constitution and the power and obligation of the National Government
to maintain its provisions.

ATTITUDE OF REPUBLICAN PARTY

With respect to the attitude of the Republican Party, the situation
was not so simple. The Republican Party was organized in 1854 to
maintain the tenet that Congress had the right, as it was its duty, to
exclude slave owners with their slaves from the territories. The
Supreme Court of the United States three years later decided that
Congress possessed no such power, yet in its platform of 1860 the
Republican Party reasserted its position and hence advanced the more
portentous claim that Congress had a right to legislate upon the
subject in disregard of the mandates of the highest court of the
Republic. It must also be borne in mind that the Republican Party was
sectional in its origin, membership and spirit. Even its National
conventions were composed of representatives gathered practically from
only one of the two great divisions of the Union. Its nominees for
President and Vice-President in 1856 and 1860 were both taken from the
same section. Electoral tickets bearing the names of its candidates
were presented for the suffrages of the people only in the Northern
and Border States; and, finally, by electoral votes coming exclusively
from the North, its candidates were elected, though the majority in
favor of their opponents aggregated nearly a million of the popular
suffrage. These conditions may well have aroused the conviction that
the rights and interests of Virginia and the South would receive scant
recognition at the hands of the incoming administration, yet the fact
remains that before the date of Virginia's secession, the Republican
Party had, by legislative enactments and official pledges, given proof
of its purpose to protect slaveholders in every right previously
established by the laws of Congress and the decisions of the Federal
Courts.

SLAVEHOLDERS' RIGHTS IN TERRITORIES

It is difficult at this distance from the event to appreciate how the
question of the right of slaveholders to introduce slaves into the
territories could have been the subject of such profound and
peace-destroying controversy. That few slaves would ever be carried
into the territories was a conclusion easily deducible from the
character of slave labor, and the climatic and soil conditions of most
of the Western prairies—especially after Southern California, which
would have furnished them a congenial home, had been admitted into the
Union as part of a free state.

EFFECTS OF DISPERSING SLAVES

In like manner while we may appreciate the position of slaveholders
who insisted upon their constitutional right to carry slaves into the
territories, though they might never expect to exercise the privilege,
yet it is difficult to realize the reasonableness of objection when
coming from friends of emancipation not themselves citizens of the
locality which was thus to be burdened. The problem of emancipation
was largely a question of the relative numbers of whites and blacks in
any given state. With few blacks and many whites, there was no problem
worthy of the name. With many blacks and few whites, the problem
assumed its maximum of difficulty and danger. Every slave, therefore,
who went from the congested slave centres of the South to the Western
prairies not only ameliorated his own condition and enhanced his hopes
of emancipation, but, in like manner, augmented the chances of
improvement and ultimate freedom to those he left behind. Mr.
Jefferson had, as far back as 1820, crystallized the thought in terms
so clear and reasonable that it seems difficult to controvert.

"Of one thing I am certain," wrote Mr. Jefferson, "that as the
passage of slaves from one state to another would not make a slave
of a single human being who would not be so without it, so their
diffusion over a greater surface would make them individually
happier and proportionately facilitate the accomplishment of their
emancipation by dividing the burden upon a greater number of
coadjutors."[267]

The force of these observations will still further appear when we
recall that slavery might be abolished upon the adoption by a
territory of its constitution preliminary to statehood, or the new
state might at any time in the future so decree—a result most
probable because of the small number of slaves and the ever increasing
white population within its borders.