■■■ 
 
 JMSU J/hSJUL* CLXJUXA/ /UJUOCQ 
 
 >»•'<-< 
 
Glass I z^y-f 
 
 Book ' 17^? %4 l 
 

 THREE GREAT HACKS OF MEN; 
 
 
 HUGIN, CHARACTER, HISTORY AND DESTINY 
 
 WITH SPECIAL DITI0N 
 
 Bl -I . B. TURN] 
 
 [ELD: 
 
 BAILHAOB I i: PIO I 
 
 IS' 
 
Entered, according to act of Congress, in the year 1861, by 
 J. B. TURNER, 
 n ' leri Office of flue District Court for the Southern District of Illinois. 
 
 ' OS" 
 
r r e fa c 1-: 
 
 [f this little book it will, of course, not suit the 
 
 in church • . for the simple 
 
 reason that no party can, in o nature, embrace universal 
 
 tmtli ; ' any individual can express it. 
 
 The reader will, tit. yard it only as a hearty 
 
 though humble free-will i toward the solution of one <>! the 
 
 of the idm- here id were ; ' to a 
 
 . 
 
 d for publication at that 
 
 time; but the author then thought it not advisable to trouble the 
 
 public with anything in the Bhape of books, on this subj 
 
 The i i renewed, from - and under 
 
 ■:. he fell bound not to r< 
 lior can make no ] • or learni 
 
 ' lia\ b bi ■ n the farm and in other 
 
 jle 1 k on th 
 
 ud never i xpecte to 
 I another; and presenl opacity, 
 
 rly preclude! 
 
 olarly an written in a 
 
 ary ass* »ciation ; 
 tli few additi ual haste, tl ■ now 
 
 public t cy. 
 
 rary man will doubtless smile at many of 
 the idei ontained ; but I trust the 
 
 true philosopher i displeased to meet the frank, and 
 
 unr< don of the plain and simple 
 
 tho id only . epresentative of the 
 
 thou in the land who think the same things 
 
IV 
 
 without, perhaps, either the disposition or the leisure and capacity 
 to give them utterance. From some knowledge of the unlettered 
 working-men of the nation, I can assure him that these are the 
 thoughts that lie deep in the heart of the great mass of their most 
 intelligent men, which do and will form the basis of their practical 
 action, whether they ever give them utterance in words or not. 
 Their hearty practical contempt for the manifold shams in our age 
 and time, both in Church and in State, grows out of innate intuition, 
 which the reader will find herein more or less clearly expressed. 
 No right, however, is claimed of speaking even in their behalf: 
 they can and will speak for themselves — at least at the polls. 
 
 The reasons for the necessity of Hope, to both the white and the 
 black races, at the South, the reader will find noted ; without which 
 there can be neither hope for the Kepublic nor for the Continent. 
 
 Much herein contained was deemed, when first uttered to private 
 audiences, some years ago, prophetic, if not wholly visionary, in 
 its character. I leave all those parts to stand just as first written, 
 so that my readers will see with what fearful rapidity prophesy has 
 already become history. All that relates to the future prospects of 
 the black race and of the union of the States, he should consider 
 as uttered at that date. 
 
 I trust the book will interest the Eastern man, as showing him a 
 type or specimen of the thousands of our unsophisticated men of 
 the West ; and the Southern man, as showing him a specimen of a 
 genuine ultra Abolitionist, who has voted the extreme anti- 
 slavery ticket for twenty .years past, and is ready to no, hake and 
 pay as much for the best good, and the highest possible freedom 
 of both master and slave, as any other man in the circle of his 
 acquaintance ; and, if the slaveholder would condescend to read 
 even this little book, he would see how grossly he has been led t<> 
 misunderstand all our ends and aims by the false representations 
 of a few imbecile and profligate political demagogues. But I am 
 not authorized to speak for the Abolitionists, or any other class — 
 though I distinctly claim to be one ; for I regard it not as a term of 
 reproach, but as a term of honor. I most sincerely wish to abolish 
 all tyranny and all wrong toward the white race and the black — 
 toward the master and the slave ; and with the hope of contributing 
 to this great end alone was this little book written, amid many 
 pressing and urgent labors and cares. 
 
It may strike some that the first chapters, on geographical 
 subjects, and on the nature of liberty and government, are irrelevant 
 and tedious ; but I think, after a full survey of the whole subject, 
 it will be seen that without such considerations no intelligent 
 opinion could be formed. At any rate, opinions formed on the 
 basis of mere conventionalisms, without a specific regard to the 
 ultimate facts, laws and principles which must ever control all 
 actual and possible events, must ever be found excessively shallow, 
 superficial and unsatisfactory to every rational and thinking mind. 
 
 J. B. TURNER. 
 Jacksonville, Illinois, February 1, L861. 
 
. \ T S 
 
 C ii a r t i. i: i 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 1 
 
 CI1 A PT ER I 1 . 
 
 13 
 
 III. 
 
 I V. 
 
 19 
 
 C I! A PT E R V . 
 
 the Union to the Black 55 
 
 i ii \ i' ; i: r vi. 
 
 I of 
 i I rovernment ; 
 Policj 
 tern of Slaverj . 69 
 
 C II A PT EE \ II. 
 
 ■- of the Present Rebellion and : -and Remedies Pro- 
 
 i 91 
 

Of 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 If we look at any part of the Creators plan, we everywhere find 
 il to be i -.xitv in variety. Man seeks order in a dead uni- 
 formity : God in endless variety. Man would dig down the conti- 
 and mountains into a dead level of fields, or of railroads, or 
 cast them into to build cities and wharves upon. But God 
 
 with His volcanoes and earthquakes, heaves up more in an hour 
 than they all can cart away in a thousand years. 
 
 Man would spread the dead level of some petty democracy, or 
 •tism, or er all the earth, and over Heaven, too, if he 
 
 could, like a white winding-sheet over a great dead giant. But 
 God, with His great moral and political volcanoes and earthquakes, 
 will throw more anarchies, and schisms, and endless disorders into 
 their ill-timed work, in a single day, than they can all compose in a 
 thousand years. And until they begin to seek order and unity on 
 His plan, of endless variety, they will never succeed till they be- 
 come both wiser and stronger than He is. 
 
 Again. Everywhere in the works of God we find law lading in- 
 to law, being into being, i pecies into species, race into race, worlds 
 into atoms, and atoms into worlds, so that we can nowhere say, 
 "here this begins, and here that ends;" but all things begin and 
 end in God: infinite unity and infinite variety; and so far does 
 this variety proceed that there can he no two things or beings ex- 
 actly alike on the face of the whole earth, if, indeed, in the whole 
 Universe of God. in classifying the different races of men, there- 
 tore, we may make three or five or five million divisions, as best 
 suits our purpose on hand. My present purpose leads me to make 
 three classes, two extremes and one middle race ; the black and the 
 white races on the extremes, and the colored or yellow or tawny 
 race, intermediate. 
 —2 
 
I am well aware that these three races are at present jostled and 
 tumbled together, all over the face of the earth, in the most astonish- 
 ing seeming confusion, by the force of avarice and passion as well as 
 by conquests, wars and revolutions, through a long series of ages. 
 But still, I have not the least doubt, that the natural home of all 
 varieties of the black man, is near the equator; that of the yellow 
 and tawny races, near the tropics ; and that of the white man near- 
 est to the poles, in what are commonly called the temperate zones. 
 The black and dusky men that are now near the poles, were un- 
 doubtedly driven there by their enemies, or transported as slaves, 
 while all the white men under the equator, were forced there by 
 the inordinate love of gain or power, or by some other unnatural 
 casualty or cause. And if peace and righteousness ever cover the 
 earth long enough to let natural physical causes work out their own 
 inevitable results, we shall find in general, only black or very dark 
 men under the equator ; only yellow or dusky men near the tropics ; 
 and only white men nearer to the poles. Hence, we may properly 
 call the black the equatorial race, the yellow, the tropical, and 
 the white, the polar race, in respect to their natural geographical 
 location : The Baconed races of Mpngolias and Esquimaux, the 
 red races of Indians and our half-breeds, I do not include in the dis- 
 tinctly yellow race, although in all probability, they are all — except 
 our half-breeds — a degenerate off-shoot from it, but by their pecu- 
 liar habits, intermixtures and wanderings, they have become a 
 sort of mongrels, like the mulattoes, or men of all climes, like the 
 American Indians; of which classes we shall speak more particularly 
 hereafter. I, of course, use terms denoting color only in a loose 
 and general sense ; and the terms denoting location only in the same 
 sense; since the actual causes which make all men in process of 
 ages, who come under them, either black, yellow, or white, run 
 round the earth in isothermal, and not in equatorial or tropical 
 lines. Nor do I now affirm that any particular race now extant, 
 will, in the far future, be either here or there, or even continue to 
 exist. I only here affirm, that whatever race does ultimately exist, 
 especially on the great continents under the equator, must be a 
 black race, and have all the essential peculiarities of our present 
 black man ; and whatever race exists under the tropics, must be a 
 yellow or tawny race, and have all the peculiarities of that race ; 
 and whatever race exists to the north of this must be a white or 
 
s*~0 e / 
 
 ruddy race, and have its peculiarities. This is as much the law of 
 
 nature, the will of God, as is the law of gravity or the rolling of the 
 
 es. I shall hereafter propose my reasons for this belief. 
 
 According to the scriptures, the great stream of white men flow- 
 ed from Western Asia, Northward and Westward, from Father 
 Japhet, over Eur< ipe and the whole Northwest. The stream of yel- 
 low men flowed eastward and Southward, from Shorn, over Asia, and 
 the whole Southeast ; while th i of black men flowed South, 
 
 from Ham, over Africa and the whole South. I accept this account 
 here only on the ground of its probability; and whether the reader 
 or rejects it, will make no difference with the arguments 
 or the conclusions to which we shall arrive. Each one may hold 
 ,--v as re i ' ■ nl * all of these 
 
 races. All I wish him to grant is, that they are here by some 
 means, and that berm t be governed by those natural 
 
 □ the world. 
 
 We must, therefore, pause here to look at one or two geographi- 
 cal and physical characteristics of the globe we inhabit, which have 
 inevitably and inexorably lixed the location, character, history and 
 destiny of each of these race-, beyond the power of men or of an- 
 gels materially to change it. withoul a recreation of the very gran- 
 lundation of tl 
 
 [. In r ■ , heal and cold, the earth may be 
 
 divii ward and Westward into three great zones or belts of 
 
 temperature: 1st. An Equatorial Zone, where frost never comes. 
 2d. A Tropical Zone, where frost rarely comes. 3d. APolarZo^ 
 where all things arc frozen solid for some months in the year. The 
 grapher we will therefore drop, as being of no 
 present use to us; and what is commonly called the Polar or Frigid 
 Zone we will leave wholly oul of the account, as being a mere inci- 
 al appendage, and properly no more a part of the habitable 
 globe than the snow-ball on a man's boot-heel is apart of the man; 
 and by the Polar Zom — I here mean that part of the habitable 
 earth which lies some degrees North of the tropics, and extends 
 indefinitely to the North— the zone in which we Jive, and more 
 commonly called, in part, the Temperate Zone— as already inti- 
 mated; one of these zones naturally breeds black men; the next 
 one yellow or tawny men, and the last white men. If we include 
 all that lies between the geographical tropics in the Equatorial 
 
Zone, and divide the remainder equally, eacli of these portions con- 
 tain about an equal portion of the earth's habitable surface, and of 
 course this division of zones, assigns to each of these three great 
 races about an equal extent of territory, as their peculiar patrimo- 
 ny. Different degrees of altitude, or of heat and moisture from 
 other causes, will produce in very limited locations the same prac- 
 tical effects, as removal from the poles, or the equator. But the 
 great general law is still unvaried. 
 
 II. Let us look at the earth again longitudinally, and we shall 
 still find three great divisions, Eastern, Middle, and Western, (as 
 we are accustomed to speak.) 1st. The Eastern, comprising the 
 great strip, or glade, or continent of Asia. 2d. The middle strip, 
 comprising Europe and Africa. 3d. The Western, North and South 
 America. Each of these longitudinal strips, or glades, or conti- 
 nents, according to geographers, are of about equal extent, or about 
 fifteen million square miles each ; and thus, again, about an equal 
 area, as a field for enterprise and empire, is assigned by the Creator 
 to each of these races, by the creation of the globe itself. Eor we 
 will now notice, first, that on the Asiatic or Eastern continent there 
 is no proper theater for the black man. Here, the home of the 
 black man — the Equatorial Zone — is chopped off and sunk in the 
 Indian Ocean, or cut up into Highland Capes, Promontories and 
 Islands. He has here no-proper continental territory ; and nothing 
 but a wide continental territory will answer for the breeding ground 
 of races while still on the mainland. But while the space for the 
 white man in the North of Asia is large, it is so sterile and inhospita- 
 ble, as to force him continually to war and plunder rather than to 
 tillage and art, and was, therefore, from the earliest ages abandoned 
 by him, to the mongrel Mongolian race of wandering shepherds and 
 warriors. It is whelmed in great deserts of sand, sunk in marshy 
 swamps, or piled in rocky mountain heights, so bleak, inhospita- 
 ble, and shut out from the white man's peculiar uses, till achieved 
 arts have advanced him far along in his career of destiny— the final 
 conquest and enslavement of the powers of nature, as will hereaf- 
 ter be seen. The Eussian government, by her new interests in rail- 
 roads, and in machinery and mechanism, and especially, by throw- 
 ing back, annually, ten thousand white, hardy exiles, into the wilds 
 of Siberia, in addition to their natural increase, is already beginning 
 this great work, which will ultimately redeem to the white race the 
 
whole area naturally belonging to them ; and while I cannot but 
 admire the wisdom of God in this arrangement of these first great 
 hive of the human race, I cannot stop to depict the inevitable and 
 untold needless misery, from war, devastation, plunder and slavery, 
 that must have resulted to the human race, if either an Equatorial 
 or a habitable Polar Zone had been added to this great continent, 
 
 f these i and therefore hostile 
 
 i 
 
 But if v i the next great middle division, or continent of 
 
 i, comprising Europe and Africa, Ave find exactly the 
 
 of all this; for here, the greater part of the natural home 
 
 ellow man is sunk in the Mediterranean S -r in the 
 
 I deserts of Africa : while Europe fun tost magnificent 
 
 theat< r for I and arms of the white man, and Africa an 
 
 equally safe and for the Mack man. But between 
 
 . in the ] v man, we find 
 
 what was an impassable sea, and what still is an impassable desert. 
 The pr of the white man went out to their arts, their 
 
 wars, their conquests and their destinies, Northward, into Europe; 
 the black man took their way to the South, toward their 
 tonhl home ; and centuries rolled away, and they uever met again, 
 or knew that each oth< r I on the face of the earth. For 
 
 purposes of wonderful wisdom, as we shall soon see, God said, 
 
 . they wi ince 
 
 said, "LET ran M ;" and they have met. All is wise; God is 
 
 wise; ami God is good. Thi 3 and ends of their meeting, 
 
 . wo v. ill Boon explain. But let us look, for a moment more, at 
 
 this old home of the black men— Central Africa. 
 
 [ts shores and coasts are barricaded and blockaded on all 
 with a deluge of mud or ad, or an in: i rampart of 
 
 mountains and rivers all run contra- 
 wise, a- it' undecided whore the soa is, or whether, indeed, there 
 at to he any. With a climate so warm, and a soil 80 produc- 
 tive, that little or nothing is wanted at home, while nothing can he 
 carried abroad, there stands "Id Africa, grand, unique, solitary and 
 sublime : with the pestilence and the death-damp ever on her brow, 
 and blowing her deadly simoons an »s in the face of all 
 
 intruders; almost as unknown still, as in the days of Ham; prof- 
 fering the splendor of her jewels, and breathing the frankinci 
 
of her spices and her myrrh, toward heaven alone, but saying to 
 all earth, avaunt ! avaunt ! It is as though God had said to the 
 black man, speaking through all nature's voice, " Son, thou shalt 
 know no being, no thing, but me alone ;" as though God, amid 
 these torrid deserts, and ramparts of rock, of sand, of jungles, and 
 of mud, had constructed his secret laboratory of humanity, into 
 which, during the mighty process of the mystery of the ages, he 
 would permit none but angel eyes to look, till the apocalyptic hour 
 of his own right hand should fully come. At any rate, on the 
 white man's end, or the Northern European end, of this middle, 
 longitudinal division of the earth, all has been open, known, and 
 gazed at by the world— accessible, revealed, intellectual, aggres- 
 sive, antagonistic, progressive and triumphant; while, on the Afri- 
 can, or black man's end, all has been closed, contraband, inaccessi- 
 ble, mysterious and inscrutable ; filled with wants, without know- 
 ledge or arts ; and conflicts and sufferings, without triumphs ; with 
 toil and agony, to weak human eyes, without reward, end or pro" 
 gress— but not in God's eyes, as we shall see before we close. 
 
 We come now to the third, or the Western, great longitudinal 
 division of the earth, comprising North and South America. And 
 here again, precisely as in the Central division, and lying alongside 
 of it — "pari jiassu " — North America alongside of Europe, and 
 South America alongside of Africa — we find the tropical home of 
 the yellow man, mostly sunk in the ocean and the Caribbean Sea; 
 while, at the North, the white man has a theater of action and 
 enterprise, surpassing even the fables, to say nothing of the reali- 
 ties, of the Old World. All its mighty rivers and navigable 
 streams pour Southward, toward the black man's natural home. 
 Here are climates, soils, lakes, seas, cataracts and water-falls ; iron 
 like stone ; gold like pebbles ; all forces and powers ; all capabili- 
 ties, resources and productive energies ; all saying, with their ten 
 thousand tongues, to the white man, " work, work ; know, know ; 
 invent, invent ; progress, progress ; conquer, conquer ; " and he 
 does work, and know, and progress, and conquer, and triumph, as 
 no other being on earth ever did or could. 
 
 South of this, directly over against the old home of the black 
 man, in Africa, lies South America — the Brazils — the great valley 
 of the Amazon — with the most luxuriant climate, the richest 
 soil, and the mightiest river on the face of the earth — navigable 
 
for the largest steamers, for tens of thousands of miles, all through 
 it, with its great mouth open one hundred and fifty miles wide, on 
 ! [uator, directly toward Africa — beyond all question, and all 
 comparison, the largest, and richest, and most luxuriant and mag- 
 nificent river and land beneath the whole circuit of the sun ! This, 
 
 ae of somebody, is it not? or is it only 
 for crocodiles, panthers and musketoes? Whose shall this be? 
 That it must ultimately become, like all other equatorial lands, the 
 home of a black man, of some sort, or lie in perpetual waste, is 
 certaii . ' . erses all the laws of nature by a perpetual 
 
 miracle. Will he, then, use the millions ot black men he has 
 already produced, through ages ml or will he, as some 
 
 affirm, annihilate all these, and create or produce a new black 
 race? That is, do all his pasl work over . - to do it 
 
 cording to our Anglo-Saxon notions of fitness and pro- 
 priety. For my own part, I confess thai I am more than half 
 inclined to assume, without further proof, that God did not make 
 old Africa as he did. tor nothing— that lie has not nurtured one 
 hundred millions of men tl h all the Ion-- . 
 
 for nothing — that he did not create by far the most magnificent 
 land on the face of tin- earth, tl valley of the Amazon, for 
 
 nothing -ami that thus far lie has done all bis work, both on con- 
 tinents and races, most admirably well, and has no need to do it all 
 over again, our Anglo-Saxon pride, and theories, and speculations, 
 to the contrary notwithstanding. Bui I will not ask others to admit 
 it vet, but go on to complete our proof.. 
 
 It is proper here to remark, that if this view is correct, no yellow 
 race can ever Long exist on this continent as an independent race. 
 God has made no home, no theater here for them. They may exist 
 as individuals, but a-- independent and thorouj ranized nation- 
 
 alities they never can ; and whether our present [ndians and Mexi- 
 cans are an offshool from the original proper yellow race in Asia, 
 or not, they are either destined to a total and inevitable extinction, 
 or to be overrun and .-wallowed up by the twogreal races for whom 
 the whole continent was evidently made: the democratic whites 
 on the North, and the moiiarchial blacks on the South. 
 
 Bui let us lo,,k, tor a moment, a little more particularly to this 
 new home of the black man— South America. And the first thing 
 we should notice is its great and exceeding richness of soil and 
 
8 
 
 mines in all possible spontaneous productions ; its immense forests 
 of precious woods, fruits, spices and flowers ; its boundless fertile 
 prairie fields ; its teeming myriads of animal life. But the chief 
 thine I wish here to notice is the fact that in its geological and 
 geographical structure it is the direct antipodes of the old African 
 continent, though lying in the same climate and guarded by the 
 same ever-wakeful sentinels of pestilence and of death against the 
 prolonged intrusion ot the white man. As we have seen, in Africa 
 all was closed, hidden and mysterious, from the very nature of the 
 continent itself; but here, in Brazil, all is thrown more widely 
 open by far than in any other country in the world. The mighty 
 Amazon is itself navigable for 4,000 miles, almost to the Pacific 
 coast on the west. Its thousand tributaries, which coil around and 
 through the land, some of them flowing quite round into the 
 Carribean Sea, are navigable for tens of thousands of miles more, 
 while on their very banks are exhaustless forests of precious wood, 
 mines of coal, precious stones, salt, and metals of all sorts, and 
 every possible product of the richest of all possible climes and soils. 
 This country — so open and accessible — so rich in all natural 
 products — is considerably larger than the wlfole territory of the 
 United States, and with its great natural canals, all built — its 
 present crop of untold value, all fully planted and grown by the 
 hand of God himself- — it is intrinsically worth a dozen just such 
 countries as ours. Its simple product of gum elastic, to speak of 
 no other, bids fair, in the progress of art, to be worth more to the 
 commerce of the world than all the natural vegetable products of 
 the whole temperate zone put together. I am not unaware, in 
 this statement, of the immense undrained pestilential marshes, the 
 hordes of crocodiles and other monsters and the untold myriads of 
 verminous and offensive forms, of both vegetable and animal lite, 
 with which God has effectually fenced the white man out of this 
 new western home of his sable sons — as a barrier against an 
 invading foe, even more effectual than the great deserts and 
 jungles of the old world ; but still, unlike these, offering not the 
 slightest obstacle to the fullest and freest commercial and peaceful 
 
 intercourse. Now look this country of South America all over 
 
 its rivers, its natural commerce, its climate, its soil, its products 
 
 and ask, in view of these facts, for whom did God make this 
 peculiar, this mighty land, the whole of which seems to say to its 
 
9 
 
 ftituT .v. er he may be, from all its thousand streams, 
 
 and plal ad mountain heights, and forest homes, -- Son, thou 
 
 hast seen thy days of sorrow and of woe: I have brought thee, at 
 
 -. to a large place — a safe home — a goodly laud ; live, worship 
 and enjoy, and let all earth hear and know thy final songs of 
 gratitude and of praise :" But we are not ready t<> decide so great 
 a question, a- yet : for by this survey of continents and of climates, 
 we have only obtaii re, our li apo stou" — a proper 
 
 tform — from which to take a general survey of these races 
 then . and to note the peculiarities which these inevitable 
 
 physical causes have wrought in each. 
 
 Ai:d here, as the Asiatic or yellow or tawny man is and ever 
 must be, as a ruling or a dominant populative power, confined 
 mainly to old Asia, and has no natural home on either this 
 the one east of it, we will drop him out of 
 our • q, simply observing that he partakes of the excellencies 
 
 and defect- <.f each of the extreme races, and has been, in past 
 history, decidedly the tii imen of man on earth, so far as his 
 
 natural capacities and qualities are concerned. 
 
 Under or near to the Northern edge of the isothermal tropical 
 line we shall find the immediate or more remote ancestors of the 
 Peruvians, the Mexican-, the Moors, the Carthagenians, the Egyp- 
 tians, the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Romans, the Greeks, the 
 Jews, the Arabians, the Persians, the Northern Indians and the 
 Chinese. From these race- have sprung the finest specimens o* 
 art and taste the finest literature and poetry and eloquence, 
 nearly all the enduring religions and tin- strongesl and most 
 civilized empires of earth. In literature, policy, faith and art, 
 these nations have taken the lead and given the law to the world; 
 though not equal to their more Northern neighbors in mechanics, 
 science, metaphysics, physical products, power and war, for neces- 
 sary reasons, which will he made plain as we proceed. 
 
 I cannot pause here to note the multitude of obvious seeming 
 objections which must arise in the mind of the intelligent reader, 
 to what has already been said, [t would require me to discuss the 
 long centuries of war and invasion from the North and Northwest, 
 which forced millions of the pr 'per yellow race of Southern Asia, 
 round the Eastern edge of that continent, over the North of China 
 and the Empire of Japan, and carried them (especially their fe- 
 —3 
 
males) as slaves, and scattered them by thousands all over the 
 North of Asia, and ultimately, by emigration, over Europe, if* 
 not over all America, quite away from their original and natural 
 tropical homes; thus producing the peculiar mixed or Mongolian 
 races of the North, which have not yet had time to fade into the 
 true Northern color and type. 
 
 It is at least a fair question, whether the vast number of elephant 
 skeletons on the Siberian coast are not both an index and a result 
 of these terrible and incessant invasions of India and China from 
 the North. The barbarians would naturally take all the elephants 
 they could find to bear their captives and their booty to their 
 Northern home, where, as the cold season approached, they would 
 as naturally perish, and be thrown into their rivers and floated 
 down to the Northern seas, till the whole Southern country would, 
 at last, be almost swept clean of animals of this description ; at 
 any rate, the yellow man is no more a natural and original product 
 of the North than is the elephant, so far as we have any reason to 
 believe. 
 
 There are many reasons to think that our American Indians 
 were originally from this same yellow race, and driven across Bhe- 
 rings Strait by the same general cause ; but wandering in all di- 
 rections, they became a red race or a race of all climes, till at last 
 a part of them fell in with the plains of Mexico and the mountain 
 heights of Peru, where they found a climate and soil more like 
 their original tropical home, and, therefore, began on a narrow thea- 
 ter, and on a small scale, a new development of the peculiar in- 
 stinctive manners and habits of their original tropical race. The 
 rest remained still wanderers upon the face of the earth, because 
 here, the yellow man can find no congenial liome ; and they had 
 already shown themselves totally incapable of grappling successfully 
 with either the frosts of the Northern continent or the torrid heat 
 of the Southern cue. before either the white man came to claim the 
 one, or the black man to prepare to claim the other ; and before 
 these two great races, all this mongrel, or perhaps yellow^ race is 
 destined to melt away like the dew before the rising sun. And 
 some imagine that, because this Indian or yellow race is thus in 
 this process of extinction, that the black man must, in time, meet 
 the same fate, from the same causes. But it so happens that the 
 real causes which are in operation in each ease, instead of being the 
 
11 
 
 same, are diametrically the opposite, as the slightest consideration 
 will show. For it is self-evident that there are two modes of su- 
 premacy which any given race may maintain on any given soil or 
 in any given climate ; the' one a supremacy in power, the other a 
 supremacy in numbers. Now, in whatever place any given race 
 cannot maintain its supremacy in power, it must exist, of course, 
 only a- a subject race, though it may still forever hold its suprema- 
 cy in numbers, lint, if it has not the capacity, either to rule or to 
 populate and occupy the country, or to hold on to its supremacy, 
 cither in power or in numbers, it is self-evident that it must perish 
 altogether, am! the quicker it docs so, and thus makes room for a 
 more congenial race, the better it will be for the great whole. In 
 other woid.-, God grants a perpetual lease to all races who cansuc- 
 cessfully populate a land, and a lull title ilvrd only to those who 
 can both populate and rule it; all others are mere temporary occu- 
 pants to he moved out at pleasure, whenever the stronger claimants 
 come. Now, this tawny race in America, under this great law, 
 had already shown thai they could neither populate nor rule any 
 considerable part of this continent, either North or South, and 
 therefore could do no less than give way before the white and 
 black races, who have abundantly demonstrated their capacity to 
 do both — either Working separately, or together, as now. And 
 under this same greal law, by which the yellow man has perished 
 out of America, the white man will at last perish out of all Equa- 
 torial, and the black man out of all frozen climes ; and Canada isas 
 unlit a place tor a negro as Greenland or Guinea is for a Yankee. 
 i'.ut mere inferiority, either in civilization or in power, never was 
 the cause of the extinction of any race on the face of the earth, and 
 probably never will he; on the contrary, manifold, Mich sturdy and 
 subject races have come up to the final masterdom of those above 
 them. Doubtless, the -excessive power of the white man will anni- 
 hilate all other races wherever he can at all keep up his numbers; 
 and by the same law, the excessive numbers of the yellow race in 
 Asia, and of the black race in Africa and South America, must at 
 last overwhelm the power and exterminate the white races from all 
 those regions. The black man. at this moment, holds the supre- 
 macy, both in power and in numbers, in old Africa and in St. Do r 
 mingo, on this continent, in his own way, against ages of combined 
 antagonism and hostility, which no other race has ever endured or 
 
12 
 
 sustained ; whenever the chance is once given him, lie will do it 
 all over the Equatorial world, in time to come, as he has done in 
 time past; and the absurd notion that millions of men, of any race 
 whatever, can anywhere upon the face of the earth, toil day and 
 night, year after year, and century after century, for the good of 
 others, quietly, peacefully and patiently in the great pursuits of hu- 
 man industry and well-being, and bear up under it without war, or 
 tumult, or rebellion, merely as a prelude to the utter extinction of 
 their race from the earth, with no hope and no history for the fu- 
 ture, is an idea that will never be realized till God Almighty abdi- 
 cates His throne, and Satan usurps universal empire in his stead. 
 All seeming examples of such a horrid atrocity in the moral gov- 
 ernment of the world, are only seeming, they never were and never 
 can be real. 
 
 Nor perhaps need I say that I am now looking at these races of 
 men merely as breeders, or sources of population, and not at all as 
 masters or rulers, or sources of political power ; for though the 
 white race should wholly conquer both Asia and Africa, and rule 
 them for centuries, still their population will be propagated and bred, 
 not by Europeans, but by the races now on the ground, however 
 subjected and enslaved. Our own negroes, even now, though quite 
 out of their natural climate, breed faster than their masters, and 
 under an Equatorial sun, they would surpass them four to one, 
 however much enslaved. 
 
 "We leave, then, for the present, the white race, as the inevita- 
 ble possessors of Europe, the black of Africa, and the yellow of 
 Asia ; a result which was fixed, if not designed, by the very forma- 
 tion of the granite rock of the great globe, which no human or even 
 angelic power could change, without new-creating the solid globe 
 itself. Of course, our Anglo-Saxon gasconade will not be likely 
 to disturb it; to complete the complement of these areas, the white 
 man should take possession of North America, and the black man 
 of South America; then, and only then will the full equilibrium of 
 the three great races be restored ; and then will the equal sons of 
 Noah hold nearly equal parts of the habitable globe. Will this be 
 done ? We will inquire further. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 But before entering upon the survey and comparison of these 
 two nice-, their innate character, and consequent diverse civiliza- 
 tion and institutions, it may be welJ to say a few words about the 
 real and essential nature of freedom and slavery— of justice and 
 injustice — and of those diverse innate tendencies and develop- 
 ments inhuman nature, which inevitably result in their various 
 forms of social and civil order. 
 
 The great trouble with the Amercan mind is, that it cannot 
 conceive of either justice or liberty, outside of the peculiar demo- 
 cratic machinery with which we have chosen to administer the one 
 and preserve the other. But this is simply mistaking the mill for 
 the flour it grinds, or the pudding for the peculiar bag in which it 
 is held and boiled; and with us, the mere mill seems to be becom- 
 ing everything, and the grist almost nothing. Whether justice 
 or liberty can continue to live on the hare mill-stones of republican 
 democracy, without any grisl in the hopper, remains to be seen. 
 But neither freedom nor justice can ever be the mere creatures of 
 law, for the plain reason that they are, and ever must be, above all 
 law. 
 
 Wh \t, then, is Liberi v \ I take it to be, not simply the natural 
 righl of mam but equally the natural right of evert sentient 
 being, or thing, that God has ever made, namely: a eight to a 
 sphere of action and enjoyment, proportioned to the peculiar 
 oapaciti] 3 for such action and enjoyment which God has given to 
 each creature. The oyster needs a very narrow range; the angel 
 a very wide one. The infant child, under the absolute control of 
 its parents or guardians, is in fact perfectly free, when allowed to 
 play in the front yard of its lather's house ; but Napoleon Bona- 
 parte needed all Europe for his play-ground ; and he pined away 
 
14 
 
 and died at St. Helena, under the conscious restraints of a practical 
 slavery, amid external surroun'dings which would have made more 
 than half the human race the freest and the happiest men on earth. 
 The wolf can be free only in the forest range; but his own twin- 
 brother, the house-dog, cannot be free, with the whole world to 
 roam in, without his own chosen master, to love, to guard, to watch, 
 and to adore; and he would sooner starve, and die at his feet, than 
 he would forsake him ; and, if forced to do so, he would seek 
 another master, even before he sought -his needful food. Now, 
 which of these are the more noble animals of the two, admits of a 
 variety of opinions. I presume a general congress or convention 
 of wolves would decide the question, with great positiveness and 
 vehemence, one way, and that of the dogs the other ; and it would 
 be of but very little use for them both to undertake to argue the 
 case together, in any general assembly wdiatever. They would 
 find great difficulty in understanding each other, and might pro- 
 duce a general '"dissolution of the Union," or at least a great split 
 in the universal canine church. The lion cannot be made free 
 without meat, nor the ox without grass; the whale needs an ocean, 
 and the wiggler a mud-puddle; one man must have an empire, 
 another a republic, another a shop, another a study, another a corn 
 or cane field, another an insane or idiotic asylum, or they cannot 
 be truly, appropriately and wisely free. Yet all these alike are 
 placed by God under a perfectly absolute and resistless power, 
 cither in the absolute and irresistible will of their superiors, or ot 
 their fellow-beings combined ; for no monarch can resist the world, 
 nor yet his combined subjects ; and he is ever wholly in their irre- 
 sponsible power. Thus, while all beings may be, and should be, 
 in one sense, free, all are, and must ever be, in another sense, 
 perfectly subject and enslaved ; and no laws or forms can change 
 these facts. 
 
 The present wdiite man cannot be free, without some chance to 
 tinker at Church and State. He must be a sovereign of some 
 sort, though a sovereign in rags ; and if he cannot govern empires, 
 he will at least plot treasons. But the poor black man, with his 
 cot and garden, and a few dollars per month, is rendered perfectly 
 free and happy — " content, and careless of to-morrow's fare." 
 
 How easy, how good, and how beautiful a thing it is, then, to 
 make a fellow-creature free, in spite of all external forms and laws ; 
 
and how impossible is it. to do it by these alone!! Reader, have 
 you dune all yon could to make all God's creatures around you 
 truly free? For to this they have all equal rights; audit', under 
 this sublime and beautiful higher law of freedom, which stretches 
 over all sentient being, and assigns to each its true place and 
 sphere, 
 
 '• Proud man exclaims, ' See all lliiii ;' 
 
 ' man for mine,' replies the pampered goo 
 
 Still, it is self-evident, from this view of freedom, that no living 
 creature can he made truly free, in the highest and best sense of 
 that term, when far removed from that peculiar climate for which 
 nature has fitted and prepared it. And it is not in the power of 
 man, nor indeed of God himself, without a re-creating of the globe, 
 to give the white man a proper sphere oi freedom in Greenland or 
 in Guinea, or the black man such a sphere in Canada or the United 
 States; and as the black man of Liberia and Hayti wisely adopt 
 laws and policies to drive white men out from them toward the 
 North, so we should adopt similar laws and policies, to crowd the 
 black race South, toward the only latitudes in which it is possible 
 in nature that either should be in fact truly free, or find a proper 
 sphere of action and enjoyment. The white bear and the elephant 
 could, as properly change places on the globe as the white and 
 black races. 
 
 It is apparent, also, that no man'- righl to freedom, therefore, 
 depends at all, as is often supposed, on the fact that he is a man, 
 but on the far broader fact that he is a sentient being, endowed by 
 his Creator with a certain given amount, more or less, of capacity 
 for actio.v, tor suffering, and for enjoyment, demanding, in its 
 own nature, an appropriate sphere of action and existence; and 
 umber of his legs, or the shape of his head, or the color of 
 his body, or the bare name we give him, whether that of man or 
 animal, cannot in the least degree affect his rights. The utmost 
 that all this can do is to aff'ecl merely our sympathies and willing- 
 ness to accord his rights, and in no degree the rights themselves, 
 so long a- ho still retains, in any shape, human or animal, or under 
 any name, a given capacity as a sentient being; and the brute in 
 human shape that would needlessly, or selfishly and wantonly, rob 
 even a horse or a dog of tins God-given right, would do the same 
 to men and to angels, and, if he could, to God himself; and he 
 deserves the execration, not simply of mankind, but of universal 
 
16 
 
 being. I will not stop to show here, in what cases, or by what 
 means, the higher orders of being are justified in compelling the 
 lower to fill their appkopriate spheres, if unwilling, or may 
 deprive them of them entirely, from regard to the general higher 
 o-ood. It would lead into too wide a field. Suffice it to say, all 
 modes of human life, and all forms of social order, imply this 
 reserved right; but in no case is this divine right of freedom to be 
 wantonly sacrificed, or trodden down, even in the case of an insect, 
 without a proportionate sin against universal being, and the uni- 
 versal God and Father of all being. And what is justice, but 
 simply rendering or according to each sentient being such a sphere 
 of action and enjoyment, and securing it to them, by all the means 
 in our power ? This actually done, by whatever institutions and 
 means, in whatever condition, and under whatever names, and 
 forms, and laws, or under no laws, institutions or forms at all, seal 
 justice is done. And though it is a duty to strive to raise our 
 fellow-creatures, of all sorts, in the scale of being, and thus to 
 enlarge their capacities, both of action and enjoyment, and thus fit 
 them for still wider and higher spheres of freedom, it is still a duty 
 of mercy, and not of justice, in which duty each man may or may 
 not engage, as he chooses, (for mercy admits of no compulsion ;) 
 and if he omits it altogether, Justice cannot frown, though Mercy 
 may weep, over his delinquency. 
 
 We thus see how individuals may wholly keep the law of liberty 
 and of justice, while the States and the laws under which they 
 live may wholly ignore or violate it, toward the same identical per- 
 sons or beings; and vice versa, how the State and Institution may 
 conserve the law, while its people and individuals trample it under 
 loot. And, after all that has been said, the individual cannot be 
 held responsible for the State, nor the State for the individual, for 
 it is not possible that the one should wholly control the other. 
 
 "What particular forms of government — whether the so-called 
 free or despotic — can best preserve the living reality of freedom 
 and of justice to all, depends upon the times and the peculiar 
 character and habits of the people themselves ; and I question if 
 that God of infinite variety, who will not have two insects, or two 
 peas, or two leaves, or even two hairs exactly alike, on the face of 
 the whole earth, will ever have a dead uniformity of States and 
 Empires over any considerable part of it ; and whether our own 
 
17 
 
 democratic experiment will not at last prove an attempt to govern 
 i by A.BSTRACT principle who have no principle, just as our Sec- 
 tarianisms and Catholicisms are an attempt to govern the Church 
 where there is and can be no real church to be governed, remains 
 to be seen. But under this higher law of all sentient being, all 
 men have an inalienable right not to a monarchy, or an aristo- 
 cracy, or a democracy — not to this or that mode or form of human 
 ernment, civil or domestic, in Church or in State, or in the 
 household — but simply a right to this eternal justice, dispensed 
 where, or how, or by whomsoever it may be, whether with votes 
 or without them — with crown- or miters or without them — under 
 forms or laws called slave or free- — or as our own most admirable 
 ilaration has it: a right, not to ballot boxes, or to democratic insti- 
 tutions, courts or laws — not to any particular means — hut to the 
 
 GREAT END, " LIFE, LIBERTY and the PURSUIT of HAPPINESS " — to 
 
 eternal justice between man and man, by whomsoever or 
 howsoever defended and dispensed. Here, then, is the true higher 
 law over all races, all monarchies and all democratic majorities — 
 the great law that hind- the unity and final bliss of the race, as 
 gravity does the motion and harmony of the endlessly varied 
 spheres. Unity amid variety ! And these few remarks must suffice 
 for the ground of the freedom, unity and final fraternity of all 
 race-, while we pass on to contemplate the great diversities of 
 character, mode, choice and form- of institution- and governments 
 which must -till e\ er exist. 
 
 I;m if we could stop to look at facts, weshould note that Socrates, 
 the jbesl and wisest of ad the ancients, lived and perished under a 
 democracy; and Jesus, a higher than man, under the hand ot a 
 monarchy. Monarchial outlaws war, roll and murder by enacted 
 law, in A.sia ; and democratic and republican outlaws in America. 
 Barbarian despotism and plunder, it is true, in Africa; but 
 
 it fairly admit- of a question whether our professedly civilized 
 Christianities have not robbed and murdered more men, in Asia 
 and about S 1, in ten years, than the barbarian Africans 
 
 have ever done in a whole century. Washington wisely founded 
 a republic: Alfred, and Peter the Great, and Garibaldi as wisely 
 deferred to a monarchy; but neither of these political mills will 
 grind out much freedom, unless their people put some little human- 
 it v and manhood in the hopper to grind. Our Northern dotfghf aces 
 —1 
 
IS 
 
 and our Southern fire-eaters make decidedly an unlucky grist: the 
 one heats the spindle and the other clogs the bur-stones quite too 
 much. For in a republic there are two distinct and independent 
 ideas : the one of democracy, the other of confederacy or consolida- 
 tion. Now, the aboriginal Indians, even, were sufficiently civilized, 
 politically, to understand and practice the first about as well as we 
 do — indeed, it seems to be the natural state of all Northern tribes ; 
 but the other idea of confederacy or consolidation, or union of real 
 democracies, into a republic, is a far higher idea, and requires a 
 higher order of civilization than either our American Indians or 
 fire-eaters have ever reached. This consolidation of the democratic 
 tribes and races under the Russian government, and its progress 
 toward freedom, is a most curious and interesting phenomena. 
 Our women and children are at all times more secure in all their 
 natural rights, without office or voting or ruling, than we are with 
 it; all of which, and much else, tends to show that while this 
 eternal justice may underlie all jjossible forms and states of society, 
 whether called free or not, it may even more easily perish out of 
 the best of them, and out of all alike. In other words, they are all 
 alike — at best, nothing but a variable and uncertain means; and 
 not the great eternal end of all action, all being and all law. 
 
 Now, in Liberia, in Africa, even under a republican form like 
 our own, and also in llayti, W. I., every white man is denied, just 
 as every black man is here, all right of citizenship, as it is called, 
 in the State; and yet no white man there complains of this, or has 
 any cause to complain, because the black men there give them all 
 this substantial justice — a real though not a political freedom — 
 and if the whites would do the same by the blacks here, they 
 would have just as little reason to complain ; and if they will not 
 do it without the force of formal law, they would not probably do 
 it with it: for no law can really force the popular will, in any 
 country — it can only express it; and a regeneration of wills is the 
 only practical course toward a regeneration of the laws. Not 
 merely technical and ecclesiastic, based on a change without a 
 difference ; but practical and real. For it is not mere intellections 
 or abstractions, or the formal machinery of some cant orthodoxy of 
 faith or polity — democratic or otherwise — that mainly protects 
 any race or any man in his real rights; but only the living senti- 
 ment of justice, written, not in the head, (much less on tanned 
 
19 
 
 sheep-skins.) but in the great, ever-living heart of the people. 
 With this, the highest freedom is under all modes and forms possi- 
 ble, and without it, it is everywhere equally impossible. And 
 in a natural capacity for this ever-living and Divine sentiment of 
 the human soul, the black man is, as we shall see, not only the 
 equal, but vastly the superior of the Northern races, and will, 
 therefore, need far less abstract machinery of government, fewer 
 democratic safe-guards and props and crutches, to enable both his 
 liberty and his justice to stand and walk the earth alone; while 
 with the Northern races this generous sentiment needs all the 
 political and legislative poulticing and blistering and bolstering it 
 can possibly get, and even then it seems constantly to relapse into 
 some new attack of scrofulous selfishness and egotism. Our great- 
 est political and social danger seems to lie in the fact that we are 
 striving to elevate great multitudes of white men to a sphere of 
 action entirely above their capacity, while we at the same time 
 strive to crowd the black man down even below his appropriate 
 and natural sphere. A white fool may be nol only a voter, but a 
 ruler, legislator, senator, governor, judge, or even president of the 
 United States; while a black philosopher catfnot be even a free man. 
 
 The ground- work of all human development or civilization seems 
 to be this: The whole world in which we live is God's great 
 patent machine for grinding over conflicts, antagonisms, suffering, 
 sorrow, pain, woe, and evil of all sorts, into concord, peace and 
 virtue on earth, and final, everlasting purity and bliss in heaven, 
 (bid himself furnishes free \<;\:scy and natural good and evil, 
 as the primary and indispensable conditions of the process. I say 
 indispensable, for without natural evil, temptation, trial, and conse- 
 quent victory ami virtue, would be as impossible as fire without 
 heat, attraction without matter, or motion without force. Under 
 these conditions so furnished, his creatures, by their own free acts 
 of right or wrong, of virtue or of vice, elaborate their conflicts, 
 antagonisms and agonisms; and with these, as the raw materials, 
 they fill the hopper. I hit God alone tends the mill — and most 
 admirably well, to,,, whether we can see it or not. 
 
 It would seem that the materials presented by them are rather 
 rough, compared with the product required, and that the processes 
 of their elaboration and refinement arc in reality so difficult, that 
 it would be quite inexpedient for a mortal being to assume the 
 
20 
 
 charge and care of the process, though many think themselves 
 quite competent at least to tell how it ought to be done. But for- 
 tunately, God still keeps his own counsel, and works in his own 
 way; and if there is any other way possible, either in this world 
 or in any other, of producing intelligent virtue and its conse- 
 quent bliss, we mortals can neither possibly know it, nor even 
 conceive of it. When we, therefore, ask why evil exists, we might 
 as well ask at once why virtue, or why (rod himself exists; for if 
 God is, virtue must be: and if virtue must be, natural evil must 
 first be, as its indispensable condition. Thus it is that God evolves 
 light out of darkness, good out of evil, and order out of confusion, 
 ever making 
 
 "All discord, harmony not understood — 
 All partial evil, universal good." 
 
 One chief part of this great process is, the law of hereditary 
 civilization, a development by which— amid antagonisms, and 
 conflicts, and agonisms, and wars of all sorts, between the serfdoms 
 and masterdoms of races and orders — the lower order is made grad- 
 ually and slowly, but surely to rise in the scale of being, and need 
 and demand a broader and higher sphere of freedom and of action 
 for itself; and thus the groaning ages, like the harsh gratings at 
 every new turn of the kaleidoscope, are made to herald, some new 
 vision of beauty and glory, of virtue and of freedom upon the earth. 
 This development, both of the individual and of the race, is never 
 from within — and the spontaneous act of the subject, but always 
 from without, and enforced by a masterdom of superiors of some 
 sort. Thus the Jews, although the offspring of a choice man, were 
 still ground in this mill of despotism for four hundred years in 
 Egypt — our own ancestors some thousand years in Europe, and 
 how long before we cannot tell — and now, the negroes of Africa 
 and aW other barbarous nations are taking their inevitable turn in 
 the mill, and are actually rising in the scale of being, and therefore, 
 demanding for themselves a broader sphere of freedom, just as we 
 and all others have done before them ; and this simple fact, in despite 
 all that is said to the contrary, on both sides, lies at the foundation 
 of all our real troubles ; and step by step it must still be tested, 
 which of the two shall yield and stop, and which prevail — the eter- 
 nal Providence of Almighty God, or the pride and selfishness and 
 puny arrogance of man. Somebody must go into the hoppek 
 here, that is all there is about it; anew grist is needed, and it 
 
will be had. There lias nothing happened — in principle — to the 
 
 ; ro, that has not happened to us and to aD other civilized races ; 
 and if they could have been civilized in any other way, we at least 
 inly do n< ; know it. True, the externals and forms of the 
 black man's serfdom are somewhat peculiar, and to our minds pe- 
 culiarly offensive. But that will only give the needful peculiarity 
 to the result di all show. 
 
 Anyone who will reflect howthe various and peculiar hereditary 
 developments have been Becnred in our domestic animals, in the 
 house-dog, the setter, the blood-hound, the pointer, &c, &c; and 
 in the horse, the ox, and all others, will find the key-note to this 
 great harmony of growth that spreads over all animal being, but is 
 iliarly manifest in man. And the main thing that I wish here 
 to be particularly noted is, that no possible amount of training, or 
 
 ture, or disci] aid Becure the result in a single individual 
 
 or generation alone, either in the case of men or of animals, but 
 only a p through generations, and the result in one 
 
 individual transmitted by some law of hereditary development un- 
 known to us, to his offspring, in him again to be augmented by the 
 same discipline and culture, and handed farther down, till at last 
 the habit thus acquired and transmitted, becomes almosl i r quite a 
 native instinct of the species, inwrought as it were, by the severity 
 and continuity of their discipline, into their very hom e s , as an in- 
 tegral part of themselves. This is a Ion--, toilsome, and seemingly 
 hard way, but it is the only way that either men or animals were 
 ever really civilized or domesticated. 
 
 it is said that men are free agents, and should be taught to do 
 what is right at once, without all this trouble. So is the wolf per- 
 . and if he would but turn watchdog or shepherd dog loi- 
 ns at once, i: would be very handy indeed ; but it so happens that 
 he will not. 
 
 That this process, like all other processes, has been attended with 
 a vast amount of needless, wicked and inexcusable cruelty and tyr- 
 anny, on the part of the superior orders, there is no doubt ; and this 
 tact has engendered in some minds the absurd idea that the bare 
 holding of all arbitrary, absolute and irresponsible power, is in it- 
 '. wrong. But if so. the whole Providence of God is wrong; 
 ve;i. even God himself, more wrong than ail, for he not only holds 
 more Buch power than all others, but he has, in fact, placed every 
 
22 
 
 son of Adam, as an individual, under the absolute and irresistible 
 control of his fellow men as a whole ; for how can one alone resist 
 the human race ; they are in fact, at all times his absolute and irre- 
 sponsible masters by ordinance of God. And if Christ should 
 come again to reign in person, would the fact of his absolute and 
 irresistible power be wrong ? and why not % Simply because he 
 would use that power to give to every being a sphere of action 
 and enjoyment suited to his capacity and his nature — that is reai\ 
 freedom ; and the more power any man, or number of men on earth 
 have, who will use it for this end, the better for all concerned. It 
 is not, therefore, the holding of any amount of power whatever over 
 our fellows, that constitutes the wrong, but the abuse of that power 
 as held and used. I admit that as human beings are, it is not expe- 
 dient to entrust them with any more power in any case, than is re- 
 cpiisite to attain the end in view ; but how much that shall be can 
 be determined by no fixed rules, as respects either its degree or its 
 form, but must be decided solely on the ground of mere expediency 
 in view of the almost incomprehensible perplexities of each particu- 
 lar case; and right here Divine Providence gets no inconsiderable 
 part of the grist of the great mill of the eternities, out of the very 
 perplexity, and doubt, and struggle, and conflict, which we mortals 
 fall into, over this very point : 
 
 "Great God how infinite art Thou, 
 
 What worthless worms are we ; 
 Let the whole race of creatures bow 
 
 And pay their praise to Thee." 
 
 But since every human being is, in fact — by the eternal ordi- 
 nance of God himself — born under this perfectly absolute and re- 
 sistless power of his fellows, or of the millions of men in some 
 shape ; the only question is, how this irresponsible power can be 
 best organized and administered to meet its infinite variety of uses 
 and duties, to the manifold orders and conditions of beings beneath 
 it. Thus, to organize, restrain and direct this resistless power, is 
 the end of all forms of law and government. To leave it to fall un- 
 broken, undirected, unforeseen, and unrestrained on the head of 
 eacli defenceless individual, is anarchy — the most terrible and 
 hopeless of all possible human conditions from which humanity has 
 ever shrunk with a shudder ; instinctively perceiving that any law 
 whatever, for this terrible, moral and social gravity — so to speak — 
 is better than no law. We read much learned twaddle in law 
 
23 
 
 books about a man's giving up the rights of a state of nature, in the 
 act of submitting to civil law ; but the plain fact is, a man in a state 
 of nature, such as is supposed, that is without law, can have no pos- 
 sible rights whatever, no more than he can have a possible safety 
 while setting astride of a volcano. Society and law come in to 
 invest him with all possible rights, and strip him of nothing but 
 bare useless chimeras and abstractions. Proclaim any man an 
 utter outlaw on the lace of the earth, and you throw him at once 
 into this bliseful state of nature, or of lawless anarchy ; a condition, 
 to escape which, most men would swear allegiance to Satan himself, 
 if no other protection was proffered. 
 
 This society and law are always morally wrong, when they do 
 not adopt the best method possible in each case, and need reforma- 
 tion, but not annihilation ; and they are morally right, and should 
 be suffered to rest in quiet only when they do adopt such methods, 
 however various in different cases they may be. And the terrible 
 practical anarchy and outlawry under which — so far as the state 
 is concerned — the black man of the South is placed, is an infinitely 
 v. >rse feature in his lot, than even the despotism of his master; 
 and toward this point sensible men should direct their first if not 
 their solo complaint. And it under the present '"reign of terror" 
 and ascendancy of the nurtured habit of anarchy and mob law, the 
 white planters, and masters, and property holders, and respectable 
 
 and res] sible citizens of all sorts, and their wives and children 
 
 in the south, do not find in this spirit of anarchy, more than they 
 bargained for, all history will bo falsified and belied. It is ever 
 easy to unchain this tiger, to unloose this fearful force, but it is not 
 quite so easy to chain, and restrain it again, at will. This resistless 
 power over all born men is, of necessity, organized into forces 
 more or less absolute or democratic; and all forms of human gov- 
 ernment whatever, are but the exercise of a certain delegated or 
 conceded portion of this universal and resistless power of the race, 
 in whom alone, lies the only absolute sovereignty on earth, and the 
 fountain of all other sovereignty — the gasconade of South Carolina 
 demagogues to the contrary notwithstanding. In the family, the 
 school, the prison, the retreats for the insane and the unfortunate, 
 in the army and navy, and on shipboard, it usually is, within cer- 
 tain limits, either of necessity, or mOst naturally, wholly personal 
 and absolute in its form of administration, but not therefore un- 
 
24 
 
 just. But in the Held, the shop, and the state, it admits of a mul- 
 titude <>f forms, more or less absolute or democratic, according to 
 the nature of the case, and the civilization, wants, tastes and habits 
 of the governed. Among the most civilized Northern races, every 
 state must, for the present, have a double administration — the 
 one for the field and the shop democratic, the other for the army and 
 navy despotic ; but neither should be unjust or inhuman. Our own 
 peculiarity consists solely in the simple fact, that we have to deal 
 with two extreme races, on two extremes of civilization, and re- 
 quiring therefore, the same double administration, on the same 
 ground, namely : that of the shop and the field — the one demo- 
 cratic for the white race, the other absolute for the black race. 
 That this fact should necessarily render the administration more 
 complex and difficult, and liable to excite opposition and offence, is 
 self-evident; but it need not therefore be unjust. Suppose that 
 we had one division of the army consisting of old veterans, whose 
 ancestors had been disciplined to war from time immemorial, and 
 that their hereditary discipline and valor had become so complete, 
 war was such a second nature to them, that they could be trusted, 
 to plan and conduct every campaign by democratic vote, and best 
 inspired to duty and heroism by allowing them so to do. But 
 another division, right alongside, of raw recruits, ignorant, ineffi- 
 cient and undisciplined, which we were obliged to command, as 
 now. by absolute authority and power, without ever consulting or 
 advising with them; are not three things self-evident? first, that 
 the difficulties of the absolute rule would be greatly increased by 
 the existence and contrast of the two forces, on the same field and 
 theater of life ; and, second, that the latter would not be a whit 
 more unjust than it now is, while existing apart by itself; and, 
 third) that the only possible way of harmonizing these diverse ad- 
 ministrations, would bo by inspiring the one with the hope of 
 sometime attaining the capacity and the freedom of the other. It 
 seems to me self-evident that a law, more resistless than the law of 
 gravity, necessitates each of these conditions ; and that the man who 
 should expect anything else, if not a natural idiot, he is so near to 
 it as to be utterly unfit to have anything to do with the government 
 of mankind ; and yet is not this exactly our anomalous condition as 
 regards our administration of law over the departments of the shop 
 and the held ? and over the two extreme races we find there ? 
 
Right here then, in the simple tact, that we are compelled to ex- 
 tend our double administration over this unusual ground, in one 
 and the same department, which other nations are not, namely : 
 that of the shop and the held, lies oar whole danger and our chief 
 duly. And it is vain to say that the United States government has 
 nothing to do with it. We might far more truly say that they have 
 nothing to do with our two great ranges of mountains, that form the 
 double back-bone of our peculiar continent, and that we will ignore 
 the existence of one or both of them, because state sovereignties 
 cover them, or because old England does not happen to have the 
 same nor recognize them in her laws. But she has the same thing, in 
 fact, in her colonies, in Asia and elsewhere, and recognizes it too, 
 with a vengeance, in her own way, namely: by taxation, even 
 beyond the point of actual starvation, ami then, by a blowing away 
 of the wretched victims, who dared assert their natural rights, at 
 the cannon's mouth. But this was all genuine, Anglo-Saxon mag- 
 na cha rta freedom ! ! ! 
 
 But I have thus far, in this generalization, purposely omitted all 
 allusion to Christ's Church, because it lies wholly outside both of 
 the sphere and the form of all possible modes of earthly power 
 whatever, and is, in its essential nature, means, ends and aims, as 
 totally unlike all possible human government.-, as its great master 
 and founder was unlike all mere human beings, It is, in no proper 
 sense, a government, but merely an administration. All govern- 
 ments are based on power vested in authority, and appealing as 
 a last resort to force, or pains and penalties of some sort. But 
 Christ's Church is based on love, divine love, vested in the co- 
 equal fraternity of the whole brotherhood, high and low, rich and 
 poor, learned and unlearned, and administered by each and all of 
 these alike, according to his several ability. The sole end of the 
 
 one is JUSTICE I NFORCED ; that of the Other, MERCY AND LOVE DIS- 
 
 pensed— truly a "kingdom not of this world, 1 ' and having no pos- 
 Bible resemblance to any earthly power whatever — a thing not to 
 be voted up, nor voted down, nor ruled up, nor ruled down — from 
 the \<~v\ elements in its nature, as far above all human control or 
 change, a- are the fixed stars themselves. It can have nothing 
 whatever to do with superior power or force in any shape; and 
 the moment superiority, power, force, or privileged orders, classes, 
 or persons, are invoked to its aid, the whole thing apostatizes from 
 — 5 
 
26 
 
 a church into a mere usurping sectarism or beasthood. The true 
 church is therefore more than a democracy : it is an equal brother- 
 hood ; it is more than freedom whose sole end is justice : it is Buf- 
 fering, forgiving love, whose end is mercy. Such, so divine in 
 spirit, so unique in end, means and aim, was Christ's Church, as 
 evidently instituted by his own most express commands: in its own 
 nature admitting of no possibility of change, without an utter and 
 entire revolution. And if Paul or Peter changed this order, under 
 any pretexts whatever, they did not, most clearly, administer it ; 
 they simply revolutionized it. For it would, in fact, be far less of 
 a revolution to institute an absolute despotism on the constitution 
 of the United States, than to attempt to erect authorities, and pow- 
 ers and privileged orders, of any sort, in Christ's original Church ; 
 for the one would imply only a change of the form of the same 
 p ()wer _the power of man ; but the other implies the utter over- 
 throw and annihilation of the very element on which this Church 
 was grounded; the one but changes an earthly thing; the other 
 annihilates a heavenly one, or transforms it into a tyranny and a 
 beasthood. I do not believe that either Peter or Paul did this ; 
 but if they did. they deserve the execration of the human race ; 
 for no amount of mere good advice, or fine talk, even from an 
 angel, could atone for the atrocity of overthrowing or perverting 
 such an institution among the children of men. For the most 
 perfectly devilish forms of government that the world has ever 
 seen have grown out of this simple perversion — all in the sacred 
 name of the Church, and of the Prince of Peace and the loving 
 Saviour of men ; and it is the highest duty of our common 
 humanity to risist and repel, at all hazards, the first initial steps 
 toward such a hideous monstrosity. 
 
 Thus we see that the State, the world's kingdom, in all its possi- 
 ble forms, is the organized force of human power; the Church, 
 Christ's kingdom, is the spontaneous call of divine love. The one 
 drives to justice ; the other calls to mercy. The one in its own 
 nature is based on coercion of obedience by superior power ; the 
 other wholly abjures it. To interchange these elements in any 
 degree is as impossible as to work a volcano on the hand without 
 force, or 1o inspire one, while in full blast, on the other hand, with 
 divine love. The most we can hope from such a Church is that it 
 may become powerless — a mere death's head, to frighten only the 
 
2< 
 
 most-weak and timid. But from a State without force, coercion, 
 we could not hope even that. But though so totally unlike in their 
 means and methods, they should be harmonious in their end — like 
 two good shepherds over the same flock, one of which only calls, 
 the other of which only drives; and surely the man who expects 
 to call with force, or to drive without it, is simply a natural fool. 
 Let us Learn, then, to -render unto Caesar the things which are 
 < Isesar's, and unto God the things which are God's."' 
 
 From these considerations, we see the unutterable necessity of 
 leaving all nun perfectly free in all their spiritual relations, while 
 we hold them properly subject in all their secular and civil duties. 
 
 These general remarks on the nature of freedom and slavery, 
 and of government in general, seemed necessary, in order to enable 
 the reader to apprehend clearly what we mean by these terms, 
 as well as to vindicate the dealings of Providence with these races 
 in all ago; for it' freedom and justice really implied all that some 
 seem to think they do, there could he no denying the fact that God, 
 as the Sovereign Ruler of all, has been the greatest of all political 
 sinners; for he has ever placed the vast majority of men where it 
 was simply impossible that they should receive either freedom or 
 justice, in any Mich arbitrary and democratic sense. But it will 
 now he seen that this is not so, and that God has ever given the 
 highest possible freedom to all ages alike. Doubtless the reader 
 will still find these terms hereafter used in a somewhat loose and 
 sliding, though I hope not unintelligible sense. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 With these principles in view, we are now perhaps prepared to 
 compare, (or rather to contrast) for a moment, these two extreme 
 races of men— the white and the black : the Polar and the Equato- 
 rial race; not in the temporary accidents of their transient condi- 
 tion during the mere formative periods of their history, but in 
 those great essentials of character, impressed by the same hand 
 of that G-od who made the Boils, climates, the suns, frosts and 
 snows of their native vales and homes — not regarding those traits 
 which some have chanced to assume, but only those which univer- 
 sal human nature musl assume, whenever and wherever, through 
 thousands of years, subjected to those causes which have made 
 them what they are, and would, in time, make any other race just 
 like them, in all the substantial and enduring elements of color, 
 form and character. For example. I consider the peculiar bony 
 structure of each race, except that of the skull itself, as probably 
 only a mere accident of occupation or mode of life, while the shape 
 of the skull and the peculiar color of the skin seem to be an inevi- 
 table and enduring impress of natural causes. Of course I shall 
 oidy note some of the stronger contrasts or differences of these 
 races which most clearly mark God's plan of variety in man, as in 
 all else; and I wish two things to be constantly borne in mind, 
 namely: that 1 am describing only in the most general terms, 
 without regard t<> the many either seeming or real exceptions, and 
 looking only at natural tendencies^ without any regard to the 
 immense influence which Christianity or formal education has had, 
 or is destined to have, over either race. Bearing these things in 
 mind, then, let us look at them as climate and nature has made 
 each ; and in this survey, we may dismiss from our minds all other 
 tribes and races, and look at our own Anglo-Saxon race as the 
 extreme and almost finished type of what we have called the Polar 
 
30 
 
 man, and the pure negro as the proper type of the Southern or 
 Equatorial man. The one, as I have said, an almost finished 
 specimen ; the other but just begun, as it were, and still almost 
 wholly in the rough — a diamond yet in the charcoal — or still in 
 crucible of the great architect; the final beauty and splendor of the 
 which has scarcely yet began to crystallize into form. And in 
 overlooking this great fact lies the great mistake of Guyot's most 
 able work on Earth and Man — which, but once admitted, restores 
 at once the needful harmony in all the Creator's works, and leaves 
 no ground for that mournful and incredible lamentation which he 
 utters over their discord, disruption and incongruity, as he com- 
 pares the floral, mineral and animal with the human products of 
 the equator and the poles. He, in common with many others, has 
 not duly considered that minerals, vegetables and animals are 
 finished products ; with them the work is done, and their highest 
 o-lory is of course near the equator, under the pathway of the sun. 
 But man is still the only unfinished product of the earth : and 
 when he, too, is finished, his glory will lie around the same path- 
 way of glory — beneath the full effulgence of the sun; and thus 
 the entire harmony of nature will be restored or completed. 
 
 It is, indeed, a theory with some that the earth itself was at first 
 a mere molten mass, and began to cool down, and to produce, of 
 course, its minerals, vegetables and animals, in the Northern lati- 
 tudes first, advancing alike both in the variety and perfection of its 
 products, as the cooling process advanced toward the equator. If 
 this be so, the harmony is still more complete, for then human 
 nature, civilization and true manhood are only passing now through 
 the same stages and latitudes of perfection and growth, and by 
 precisely analagous laws, as all mineral ami vegetable and animal 
 nature has done before it ; itself, like them, in turn to find its final 
 climax of glory under the equator. And if such unexpected and 
 surprising analogies and coincidences prove nothing, they certainly 
 do not disprove our position ; for God is the God of unity of law, 
 as well as of variety of result. 
 
 But pardoning this digression, the reader will remark, that in 
 general terms, the one of these races is inevitably black or dark, 
 the other ruddy or white. The head of the one is developed boldly 
 and widely forward, in the region of the intellect ; that of the other 
 piles and slopes backward, in the region of the sentiments and pro- 
 
31 
 
 pensities ; and as the white man cannot laugh, so the black man 
 cannot frown; the white man "tee-shees, " and " giggles, " and 
 smirks, and smiles; giving a Laugh of the head indeed ; hut the 
 genuine outbursting, uproarious laugh of the heart, he cannot well 
 give. The black man may look cross, it is true, but that dark and 
 awful frown of the white man, that strikes through the soul like a 
 bolt from a thunderstorm, he cannot command ; and if he should 
 ever try, the white man might well, for once, if never before, hurst 
 out into a real hearty laugh. The one is thin faced, thin lipped 
 lean, spare and active ; the other is thick faced, thick lipped, natur- 
 ally inclined to be corpulent, heavy, slow and inactive. The whole 
 man, in form, feature, gait and motion, in the one case, bespeaks 
 intellectual and physical energy, pride and power. In the other 
 it bespeaks the love of luxurious indolence, ease, quiet, grace and 
 repose. Intellect and action se< m to he the controlling element and 
 the final end of the one; sentiment, loyalty and repose of the other. 
 Kven the very vices of the one, are the antipodes of those of the other, 
 springing as they do from these opposite qualities in their nature. 
 For while both alike love money, power and ease — the one loves 
 monev for the sake of power — while the other loves both power and 
 n i one v for the sake of ease ; both alike will sometimes get drunk ; 
 but tiie one when drunk, swears, and curses, and fights, and kills 
 from thi madness of the brain; the other bows, and 
 
 Bmiles, and sleeps, from a sweet delirium of the hear). But before 
 pursuing this contrast further, ii may be proper to advert more par- 
 ticularly to the real causes of this great and almost surprising dis- 
 similarity, not only in bo ly, bill in soul, in real character. 
 
 Man is a being of thought, of feeling, and of action. In other 
 words, lie has capacities of INTELLECTION, of EMOTION, and of WILL. 
 In popular language, the head is considered the seat and symbol 
 ofthe intellectual powers ; and the heart of the emotive powers ; 
 comprising the moral, social and affectional powers. In different 
 races ami individuals, the different degrees of development and 
 consequent diverse combinations of these several classes of powers, 
 make whatis called difference of mark or character. In intellectual 
 race- and individuals, the former preponderate, and all action and 
 effort seema to spring from the head or the intellect, and to be 
 guided and controlled thereby. In the impulsive and emotive 
 races, on the contrary, the emotive faculties seem to preponderate, 
 
32 
 
 and the heart seems to give origin, and form, and guidance to all 
 action and all effort. I remark on the difference of these races 
 then, first, that everything in the higher latitudes of the earth tends 
 towards the preponderance of intellect, self-reliance and energy, in 
 the mind of man, while all under the Equator tends, with equal 
 force, to develop the sentiments and the emotive powers, and to 
 invite to social ease and repose. In other words, the sunny South 
 is God's great school for the heart ; the frozen North for the head ; 
 the constant tendency is to make the Northern man all head, the 
 Southern man all heart ; and all their institutions and creations 
 without them, must conform to that which the hand of God has 
 thus implanted within them. If it be asked here which of these 
 will be superior, I answer neither ; for those uses for which God 
 made each, both alike will be superior, and for all other uses equally 
 inferior. Just as the different sexes of our own race are either su- 
 perior or inferior, according to the work you give them to do. If 
 you wish hands to solve problems, maul rails, sail ships, or fight 
 battles, doubtless, the men are superior; but if you desire hands to 
 rear and educate embryo angels, to diffuse everlasting peace over 
 all the earth, and bear all things upward toward heaven, even the 
 sourest and most churlish of us all would be compelled to hesitate, 
 at least, before we should decide in oar own favor. But we Anglo 
 Saxons have to make a special effort to conceive that either God 
 or man has any need of hearts, or anything but bare brains on the 
 earth, and wonder why we were ever incumbered with even any 
 approximation to such a superfluity. According to our estimate of 
 things, this subordination of the head to the heart does therefore 
 make the black race inferior, just as it makes our own wives and 
 daughters inferior to our own most magniiicent selves. But in any 
 true estimate this is not so; and even the scriptures assume the ex- 
 actly opposite position, and everywhere place the heart wholly and 
 supremely above all possible attainments and aspirations of the 
 mere head. How all this has happened to us, and the reverse to 
 the black man, is quite plain. For God's great mission work to 
 the Northern man is, to analyze and conquer ; to the Southern 
 man to perceive, to enjoy and to adore ; the great final end of th 
 one is consecration ; that of the other, devotion. Intellect an 
 mechanism are the instrumentalities of the one, sentiment and de 
 votion at once the end and the means of the other; the one works 
 
with the head and for the head; the other, with the heart and for the 
 heart. God's revealed providential word to the Northern man is, 
 rQUEK or die." Hence, he must conquer the forest, the quarry, 
 the mountain and the slough ; the river, the ocean, the wind and 
 the storm ; he must conquer heat and conquer cold; conquer dark- 
 ness and conquer light ; conquer steam and conquer thunder ; con- 
 quer height and conquer depth ; and conquer even space and time 
 themselves. lie must everywhere conquer in the abstract, and 
 conquer in the concrete, or die ; and last and hardest of all, he must 
 conquer himself. Nor can he ever stop in this magnificent career 
 of conquests; for the moment lie pauses, adverse influences or hos- 
 tile races will he sure to set in to devour and destroy him. It is 
 ever on, on, on] conquer, conquer, conquer ; triumph, triumph — 
 one everlasting ovation from knowledge to knowledge, from skill 
 to skill, from height to height, and from power to power, till Heaven 
 itsell is climbed. This is the work, the destiny and the glory of 
 the intellectual man of the North. Butone equal to it can be con. 
 ceived, and that belongs to the Equatorial man of the South. "With 
 such a mission on hand, ever firing his very bones, is it any wonder 
 thai the millions of the North have so often, just by way of pastime, 
 stepped down and done a few extra jobs at their trade — not in the 
 programme — and a little too tar South. All mighty floods some- 
 times overleap their proper harriers. So with this terrific instinct 
 of the North, that ever hangsabout the poles and mountain heights 
 of our earth, like some vast avalanche or deluge, still suspended, 
 
 hut uever stayed. 
 
 In all this career of conquests, intellect is the sole moving force, 
 and mechanism the grappling power. Hence, the Northern man 
 first analyzes all things, next reduces them to an abstraction, and 
 [astly, converts them into a machine. He must see, and feel, and 
 love, and hate everything in the abstract, and use everything as a 
 machine; tor he abhors, equally, the unmanageable and the con- 
 crete; hence, he will weep over an abstract beggar in a romance, 
 and, perhaps, turn a concrete one from his doors. His sciences 
 must take nature all to pieces, and show her abstract bones, and 
 muscle-, and Binews, all boxed up mechanically by themselves, be- 
 fore he will condescend to look at her at all. His governments, 
 law.- and institutions, must first be all reduced to abstractions, and 
 done up in democratic wheels, and cogs, and pulleys, so nicely ad- 
 —6 
 
u 
 
 justed, that he can crawl through and re-adjust every one of them 
 to his liking, while they are sure to catch, if not to crush everybody 
 else. Under his "magna charta," your rights are doubtless all se- 
 cure, if he does not choose to molest them. Under his "habeas 
 corpus," you can always have your own body, when you can get it: 
 Provided, always, that you don't press your rights to it, too far, and 
 leave some one else to find it hanging on a tree. His "trial by 
 jury," no doubt, works most admirably well, when twelve villains, 
 packed by the sheriff, conspire with the scoundrel on the bench to 
 screen fellow villains, or to rob and plunder you for doing simply 
 your duty to God and to man. You might as well think to catch 
 a gopher in a noose made of his own tail, as to think to catch these 
 Northern Anglo-Saxons in their own abstractions. They set all 
 those traps of course for other people, not for themselves ; and they 
 will be sure to spring them when, and only when, other people's 
 feet are in them, and their own out. When this Northern man 
 says that the king can do no wrong, he only means that he will cut 
 his head off when he does not work to suit him. If he declares the 
 inalienable rights of man, he only means his own right to catch and 
 enslave negroes. His Bible is a most superb book, no doubt— the 
 only rule of faith and practice. But you had better not apply it 
 to him, or his party, or creed, or church, or sect ; if you do, he will 
 rain down on you a flood of commentaries and dictionaries, that 
 will cover you, Bible and all, .more than fifteen cubits deep ; and it 
 will be in vain for you to send out either crows or doves in search 
 for its loftiest truths, after such a deluge of dogmas. Catch a wea- 
 sel asleep, and then you may catch these Northern races in their 
 own abstractions. They will have no religion, even, that they can- 
 not distill into dogmas, cooper up into sects, or run through a cot- 
 ton mill, or ride upon a railroad. No God— unless they can lirst 
 make him— "without body or parts," as their old creeds had it, 
 "or passion, or emotion ;" and even tins bare abstraction of a deity 
 is not entirely satisfactory, until the last possible shred of conscious- 
 ness or of personality has been whittled away with the transcenden- 
 tal jack-knife, and some unknown and inconceivable essence dis- 
 tilled out of the whittlings, which works everywhere, does every- 
 thing, but exist nowhere, and is nothing; then at last he gets a di- 
 vinity that exactly suits him, as entirely out of his way as his own 
 creed, and Bible and democratic constitutions and laws; a first rate 
 
35 
 
 foundation for the better security of states, churches, and railroad 
 stocks, and mortgages ; and if he knew at what court to apply, he 
 Mould doubtless patrfut it on speculation. 
 
 We hear much of a skeptical age, an infidel age, and all that; 
 but in truth there never was any such age, and there never will be 
 one. The eight hundred millions of earth are more believing at 
 this moment than they ever were before, and will grow more and 
 more so, simply because God lives, and still reigns over all. But 
 there is a skeptical Northern Anglo-Saxon race, whose peculiar 
 work, which he has given them, ever tempts and drives them in 
 tlii- direction, for which weakness he doubtless makes all due 
 allowance, and certainly exercises all due patience and mercy. 
 This race, it is true, cannot believe that they have got a stomach, 
 much less a soul, till they have first whittled it to pieces with their 
 jack-knives, macerated it in their crucibles, and demonstrated it, as 
 they cull it; and oven if it should come out proved, they can still 
 doubt whether either matter or spirit exists in any form, save 
 always in the abstract. But other races are not so. And I allude 
 o. this only to show how this all-devouring, all-couquering Xorth- 
 ern race firsl analyzes and sublimates everything — every agent — 
 even God himself- into a mere abstraction, and then transforms it 
 into a mere machine <<\' use, or of power. They will generally 
 obey a just abstract law. of their own making; but they would 
 probably shoot or hang an equally just concrete man, who should 
 try to enforce the same obedience: tor they must be governed by 
 the peculiar abstract machinery which their own brains have con- 
 cocted, and their own hands have made, or they cannot be governed 
 at all -at leasl not without constant uproar, anarchy, rebellion and 
 alarm, in a word, they are, from the very necessities of their 
 climate and their position, metaphysicians, critics, philosophers, 
 abstractionists, machinists, egotists and democrats to the back- 
 bone — who conquer everything, and patiently submit to nothing, 
 not even to God himself; a race whose sciences are all quadrations 
 and triangles— whose logic and rhetorics are all syllogisms — whose 
 philosophy is all abstractions— whose productions are all machines — 
 whose societies are all "anties" whose creed is all dogmas, 
 bristling all over, like a porcupine's back, with sharp, defiant proof- 
 texts and demonstrations — and whose missiles are all bombshells, 
 that everywhere kill as they fly, and kill still worse when they 
 
36 
 
 stop. Why such a race should have been shut out of Asia, and 
 out of Africa, through the earlier ages, till Christianity had gained 
 power upon the earth, and most of all over this peculiar race, I 
 trust is perfectly apparent, if God intended ever to keep alive 
 more than one race upon the face of the earth. This all-em- 
 bracing and all-conquering intelligence is the true glory of the 
 North, and the excesses and abuses of it to which I have adverted 
 are only its transient and incidental evils, during its earlier and 
 formative periods. But when this Northern race have explored 
 nature, adjusted their sciences, faiths, empires, machines and arts, 
 so that they begin to feel somewhat at rest in their new home- 
 when, pausing from conquests, they once begin in earnest their 
 final work of consecrating their vast and untold energies, powers 
 and resources to the good of man and the glory of God, what 
 tongue can tell of the good and the glory that shall then, from their 
 hands, roll round the earth ? I say consecrate ; for their religion 
 will always be a religion of consecration, and not of devotion, like 
 the Equatorial man. They will consecrate all things without, but 
 never devote themselves to God. For God made them to conquer 
 and to use, not to worship and adore , for his glory — or rather this 
 consecration of their resources — is their natural and proper worship. 
 Some complain of this. But we might as well complain because 
 the strong and sturdy oak, that throws out its giant arms, and bares 
 its breast, and scatters far and wide its shining leaves, will not, like 
 the pliant willow, bow its head to the storm. The one honors God 
 with its massive strength, the other with its yielding beauty and 
 its pliant grace. We may harangue this intellectual, mechanical 
 North till dooms-day, but they will still go on to fulfill their God- 
 given mission — to conquer and consecrate much, to pray and praise 
 only sparingly. Exotic habits may for a time seem to thrive, but 
 they will soon die out; for God will have his own work done in 
 his own way at last, after all our theorizing, and dogmatizing, and 
 haranguing. 
 
 I am not unaware of the many seeming and even real exceptions 
 to these general remarks ; and still, as general remarks, and for the 
 purpose for which they are here intended, I deem them none the 
 less true. For example, Russia is despotic in the extreme North ; 
 but Russia is a new-born empire, of strongly Asiatic origin and 
 habit, and has, it is true, like all other democracies, begun under a 
 
37 
 
 despotism; but I have never read of any other nation that, in the 
 same length of time, lias made so rapid strides toward democratic 
 freedom as Russia has done in the last few centuries, in spite of its 
 vast numbers, its Asiatic origin and habit, and the extremely bar- 
 barous condition from which it but so recently emerged. Iain 
 fully satisfied that most of our people have no idea of the rapid 
 progress of events in Russia; and I think the laws of climate will 
 work themselves out there, probably more speedily than they ever 
 have done in any country on the globe, after all. Since the writer 
 predicted — almost without hope, it is true — four years ago, in these 
 Lectures, as then delivered, that Russia must in the end become free 
 by the laws of nature more serfs have been practically freed in 
 that country than there are people in the United States. 
 
 We turn now to the natural characteristics of the black or Equa- 
 torial man. and wo shall find them exactly the reverse of those of 
 the white or Polar man. He is as fully his antipodes in character 
 aa he is in geographical location. They could no more permanently 
 and properly dwell together, than the two zones which bred them 
 could lie in the same latitude. It is indeed possible, in nature or 
 in theory, that the black man might stay in the North long enough 
 to he transformed into a genuine Polar man; but that would take 
 probably thousands of years, and it is not possible, therefore, in 
 history and ii fact ; or. if so. he would then of course cease to be 
 an Equatorial man. and the richest portion of the globe would be 
 created for nothing, and remain forever a pestilential waste. 
 
 As God has made him, he cannot he a bare intelligence — a mere 
 thing of the head -but a creature of sentiment, a being of the 
 heart ; not evolving abstractions, democracies and mechanisms, but 
 sympathies, affections, loyalties and devotions. Indeed, if, accord- 
 ing to the popular notion, sentiment and devotion come out of the 
 heart alone, independently of the head, it would be of but little 
 consequence whether he had any head at all or not. except for the 
 mere purposes of his physical economy; for he would have no 
 further U8e for it. except as a mere appendage to his great magnifi- 
 cent equatorial heart. 
 
 A being born not to scheme and to conquer, but to perceive, to 
 enjoy, to bless, to love and to adore— the last human product of 
 the agonizing age- -born, baptized and nurtured in blood and in 
 tears, the only soil oi' earth in which great hearts can be made to 
 
38 
 
 grow — raised from the horrible depths, and placed at last on the 
 equatorial heights of the globe, to give new fire and new fervor to 
 its poetry, its eloquence and its faith — to fill with concrete form 
 and inspiring life and soul, with gorgeous equatorial beauty and 
 grace, the dry and abstract mechanisms of the North — to put living 
 flesh on the dry bones of their philosophies and their faiths, and to 
 shout with their huge mouths, and still linger hearts, their final 
 song of praise: "Hallelujah! hallelujah! for the Lord God om- 
 nipotent reigneth : let all the earth rejoice therein and be glad ; 
 for great and marvelous are his ways, and his wisdom past finding 
 out." 
 
 Summarily, then : as the great mission of the Polar man is to 
 analyze and to conquer, that of the Equinoctial man to enjoy and 
 to adore; as the final end of the one is consecration, that of the 
 other devotion; as one is a being of intellect, of the head— the 
 other of sentiment, of the heart; as the one loves the abstract, and 
 avoids all that is not reducible to the abstract, while the other 
 hates all that is not in the concrete — so, of course, their forms of 
 faith and of civil order must differ. The Northern man analyzes, 
 and splits, and burns, and stews all nature and all art to find truth 
 and God. He of course finds abstractions, but he does not find 
 God, for God is not among the abstractions ; but the Equatorial 
 man at once finds God wherever he himself is. God whispers to 
 him through the stars and through the breezes: He talks to him at 
 noonday in the desert, and at midnight in his dreams: He finds 
 him at home and abroad ; everywhere, God is with his great 
 undoubting heart. He everywhere talks with him, counsels him, 
 comforts him and blesses him. He must, of course, everywhere 
 worship and praise him, according to the best light he has, be that 
 little or much ; for he is, by nature, a being of devotion, and not 
 of mechanism. Said Dr. Livingston to the Royal Geographical 
 Society of London, on his return from Africa, "I defy any one to 
 convey to a native African an idea of a machine." Says the 
 excellent African missionary, Mr. Olendorp, who visited many 
 tribes: "Among all the black nations with whom I have become 
 acquainted — even among the utterly rude and ignorant — there is 
 none that do not believe in God, and have not learned to give Him 
 a name, and to regard Him alone as the Maker, and Preserver, 
 and Benefactor, and Judge of the world. It is true they also 
 
39 
 
 believe in many inferior gods or mediators between themselves 
 and the Supreme Divinity, and hence are called ' Idolators.' Be- 
 side their more formal and public seasons of worship — their sacri- 
 fices and oblations of oxen, cows, sheep, goats, fowls, palm-oil, 
 brandy, yams, etc. — all these negroes," says he, "pray to this 
 Supreme Divinity at different times and in different places; especi- 
 ally at the rising and the setting of the sun, on eating and drinking, 
 wIkii they go to war and in the midst of the conflict, and whenever 
 they are in want of either food, success, health or rain. They pray 
 for themselves, they pray for their friends, they pray for the living, 
 they pray for the dead." They are, in short, naturally a people of 
 devotion, of faith and of prayer, and it only remains for Christianity 
 to teach them to pray for their enemies, and they would become 
 the mosl devout people on the face of the earth. 
 
 The EqoiiQQcfia] man (barbarian aswecall him) even now. when 
 lie goes to war, naturally offers a new prayer — the Northern man 
 as naturally makes a new bomb-shell ; and this is the exact differ 
 enee between the two. The one has faith in gunpowder, the other 
 in God : the first may be most efficient in the war of races, but the 
 last will eonquer in the war of the eternities; for (bid will still live 
 when all the gunpowder has exploded; and Jesus has said, "My 
 kingd' 'in is not of this world." ( Jonsistently with this view we are 
 informed, in Good's Book "I" Nature, that the original Heaven of 
 these "North-men was the gory battle field, with meat to eat and 
 wine to drink from reeking warriors' skulls." That of the negro 
 was and still is, his own sweet, peaceful and balmy South, where 
 ceaseless spring and verdure abide. 
 
 Thi' genius of the black race for poetry and eloquence, and in all 
 matters of mere taste and art, has been most surprisingly mani- 
 fested, under the greatest possible obstacles, by many instances, 
 well known to all, of rare merit, on our own continent. The 
 history of the whole world does not furnish an equal number of 
 white men who have risen to an equal eminence in these arts, 
 under equal embarrassments. 
 
 Their surprising ami almost universal taste and genius for music, 
 and their tendency to religious devotion and worship, is equally 
 manifested, under similar discouragements, whenever they are 
 allowed to assemble in their congregations and camp-meetings and 
 lift up their multitudinous and united voices in songs of praise and 
 
4:0 
 
 prayer to God. John B. Grough, the celebrated temperance orator, 
 states that he has heard the finest musical performances on this 
 continent and in Europe. At one time, twenty-three hundred 
 picked singers and eight hundred instruments gave the Marsellaise 
 and other pieces; thirty-five hundred Frenchmen, accompanied by 
 the Emperors hand, at another time, performed the finest pieces : 
 yet he never in his life heard anything like the singing of the 
 Richmond church of slaves in old Virginia, as they join in the 
 choruses of their celebrated church melodies. I have heard 
 Southern clergymen often say that the most pious men they had 
 ever seen were negroes, and the most vigorous and prosperous 
 churches in the United States are now— and have been for years — 
 churches of black men and slaves; and, probably, they are also 
 the largest churches in the whole world. One, in Beaufort, S. C, 
 in 1857, numbered three thousand five hundred and eleven mem- 
 bers, of whom live hundred and sixty-five had been baptised that 
 year. That of Richmond, Va., is said to be nearly as large, and 
 was, for some years, the largest church in America. One of our 
 religious editors, in commenting on this most interesting state of 
 facts, very properly laments the fact that, in such churches, " the 
 hihle is withheld from the people, except through the medium of 
 the priests' interpretation." I, too, greatly deplore such a fact ; 
 but I have, also, right here, several special words to say about it : 
 and the first is, that in this respect, the black man of America is 
 really no worse off, and in some respects not as badly off, as the 
 white man is, for neither are allowed in fact to receive the bible, 
 except through the priests' interpretation. I have heard a great 
 deal of gasconade about our open Protestant bibles, but I have 
 never seen one of them yet. Nor do I believe there is any single 
 church or communion in Christendom that would tolerate any man 
 in receiving and applying the bible to himself and others, on the 
 simple ground of those reiterated and self-evident principles on 
 whicn the bible itself declares the whole of its own authority to be 
 based. Thank God there are good and christian men and women 
 in all the so-called churches ; but if there is a single church organ- 
 ization in all Christendom, black or white, which the single gospel 
 of Matthew would not utterly annihilate, if applied to it with even 
 any tolerable honesty and consistency, I do not know where it is. 
 And an open bible is the last of all things that the dead Corner- 
 
•11 
 
 vatisms and Phariseeisms, of either the North or the South, would 
 ever wish or should ever pray to see. An open bible would be to 
 them what a waggish comrade was to an old negro, who was every 
 night in the habit of praying, very loud, in his cabin, for the Lord 
 "to send Gabriel to take him right straight up to Heaven." But 
 one night this wag. while Tony was thus praying, rapped on the 
 door, and said, in a very gram and doleful voice: "Here is 
 Gabriel, come to take Tony right up to Heaven." Tony blowed 
 out his light and jumped into lied in a trice, exclaiming, as he 
 went : " Go and tell de Lord dat dat ar' nigger haint been seen in 
 doc parts tor a whole three week- ! " Why is it worse to compel 
 the black man to take the bible through the interpretation of a 
 living "John Smith," whom be docs know, than to compel the 
 white on.' to take it through a dead John Calvin, or John Wesley, 
 or Westminster Assembly, whom be don't know; or through the 
 petty sectarianisms and creed-mongers of his own day? And if 
 this ecclesiastical master of the white man may shake hell-fire in 
 the face of his pupil to dissipate bis doubts, why may not the mas- 
 ter of the Mack man shake a harmless cow-skin, that cannot touch 
 the soul, in bis face, to drive away his unbelief ? Iain sure that 
 the "white cuffee' 7 and the "black cuffee" come nearer upon the 
 platform of a twin brotherhood here than anywhere else, except 
 that the poor black man has not yet risen to a point of culture and 
 civilization in which books, of any sort, can be of much use, to any 
 
 race; while the servile white man has, by the g Iness of God, 
 
 already attained that point where the bible would be of great use 
 t,, him, if he only could muster the manhood to dare to open it and 
 read it for himself, in spite of his sect and his priest. But a wild 
 lliall l ia - no more use for a book, of any sort, than a wild horse has 
 tor a silver-mounted harness. Hooks are of no more real use, to 
 multitudes even of our own people, who have them and can read 
 them, than a treatise on fluxions would he to a Greenlander, or a 
 parasol to a harvest hand. Some of them read only just enough 
 to befool themselves, and others do not do even so much as that. 
 God has never given hooks to any race of men until they were far 
 advanced in their long career ot hereditary civilization. He did 
 not give, even in form, the bible to any of our ancestral races, even 
 after its institutions and truths were thrown all around them, till 
 they had gone through a thousand years of pounding under a 
 
 —7 
 
42 
 
 despotism of the very priests who held it ; and even after all this 
 severe discipline, they have by no means learned either to prize it, 
 or to use it as they should. But as the people of Italy have, after 
 all, got at the practical substance of the bible, without ever read- 
 me- it, better than their priests have by reading it all the time, 
 on the same principle the South Carolina negroes will at last get 
 at it better than their masters, if indeed they have not done 
 so already; and how long a discipline, of the same sort, the 
 black race may require, I am not wise enough to detemine. 
 I pray that they may so advance and so profit, that it may 
 properly be a short one. I am well aware that theologians often 
 ascribe such facts as these to Providential imbecility, miscalled 
 forbearance, or some other learned name ; but I would rather have 
 our " Old Public Functionary" at the head of the universe, than 
 such a stupid and imbecile Divinity as these theologisms and eccle- 
 siasticisms talk of. The Devil everywhere outwits him, or beats 
 him at a fair game. He could not govern even South Carolina, let 
 alone the rest of the universe. Although they say he is CxOing to 
 do great things sometime — at least he is full of large promises 
 about it — but his actual performance, so far as we have seen, has 
 been quite small, indeed. But, I take it that the real God, both 
 of the universe and of the bible, rules the world now, and always 
 has done, in spite of the Devil and the ecclesiastics, too ; and He 
 has never seen tit to give books to any barbarians yet — though I 
 admit that it is fitting for us poor mortals to give them, together 
 with all other good things, just as fast as we can, and then He will 
 guide and control our. action to exactly right results. For He 
 understands this mighty mystery of developing, or rather creating, 
 out of nothing, intelligence, virtue, holiness and heaven, far better 
 than we do. 
 
 But we Anglo-Saxons are all laboring under the same mistake, 
 in regard to the negro race, that the Egyptians of old were in re- 
 gard to the Hebrews. Those old Pharaohs supposed God sent the 
 Hebrews into Eypt to learn to make brick and build pyramids ; 
 whereas he sent them there, not to fit them to make brick, but to 
 make Bibles; a very silly and useless sort of a thing compared with 
 the useful brick and magnificent pyramid, doubtless these old Phar- 
 aoh's thought it, But we have got up a round or two on that lad- 
 der. Still we suppose that the black man is sent here to raise cot- 
 
43 
 
 ton and sugar, to perfect our calicoes and dresses, and sweeten our 
 julips and teas. But God is schooling him to fill up and complete 
 the measure of our literatures, freedoms and arts; our charities and 
 devotions. Said the same Dr. Livingston, on the same occasion, 
 "I have no doubt that these numerous black races are as much pre- 
 served for purposes of mercy, as were God's ancient people, the 
 Jews." Can any intelligent men donbt it l 
 
 As respects their natural modes of civil order, then they must 
 conform to these fundamental requisites of their character, and they 
 can be really free; under no other order. On this point there are 
 two extreme opinions in the United States; one would transform 
 the negro into a democrat, and spread the dead level of democracy 
 all <>ver the globe ; the other would forever hold him as a slave, and 
 erect it> mis-called democracies over the volcano of negro slavery; 
 if there is any truth in the views presented, both these extremes are 
 equally absurd, for neither our present system of Southern slavery, 
 nor democracy, furnish to the Equatorial man his own final proper 
 sphere of action, of fbeedom, of loyalty and devotion, all of which, 
 in combination, he as instinctively seeks, as the duck does its own 
 native water; and we may set and hatch as many of these Equato- 
 rial duck eggs under our own Northern democratic hens, as we 
 please, either here or in Liberia, or elsewhere, but we shall never 
 hatch out one single genuine democratic chicken; as soon as left to 
 themselves they will all take to the institutions of their own native, 
 sunny South. And with the exception of a few miserable abor- 
 tions on this continent, and our present failure in Liberia, I believe 
 that in the whole history of the world, there has never been an at- 
 tempt, even to seek alter, much less to institute a Republic between 
 the tropics. Even at the first discovery of this country, while all 
 the Northern tribes were substantially democrats, all the tropical 
 ones were monarchists; and the present races have already sunk, 
 in fact, into the same order, if not in name. 
 
 God has not experimented with monarchies for five thousand 
 years for nothing; they are just as natural and necessary to the 
 tropics and the Equator, as democracies are to the higher latitudes. 
 And the same cons* ious personal freedom that leads the white man 
 to choose to be governor by abstract laws, written on papers and 
 parchments by political machinery of his own fixing and working, 
 because he is by nature an abstractionist and a machinist, will as 
 
44 
 
 naturally lead the black man to choose to be governed by concrete 
 laws, written on the heart of a just, generous and concrete man, 
 around whose person and presence, his own native sentiments of 
 loyalty and devotion may find a full, free and healthful scope, 
 both for culture and for action. Equal and stable democracies are 
 the complex political machinery, of fertile and inventive brains ; 
 the product of the head for the purposes of individual security, and 
 self-culture and self-development, 
 
 Just and magnificent empires are the spontaneous creations of 
 great, devotional, loyal and magnanimous hearts, which sink and 
 forget the egotism of self, in the glory and renown of the social 
 whole ; christian purity and truth can give freedom to either, fit 
 both alike to man, and consecrate both alike to God. Monarchy, 
 therefore, the earliest and the most wide-spread political blossom of 
 earth, is not to prove a barren sterility, an utter abortion ; but un- 
 der christian freedom and christian inspiration to bring forth the 
 choicest Equatorial fruits for the good of man and the glory of God. 
 The black men of Africa are not only by nature monarchists, hav- 
 ing a king or chief to follow and to adore, in every petty village, 
 but it is said that four-fifths of the 'whole population quietly remain 
 under their masters, as domestic slaves, even in those wilds where 
 they could run away, or raise an insurrection any clay ; and outside 
 of the influence of the American slave trade, so little injustice is 
 done them, that a stranger cannot readily tell the slave from the 
 master. How different, in fact, is this, from our present American 
 system, though the same in name. Beside, the black man has not 
 intellect enough to make a safe democrat, lie cannot be made to 
 comprehend how the ''inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pur- 
 suit of happiness, 1 ' in all men, should only define the right of the 
 white man to catch and enslave negroes. How slavery is to be 
 hated in the abstract-, and deified in the concrete, and finally, ex- 
 tinguished by investing it with all concrete power, and spreading 
 it over the whole continent. How a constitution ordained to "se- 
 cure and perpetuate liberty and Union,' 1 should be used only to 
 catch stray negroes with, or to mob, outlaw, whip, club down, tar 
 and feather, hang and murder free white men, women and chil- 
 dren ; to ferment treason and disunion, till all liberty, all Union, 
 and all law and government on earth, become a mockery and a 
 by-word. How we save the Union every four years by electing 
 
45 
 
 some Northern doughface, or some Southern fire-eater to swear to 
 these self-evident truths, and politically to execute them at the cap- 
 ital — all this the black could not be made to understand ; and should 
 he attempt to execute it, his weak head, and his great swelling 
 Equatoeial heaet would lead him sadly astray; for to do all this, 
 DOt only requires a man that has a very "big head,'' but he should 
 also be more utterly destitute of all heart than a crocodile; and this 
 the black man i- not. 
 
 But to illustrate further my point: I suppose, if it were left 
 perfectly free to all the negroes today, either to remain with their 
 masters, astheyare, or to go out five, among those who have really 
 kind masters, i doubt not, thai even now, under our appalling 
 . ode of slave laws, such is the extreme tendency of their nature 
 to sentiment, Loyalty and devotion, that multitudes would choose 
 t«« remain where they are, inconceivable as all this is to us; where- 
 as, if our laws protected them and their property, in family, life and 
 limb, to even any decent extent, I have no doubt that under such 
 a choice, the va-t majority of them would stay where they are. 
 But yon probably could not find one single white man, on two 
 whole continent-, however debased or inured to despotism at home, 
 that would make such a choice. 
 
 Nor doe- this fact show so much the degradation of the black 
 race a- is sometimes -aid. a- it does the radical and instinctive dif- 
 ference of the two races; a difference so great that it is Impossible 
 for a- to comprehend, much less to sympathize with the other race. 
 And it i- this conscious difference in b ldk ax chaeactee and ulti- 
 m\ti. destiny, not a mere difference of color, that throws a great 
 and impassible gulf between the two races. We might a- reason- 
 ably expect the wolf and the house-dog to see alike and act alike, 
 and voluntarily to choose the same kennel or lair. I do not deny 
 that the mere color is repulsive to us, or at least distasteful — 
 :lll ,l rightfully to for if there were a race of women on this conti. 
 ,,ent with scarlet rednoses, there would be lots of old maids among 
 them in spite of a common Christianity, and the Declaration of In- 
 dependence thrown in to boot. Now, if we were all made angels, 
 and did not care for color, all this reasoning about its being a mere 
 prejudice, might be very nice ; but so long as we are but men, and 
 do, and must care for it, it is all very shallow. 
 
46 
 
 The venerable Dr. Livingston testifies, in his work, that at one 
 time he himself became so black while on the low lands of Africa, 
 that the natives would not believe that he had ever been a white 
 man, till he stripped up his sleeve and showed them his protected 
 skin. He affirms also, that in those regions, a white man appeared 
 decidedly distasteful and repugnant to him, so far as the color was 
 concerned. This frank confession indicates two things, both of 
 which we should naturally expect, namely : that by ordinance of 
 God, both healthful color, and healthful and natural taste, changes 
 with the different climes ; thus laying an immovable foundation for 
 distinct varieties of races, colors, and tastes, instead of a dead uni- 
 formity of either. And I think all those democrats who feel that 
 they are in danger of marrying black women ought to be allowed 
 to prohibit themselves and their friends, by enacted law, though 
 such a law is quite needless for most people. But this matter of 
 mere color is not all, nor is it the chief ground of our repugnance, 
 for we do sympathize with the Indian, and with occasional speci- 
 mens of the African race, in spite of color, in whom we find the 
 same indomitable will, as in ourselves ; and it is impossible for 
 any human being to respect, or at least to sympathize with any 
 quality in another, which he does not find in himself. The negro 
 cannot be taught to swear, fight and cypher equal to the Anglo- 
 Saxon, and, therefore, he can have no respect for him, however 
 faithfully he may serve, worship, pray, and adore. 
 
 But to bring all to the concrete : Take as a full grown Northern 
 man, Napoleon Bonaparte ; and as a full grown Equatorial man, 
 "Uncle Tom," for I am not acquainted with any similar real char- 
 ter, though Southern gentlemen of undoubted veracity, assure me 
 that they have often seen such at the South. Now, this "Uncle 
 Tom" had not what we call intellect enough in his head to sub- 
 serve the necessities of Napoleon's little finger. But if Napoleon's 
 heart, on the other hand, had been beaten out as fine as gold leaf, 
 it would not all have made a sizable case for Uncle Tom's great 
 Equatorial heart, ever full of love and of grace, and ever pouring 
 a full tide of divine and heavenly wisdom up into his head, so that 
 there was no need, no room for what we call mere intellect there. 
 No more than the electric battery, that draws its full charge from 
 the clouds, needs the gyrations of some petty human machine. It 
 is true, logic is good, but there are powers of the human soul that 
 transcend all the possibilities of a bare logic. Now, any man who 
 
47 
 
 should assert that this Uncle Tom was a higher specimen of true 
 manhood than Napoleon Bonaparte would perhaps be deemed in- 
 sane. And yet, if Christ's teaching, and the whole of Christianity 
 from beginning to end, is not all a sheer fable, it is even so ; and 
 Uncle Tom's character will prove not only the higher, but in the 
 long run infinitely the stronger, and more dominant and all-control- 
 ling character ot the two ; and I am not sure but the bare imaginary 
 conception of it, is yet destined to work greater and more desirable 
 changes on this continent, than all Napoleon's power could on the 
 continent of Europe. For "blessed are the meek, for they shall 
 inherit the earth — not Heaven — but the earth, and strain, and 
 pervert the old prophecy as you will, that '"Canaan should be ser- 
 vant of all," the oft-repeated prophesies of Jesus, who is greater 
 than Noah, that "he he who is servant of all, shall, in the end, 
 become 'geeatest and masiik of all,' " must needs be fulfilled. 
 And do \w not even now see, that this despised negro race are 
 gathering around them, like a wall of eternal fire, the highest, and 
 holiest, and strongest sympathies and sentiments of the most chris- 
 tian and civilized races of earth. In some aspects, mere weakness, 
 even like that of the infant, is the strongest thing on the face of the 
 earth; and the careless killing of a half-dozen children about 
 Charleston, might now, make as more trouble than the slaughter 
 of fifty thousand armed soldiers. Mere logics, customs, conven- 
 tionalisms, prejudices and passions, are very small affairs, and may 
 either freeze or perish in a day. J!ut these instinctive and undying 
 sentiments of the human soul, when once aroused, are truly terri- 
 ble. "Woe, \\oc to the rider that would trample them down." 
 
 The reason, then, in brief, why the two races cannot dwell 
 together, is not one of mere color. It is — -first, because God never 
 designed that they should, as we shall soon see; and second, 
 because each race is still essentially barbarian in the only line in 
 which the other has begun to be civilized — the one in head, and 
 the other in heart— and thus they must remain till long after their 
 separation will come. Hence there is no solid ground of mutual 
 sympathy and co-operation between them. All the black man's 
 social work here is as totally unnatural to him as the bricks without 
 straw were to the Hebrews, and must ever remain so. For his 
 home and his great work is not here, but between the tropics; 
 while the social and civil order that he craves is just as distasteful 
 
V 
 
 48 
 
 and imsuited to ns. For, made as we are, and destined to what 
 we are, should we attempt to live with him in his sunny home, 
 under the wisest, and best, and freest institutions he could possibly 
 create or endure, it would be to us a practical slavery, an inevitable 
 crippling and dwarfing of all our natural powers and energies, 
 however kindly he might treat us. For him to do the same with 
 us must as inevitably result in the same thing. Shame on us, 
 th en — yea, ten thousand shames on us — if we cannot treat him 
 kindly, nor yet humanly, while Providence permits him to remain. 
 We are barbarians in heart ; he never treated us so, in his own 
 native home. 
 
 Did space allow, it would be pertinent here to remark on the 
 cause of that peculiar ease and grace of manners which the unpre- 
 judiced traveler perceives, as soon as he passes the lines of one of 
 our great slave States. This is one effect — a sort of reaction of 
 the great equatorial heart of the black man, though degraded and 
 enslaved, even upon the heart and manners of his master. I refer 
 not now to the haughty insolence of the slaveholder, when in 
 anger, or when assuming superiority — which habit is a direct effect 
 of slavery itself, and, if possible, more detestable and disgusting 
 than the cause which produced it; but I refer to his quiet and 
 graceful ease, so charming when he is in repose, which is an effect 
 of his association with the black man as a comrade, and which I 
 do admire, though we of the North strive in vain to rival, or even 
 successfully to imitate it. 
 
 But is it asked again, which of these two races is superior ? I 
 answer, both, for the purpose and the place for which God made 
 them, and both inferior for any other place. And here the black 
 man is inferior, just as we should soon be in Greenland, simply 
 because he is out of his own sphere and place. And if ever our 
 women should change places and spheres with us, they would soon 
 fall under the same disgust and contempt, because they would be 
 at work in a sphere they could not fill ; and if physical nature does 
 not abhor a vacuum, still human nature abhors such a monstrosity; 
 and whenever woman has been thus thrust out of her sphere, she 
 has ever been held in disgust and contempt, as a mere slave, for 
 the same reason, and ever must be. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 "We are now prepared, perhaps, with some degree of intelligence, 
 to ask and to answer the questions, why did the black man come 
 here \ and how and where shall he go? In our former survey of 
 the continents, we left these two races, the white at the North, and 
 the black at the South, of the Mediterranean Sea, each having 
 traversed the whole breadth of his own continent, from the East to 
 the West — the one having tilled the European, the other the Afri- 
 can end of this continent with its own peculiar people and arts, till, 
 with their modes of lite, both seemed pressed for room — we left 
 them, I say, thus standing on the "Western verge of their individual 
 homes, totally unconscious of each other's existence, and both 
 looking, as it were, wishfully to some unknown land — some new 
 home in the far West, in the bosom of the great, dread, mysterious 
 and unknown Atlantic. The fortunate and timely hanging of a 
 little bit of iron on a pivot, called the mariner's compass, by the 
 intermediate Portuguese race, unexpectedly introduced these two 
 races to each other, and to their new home in the "West, and opened 
 all Africa and all America to the astonished gaze of the civilized 
 world. These two races at first shook hands, and turned their 
 eves Westward. There they stand, these two mighty races, nur- 
 tured apart, on the two extremes of earth, and of climate, and one 
 of them nursed in secret for thousands of years. The white man, 
 with his wonted agility, starts at once for his new home in the 
 North of this new-found and new-born world. But the black man 
 still gazes in stupid and helpless amazement upon the glorious land 
 of the Amazon, already opening wide its ocean mouth, and throw- 
 ing far abroad over a whole continent its mighty arms, to receive 
 and embrace him. But the Africans have neither ships, nor 
 money, nor arts, and they cannot cross. "God has surely made a 
 mistake now," says the skeptic; "he has made the race in Africa, 
 —8 
 
50 
 
 and the lands to receive them in America, all right ; but they can 
 not cross the sea— they can never meet." Hush ! hush ! " Thou 
 shalt make even the wrath of man to praise thee, and the remainder 
 thereof shalt thou restrain." So it was of old, and this Scripture 
 is not out of date yet. The white man has ships, and money, and 
 skill, in abundance ; but he is the universal Yankee of the globe, 
 and was never known to work for either God or man for nothing ; 
 and if he brings them over he must have pay — cash down. Well, 
 he brought them, and he has taken terrible pay ; and now he ought 
 to be satisfied, and love mercy, and do justice. 
 
 It is interesting here to note that about this time the most Chris- 
 tian and civilized nations of Europe, as if impelled by the frenzy 
 of some malicious demon, all united in capturing and plundering 
 the black man, and bringing him across the Atlantic, and colonizing 
 him in the United States, and in Brazil, and on the islands, on all 
 sides of his new Amazonian home, until almost three millions were 
 found in each country. Then the same nations, as if inspired of 
 God, without changing a single cardinal truth of either their polity 
 or faith, all as one, set to to denounce and punish their own practices 
 as a felony and a piracy. So far did this proceed, that at one time 
 the best of men could see no wrong in the traffic, and at the other 
 the worst could find no apology for it. There is no accounting for 
 the action and logic of men on this subject. Even we ourselves 
 still call trafficking in negroes piracy on the water, and democracy 
 on the land. I say there is no accounting for these and similar 
 facts, except that God wanted about twelve millions over here on 
 either side of this equatorial home of the black man in Brazil ; and 
 now they are here, no more are wanted from Africa, while it is still 
 needful to push those of the North down South, which the overland 
 slave trade is constantly doing, and is therefore permitted ; and if 
 this divine reason does not lay at the bottom of those most unac- 
 countable discordances and inconsistencies of all faith, all logic, all 
 charity and all law combined, surely no human reason does. 
 
 Again : Till about the same time, all these United States alike 
 held slaves, and all alike, the North as well as the South, tolerated 
 slavery. The best of men in the North saw no particular harm in 
 it, and all sustained and strengthened, not simply tolerated, each 
 other in the practice. Slaves were then thought as proper and 
 useful at the North as at the South. But all of a sudden this 
 
51 
 
 scene, too, changes ; and every influence of God, of Nature, of 
 men, and of devils, seemed to conspire to crowd the three millions 
 of slaves in the United States down South, toward their final home; 
 while similar co-operating causes have operated in South America 
 to push them up North toward the same spot. Some Northern 
 States emancipated and sold South. Several States still raise 
 slaves and sell South. The Southern State filibuster, fight, nego- 
 tiate and secede, to gain territory — Texas, Mexico, Cuba, Central 
 America — in order to push slaves still further South. Northern 
 men — Democrats, Republicans and Christians — compromise, enact 
 ordinances and platforms, pray, emigrate by thousands, and even 
 fight, to keep slavery from spreading toward the North. But, 
 strange again, as it logically seems, they will resist to the death the 
 addition of a single slave State toward the North, while they will 
 quietly acquiesce in the addition of a dozen on the South — only 
 barely making just fuss enough about it to make themselves believe 
 there is some consistency in their action : just as boys whistle in 
 the dark, to keep their own courage up. But God works by still 
 more effective means; for he smites every Northern soil with bar- 
 renness and with curses, on which the slave is permitted too long 
 to linger, and thus drives them South by the accumulating deluge 
 of desolation in their rear, as he drove the Israelites out of Egypt 
 by closing in the Red Sea behind them. True, all this will not be 
 done in an hour, nor in a single generation, God has never pur- 
 posed nor promised that he would complete this great equatorial 
 work of the globe — the final crowning work of all lands, races and 
 acres — a nd usher in the final sonj>; of earth's jubilee that is to 
 encircle the globe, in a single generation. And, fret as we may, 
 he will take his own time for it ; oppose or help as we may, he will 
 at last do his own work in his own way, and do it so, too, that all 
 shall pronounce it " good," " very good." 
 
 Now, if these and all accordant facts do not show the finger of 
 God in this whole matter, from Ham's day down to our own, and 
 intimate the final destiny of the black man and our highest duty 
 toward him, I do not know what could show it. In my view it 
 takes no more of a prophet or of a wise man to see that the black 
 man will go to the valley of the Amazon, whether we will or no, 
 than it does to see that the white man will remain in the United 
 States, or that the Amazon will run into the sea. 
 
52 
 
 Brazil is, at this very hour, substantially a black empire. There 
 were, in 1850, in the country, about one million of weak and 
 degenerate Portuguese and mixed Portuguese. These, at present, 
 hold the supremacy of power, while the supremacy of numbers — 
 of population — is hopelessly against them. Pitted against them, 
 in the contest for power, there are already more than a million of 
 strong, robust, warlike, free blacks, Indians and half-breeds ; while 
 in the contest for the supremacy of numbers, there must be added 
 to these more than three million of slaves, daily increasing with 
 astonishing rapidity,® both by birth and by emigration. The 
 reigning house is equally illustrious for its prestige, its sagacity 
 and its comprehensive philanthropy and humanity. The world 
 could not furnish a better sovereign for those mixed races, if they 
 desired one; and, fortunately, they have no disposition to desire it. 
 The practical administration, in several respects, is more free and 
 more perfect than our own ; and, for that place and people, better 
 than any known civilized government on earth. Hence the aston- 
 ishing development and progress of the country in the past few 
 years. It is, at all points, as favorable to the black man as to the 
 white, and much more congenial to his nature. Amalgamation is 
 common, and even encouraged by law. All religion is free. The 
 press is free : far more so than it is in the United States. Great 
 attention is being paid to the development of a system of free 
 schools — to foreign commerce and foreign emigration ; while the 
 African slave trade is now wholly suppressed, and the actual con- 
 dition of existing slaves ameliorated as fast as it can be done. In 
 the last half century Brazil has quietly swallowed up the little 
 republics on her Northern border, just as we have the monarchies 
 on our Southern border, until, without war, noise or uproar, she 
 has come into safe and permanent possession of a territory larger 
 than all Western Europe, fourteen times as large as France, larger 
 than the whole United States by 68,294 square miles, and, in per- 
 manent natural resources, worth a dozen just such countries as ours; 
 and it is steadily rising toward an empire that will, in the end, 
 eclipse all other empires on the face of the earth in its wealth, its 
 splendor, its numbers and its power. 
 
 "Why quarrel longer over our black people, or try in vain to jilt 
 them back to Africa, when by sending them to Brazil we could 
 confer an inestimable blessing upon the whole world in the devel- 
 
53 
 
 opment of the resources of that unique and glorious empire, and in 
 the end increase our own safety, wealth, commerce, glory and 
 power a thousand fold more than we can by retaining them here; 
 and place the African in his own native, final home. We have 
 hundreds of thousands of free blacks in the United States and 
 in Canada that might go to-morrow, with infinite advantage to 
 themselves and to all others, at home and abroad. I will reiterate 
 ■ — because it is as certain as the laws of God and of nature — that 
 nothing can surpass the glory and the grandeur of the future 
 history of the black race in Brazil, let who Avill rule them; for 
 whoever holds the supremacy in power, they will always hold it 
 in numbers so decided and strong, that that power must be exerted 
 substantially for their good. 
 
 But there is the half-way house, in Ilayti, to which they even 
 now offer to pay the passage of all our free blacks who will go, 
 give each family a farm of the richest land in the world, when 
 they get there, and guarantee to them all civil and social privileges. 
 Much the same is true of Central America, and even of Southern 
 Mexico. Since these lectures were first written and delivered, 
 now some year- ago, most of these governments have offered forty 
 acres of land gratis to all black men, of good character, who will 
 come to them ; and the Providential developments, on all hands, 
 toward such a final result as was there predicted, and thought, at 
 thai time, by some, to be wholly chimerical, have been so rapid, 
 wide- spread and resistless, as not only to astonish the writer, but 
 even the whole world at large. It has now become absolutely 
 childish tbr us to be halting, and doubting, and bickering, and 
 quibbling over the final and proper destiny of the black man any 
 longer. The finger of Almighty God has not only written it on 
 the continents and the ages, from which alone it could be deciphered 
 when this view was first suggested to an audience of half fearing, 
 half hoping, and therefore willing hearers, but he has now chroni- 
 cled it in our surrounding policies, histories and laws, in speeches, 
 gazettes and, above all, in «»ur unutterable necessities. "What class 
 of men on the face of the earth can such a policy injure? Nay, 
 wdiat class will it not most obviously benefit? Will it harm Africa? 
 Brazil will do more for Africa than Africa can possibly do for her- 
 self alone ; just as this country has done more for Europe than a 
 thousand Italics or Spains could have done. Will it injure the free 
 
54 
 
 black, the slave or the master ? I shall show, hereafter, that it is 
 the only possible earthly hope of either. Will it injure the com- 
 merce, or the wealth, or the Union, or endanger the safety of the 
 Republic 1 ISTo man will say it. And, if not the only hope of 
 either, it is, at least, by far the most cheering one the far distant 
 future can present to us. 
 
CHxVPTER V 
 
 In view of these tacts, what shall we do ? We may, in general, 
 like christian freemen, by all the means God has put in our power, 
 aid, instruct and comfort our sable brother in his pilgrimage toward" 
 the far South, and thus prepare him for his new home and final 
 glorious destiny there. If so, our own destiny and our own glory 
 will be unrivalled past all power of human speech to express. 
 
 On the other hand, we may abuse, crush, trample and torture 
 him as he goes: deny him all natural rights, simply because we 
 have the power : scourge the race and desolate the earth, and 
 explode the volcanoes of eternal justice beneath our own feet, till 
 our own freedom is a hopeless wreck — our own strength and wis- 
 dom a strength for suicide — an infatuation that arms the race of 
 man and the omnipotence of God against us — till at last this once 
 patient but now phrensied and despairing man, skilled in the arts 
 of his torment ore, and aided and abetted by all the monarchies of 
 the elobe, shall burst forth from the kennels in which we have 
 caged him, to reek upon our institutions, and kindred, and homes 
 the unutterable vengeance of his own unrequited wrong — the 
 justice of the ever-living God. For God still reigns; not away up 
 among the stars, and the eternities and the dogmas, but down in 
 the rice swamps and cotton and cane fields, over those sable souls, 
 that still cry, from beneath the altar, w * How long, oh, Lord, how 
 lone ( " And what shall we do if we at last provoke him to exe- 
 cute his higher law, not in suffering mercy, but in avenging wrath. 
 But to be more specific : 
 
 I. The slave states of the South can so readjust their state laws 
 as to protect, both in theory and in fact, all the natural rights of 
 the black man, while the master still holds his superior relation to 
 him and all needtul control over him; and the only possible way 
 to render the slave safe, contented and happy, and useful to his 
 
56 
 
 master and to the world, is for the state to interfere as he rises in 
 the scale of intelligence, to correct, in his behalf, admitted abuses, 
 and to protect him against the abuses of cruel and unreasonable 
 masters. The state, in its own sovereignty, and majesty, should 
 assume his guardianship and efficient protection against all such 
 unreasonable abuse. And unless this is done, the civilized world 
 will become arrayed against the whole system. 
 
 II. Individual masters can, meantime, treat their slaves with 
 so much christian kindness and humanity, that with their proclivi- 
 ties toward sentiment and devotion, they would not leave them if 
 they could, until both parties see that it is for the good of each ; 
 and should that time ever come, then they would part in love and 
 peace, and no wrong or violation of freedom be done to either ; for 
 the fundamental idea of freedom includes the right of choosing to 
 serve a just and upright man, as truly as it does the right to choose 
 to obey a just and upright abstract law. And according to the true 
 idea of freedom given on a preceding page, any master can, at any 
 time, make his slave really free, without manumission, and without 
 either aid or opposition from the state ; for he can place him at once 
 in a spere of action and enjoyment suited to his capacities and 
 wants, if he is not there already ; and that is all the rational liberty 
 that any living creature can either have or claim. I am aware that 
 one party will cite the West India emancipation, and the other, St. 
 Domingo, to refute and rebut the above suggestions, forgetting 
 that it was the awful negligence of the state, and the appalling 
 abuses and cruelties of the masters, that precipitated the catastro- 
 phe of slavery, in both of these cases alike ; and if any state would 
 avoid such an end, it must turn out of the road that inevitably leads 
 to it. The cruelties and necessary abuses that there arose, under 
 absentee landlords, and irresponsible overseers, destroyed all natur- 
 al sympathy between master and servant, forcing the slave to see 
 and feel that their masters cared nothing, whatever for their real in- 
 terests and welfare, and throwing them into that condition of com- 
 bined disgust and despair, in which the weakest of mortals is capa- 
 ble of the most terrible desperation and revenge. May God deliver 
 our own states from such cruel and suicidal folly and infatuation. 
 There are but two possible causes that can ever terminate slavery 
 in these states ; the one is the despair of the black man ; the other 
 is the wisdom and benevolence of the white one. The one is hor- 
 
57 
 
 rible even to think of, the other is the most beautiful and glorious 
 subject the mind can contemplate. The one comes by first making 
 the master a brute, and the slave a consequent demon ; the other 
 comes by making the master a virtual parent and guardian, and 
 the slave a dutiful and faithful son, or ward, rising in the scale of 
 being by the slow, but sure process of hereditary civilization, as 
 their generations pass away, till finally prepared to leave their fa- 
 ther's home, more in sorrow than in joy, to enter their new home, 
 and assume the burden and cares of life for themselves. What 
 more beautiful or blessed sight can there be upon earth, than that 
 of millions of men passing from barbarism to civilization under such 
 a process as this; and though their growth be slow, like that of the 
 forest oaks, it is still the growth of nature and of God, and, there- 
 fore, resistless and sure. Southern writers and speakers boast of 
 what they have already done for the black man in this line, and of 
 the civilization he has already achieved, under their care, imperfect, 
 and even cruel, as it often lias been. I do not doubt, either as re- 
 gards the fact or the true philosophy of the progress. And it is 
 on this very ground that I would urge with all the vehemence of 
 truth and its own eloquence, the immediate, and constant, and in- 
 dispi nsable readjustment of their proper sphere of action and 
 enjoyment to suit their new condition, and their new wants, both 
 on the part of the State and the master, as the only hope of either 
 the white or the black man in the South; for otherwise^ the slave 
 must at last, sooner or later, be driven to sunder his bondage in 
 despair and in Mood. But before that time comes, he will have 
 been rendered totally worthless to his master; their mutual aliena- 
 tion and distrust will render the cost of securing and guarding his 
 reluctant labor more than the labor itself can possibly be worth, 
 aside from the hourly impending danger of the final doom; for 
 only the very lowest forms of humanity can possibly be made to 
 work under the stimulus of tear alone. As they rise in intelligence 
 and practical capacity, they must be more and more allured by the 
 incitements of hope. How heroically McDonald's slaves wrought 
 under one form of this hope \ and how bravely others are still work- 
 ing under other forms of it. Xow, that the same laws and customs 
 which were in their own nature fitted, or at least were thought to 
 be needful for the slave, when he was nothing but a mere bar- 
 barian, and could be addressed by no motive but fear, should be 
 
58 
 
 fitted to him, now, if he really lias advanced in civilization, as is 
 claimed for him, is, in itself, a sheer absurdity, contradicted by all 
 possible modes of human reason, experience and observation. The 
 South are everywhere complaining that their slaves ake becoming 
 uneasy ; and they attribute the fact to the abolitionists of the 
 North. They might as well ascribe it to the ice around the North 
 pole. No, the real cause lies much nearer home, and is much more 
 creditable to the individual master, than all this supposes. It lies, 
 in the fact, that in spite of the severity, and barbarism, and cruelty 
 of the old and formal law of the state, masters have, in fact, in gen- 
 eral, treated their slaves with so good a degree of humanity, that 
 they have risen, in spite of many obstacles, in civilization, and 
 in the scale of being, and consequently, have outgrown the bar- 
 barism of the law at sundry points, and feel its injustice with 
 necessarily increasing abhorrence and disgust. Such a result is, 
 and was, and forever will be, as inevitable as the motion of the 
 earth on its orbit, ; and depends just as little on the harangues and 
 appeals of mortal men of any sort. Exclude all men on the face of 
 the earth from the slave states, but the slaveholders only, and 
 this process will inevitably go on, just the same as before; and all 
 the mere talk in the universe cannot arrest it, nor yet materially ad- 
 vance it, for it is based on an unvarying law of the Infinite God, 
 and we might as well talk for or against the rolling of the spheres. 
 It cannot be even legislated against, only in one way ; and that is 
 a system of espionage, and distrust, and force ; and cruel appeal to 
 bare fear, can be instituted, so ferocious and cruel, as to reduce the 
 coming generations of slaves to their original condition of utter and 
 unmitigated barbarism, and all manhood be again so thoroughly 
 crushed out of them, by tyranny and fear, that they feel easy un- 
 der the old and barbarous law, just as an ox would, because they 
 have shrunk beneath, instead of having risen above its provi- 
 sions. Men ! white men, free men of the South, will you do this ? 
 We know you will not, and cannot ; and, therefore, the other is the 
 only alternative open to you. For hope, hope, soul-inspiring hope, 
 is the great want of their present condition ; and their best minds 
 will gradually seize hold of it, however remote in the future it may 
 lay, as the crushed man still clings to his hope of Heaven. 
 
 There is terrible reason to fear that the black man is really sink- 
 ing from simple despair. Our revolutionary fathers kept up their 
 
50 
 
 hope, and their consequent attachment and allegiance, by assuring 
 them, by act and word, that their present condition is only tempo- 
 rary. The colonization scheme renewed and reinspired this hope- 
 Both were totally illusive and impracticable; for the blacks never 
 can be emancipated here, nor carried back to Africa. So now they 
 have no national hope — no hope ! ! Most merciful God ! Are so 
 many millions of thy toiling children to be left longer on earth 
 with no hope — no hope for themselves, or for their children? It 
 cannot be; or, if it is allowed to be, it will create a hell upon earth 
 before many years roll around. Say then at once to the black man, 
 that it' he is faithful to his duty, to himself and to his race, there is 
 f<>r him in the far future a hope, more glorious than the mind can 
 conceive, even, in this world, and an eternal hope nearer by, in the 
 world to come. Say not it will do him no good. Such sources of 
 national hope inspire, and cheer, and encourage all living men, 
 and most of all, men bordering on the verge of despair. Such a 
 course will mend again the sundered cords of sympathy and 
 fidelity — of attachment and devotion between master and slave — as 
 no force, and no fear, and no unfeeling severity and cruelty can 
 ever do — and mend them, too, beyond the power of all the aboli- 
 tionists in the world to sunder them, even if they should desire to 
 do it. Do you say that the hope of heaven supplies this want? 
 It <\<n'< not; it cannot doit. It is good, yea, above all estimate, in 
 its place; hut it sustains and cheers only the spiritual man, in his 
 spiritual relations and duties. But every man on earth needs, also, 
 and must have, a distinctively earthly hope, for himself or for his 
 posterity, or he will, by its want, be transformed into a beast or a 
 demon. Give, then, to the black man, first of all, a hope for him- 
 self and his children, on earth, however remote it may lie in the 
 distant future, if you would Mill keep him a man — a glorious, 
 kaim ni.v, national iiope. It belongs to him ; it is his due. Not 
 a hope in the North, or the free States, or in Canada — for there is 
 no more rational hope for the black man there than there is in 
 Greenland or Labrador — but a new, and soul-inspiring, and glorious 
 hope in his own sunny South, his natural Equatorial home, the 
 land of the great river, and the boundless fertile fields, which God 
 has laade for him, has he not ? For whom, then, did he make 
 that most glorious of all lands? Was it only for the crocodile and 
 the alligator 2 or was it for the white man? But he cannot possi- 
 
60 
 
 bly live there. Who, then, was it for? Will he create a new race 
 of black men ? No : it is for our present black men. They are 
 now only preparing for their new home. Let but this new hope 
 inspire the soul of the black man, and let only moderately reasona- 
 ble justice be done him, while he must remain in his school at the 
 North, and we shall soon hear less of despairing and therefore 
 reluctant and uneasy slaves, and consequent nervous and fright- 
 ened masters. And it is equally beneath the dignity and the duty 
 of the South to be fretting and stewing about a few Northern abo- 
 litionists, who have no access to their slaves, no more than a man 
 in the moon, and could not materially change them if they had ; 
 while the great and solemn issues of the case are now, as ever 
 before in the history of the world, wholly under their own eyes, 
 and in their own hands. Does not all the world know, already, 
 that the anxiety, and fear, and alarm of the masters is far greater 
 in those remote States where abolitionists never go, than it is in 
 those States where they most often go, and where their influence 
 is most felt? True, most slaves run away from the Northern 
 States; but that is merely owing to two causes: first, because, 
 under a temporary impulse or abuse, it is easier to do so ; and 
 second, because they are always suspicious and fearful of being- sold 
 South sooner or later. Thus even the Northern negroes them- 
 selves, stupid as they are, have learned to see and to fear that very 
 despotism under. which some propose to crush the black men of 
 the extreme South. But will a great and vital political tact, that 
 has become so plain that even the Northern negroes can read it — 
 shall it escape the notice and the needful action of Southern demo- 
 crats and statesmen ? We trust not. Our faith both in God and 
 man bears us above such an appalling and despairing view, all 
 present appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. 
 
 It is abundantly within the power of the South, any day — with- 
 out in the least impairing the rightful authority of the master, or 
 the pecuniary value of the services of the slaves, or the security of 
 society, but greatly confirming, enhancing and securing all these 
 together — to place the black man in a condition of practical freedom, 
 usefulness and contentment, as great and as hopeful as any other 
 class of men, of the same grade of civilization, ever enjoyed upon 
 the face of the earth ; and by doing this, they would at once elevate 
 in the scale of moral being both the white and the black man, pre- 
 
61 
 
 pare the latter for his final home in the far South, and command 
 and secure to themselves the sympathy, the respect, and the lasting 
 esteem of mankind. But if they will not do this, they must, in 
 common with all who have gone before them, take what must and 
 will inevitably come: a despotism or an anarchy both for them- 
 selves and their children. That is — to revert to a former simile — 
 they must themselves go into the hopper; for foam, and fret, and 
 stew, and resist, as we, any, or all of us may, God's great and eter- 
 nal mill for the elevation and civilization of the races will not stop 
 its work ; and when any race, black or white, fall evidently bfilow 
 the required standard of work and of duty, it will take them, too, 
 uj), and grind them over, till they come again up to the mark, the 
 standard required. And to my mind, these extreme Southern fire- 
 eaters, as well as the opposite extremes in the North, seem to be 
 hopping in, between the burr-stones, just as fast as they can. That 
 they need a new grinding there can be no doubt; and could they 
 take; it alone, no reasonable man would object; but the fear is that 
 they may draw multitudes along with them, both North and South, 
 who are really, by themselves, deserving of a better fate. 
 
 I have, it will be observed, nowhere inquired whether the Scrip- 
 tun- sanction slavery or not : first, because no possible book can 
 make anything either right or wrong, that was not so in its own 
 nature, before either the book or the world itself was made; and 
 secondly, because the Scriptures, if either true to fact or true to 
 nature, as I believe they are, musl sanction all those kinds and 
 degrees of servitude that have been found, in all ages, indispensable 
 to the civilization of mankind; and they must as clearly repel and 
 condemn all forms and modes of servitude which tend only to the 
 perpetuation and the production of barbarism. But as our Ameri- 
 can slavery includes both — namely, a system of law, under the 
 State, that tends only to barbarism, and a system of practical 
 administration, under* a vast many, if not under the majority of 
 masters, which, in spite of the law, tends to civilization — the Scrip- 
 tures, if true to God and man, must boldly condemn the one, and 
 as boldly tolerate the other; and so they do; and it is easy for a 
 sophist to cite passages and examples, on either side, of the am- 
 biguous and unanalyzed word slavery, all day long, which most 
 clearly either approve or condemn it, just as the ecclesiastical ma- 
 gician chooses. But a rational man would as soon ask whether the 
 
62 
 
 Bible approves of " killing " as of " slavery ;" for in each case it 
 depends wholly on the kind of killing, and the kind of slavery; 
 for God does not fight mere words and wind, however odious they 
 may become ; and all this noise and tumult about the relations of 
 the Bible to slavery must ever remain, like most other ecclesiastical 
 disputes, a mere war of words and of wind, till the .complex word 
 "slavery " is analyzed into its distinct parts. Then it will be found 
 that God has, in all ages, approved of some things included in the 
 general and complex term slavery, and disapproved of others ; for 
 God is neither deceived nor governed by mere big words, as men 
 are. 
 
 Mexico and several of the Central American states, it is said, 
 have recently offered forty acres of land, gratis, to all emigrants, 
 without distinction of color. The whole vast country of Brazil, the 
 black man's natural home, is, as we have seen, even more open, as 
 well as more congenial to him than to the white man ; and it is 
 within the power of the Union, and of the states, to make immedi- 
 ate provisions for the ample colonization of our free blacks and 
 emancipated slaves, into these regions, at far less cost than in Afri- 
 ca, and infinitely more to the present and ultimate advantage of 
 the black man and his race. For South America would thus be 
 made to Africa what North America is now to Europe; just what 
 it would seem that God ultimately designed that it should be. But 
 that all this must take place only by slow degrees, and be fully re- 
 alized only after we, and perhaps many other generations are dead, 
 is no more objection to the policy than the same obstacles were to 
 the policy of colonizing this Northern continent when it was first 
 discovered. And considering the rapid progress of the facilities of 
 transit, and of commerce ; the surprising recent development of 
 those rural implements and machines, by the aid of which, the re- 
 sources of that rich country can now be developed, and its wildness 
 subdued, as it was not possible that it ever could have been before ; 
 considering the results of our recent explorations and reports, and 
 of the vast stream of emigration and of labor, both black and white, 
 that by new discoveries and new enticements, social emigration, 
 and political agitation, and a multitudinous array of combined 
 causes, is now being poured down toward the Equator, in a con- 
 stantly accumulating torrent ; I say, considering all these, and simi- 
 lar facts, too numerous even to allude to here, we may even now 
 
63 
 
 be nearer to the glorious goal of our effort and hope than many of 
 our "slow coaches" suspect ; the moral world does not now simply 
 revolve, as in olden time; it whirls, and "buzzes," and "whizzes," 
 and "sissies," out of every crevice, and crack, and joint, for God 
 has got the steam fully up to the fair running point ; and three or 
 four million of negroes on board, to be carried only across the Mexi- 
 can gulf, are hardly enough for the train to stop for; we shall pro- 
 bably have to throw in several hundred-thousand white men, to en- 
 sure the certainty of a sure and feasable passage. But even, if for 
 a time, they should control, they can never populate the Brazils; 
 and if they control it justly, they will control it no longer than it 
 i- best that they sin Mild ; and in such a climate, and in such a vast, 
 open and peculiar country, a very unjust or cruel control is, for any 
 length of lime, simply an impossibility. For God has taken good 
 can- to make South America all right, in the outset, for the unique 
 and peculiar pail she is to play in the history and civilization of 
 man. 
 
 It would well pay the government now to pay a fair price for all 
 the slaves on the border states, that are willing to go, and colonize 
 them, either in Central or South America, or in Hayti, under some 
 sort of government or guardianship suited to their condition ; and 
 encourage as many free blacks as possible to go with them, from 
 the other .-tat'-. Both the safety of the Union and the slave pro- 
 perty, to,,, as well as all other property in the Union, would be in- 
 creased by the operation, for reasons that will be. more fully sug- 
 gested, as we proceed to other aspects of our subject. 
 
 The cotton states have no reason to apprehend a scarcity of labor 
 from any Mich policy. For it* they would diversify their crops, 
 raise com, wheat, mules, pork and stock, whenever the can, for 
 their own consumption, and introduce the best implements of the 
 free states for the culture of all these, and of their cotton, too, one 
 hand would be found as effective as two or three now are, in the 
 simple cultivation of the crop; and in picking time, they could send 
 to their large cities, by railroad or otherwise, and get gangs of idle 
 hands to come and pick cotton by the pound, or by the day, at far 
 less cost, than it now takes to buy negroes, and keep them the 
 year round, merely, or mostly, for that brief service. If white 
 hands were obtained, they might work in fields, or in gangs, 
 wholly apart from the negroes ; and thousands might, by a little 
 
64 
 
 effort, bo persuaded to make it their regular annual business, to the 
 advantage of all parties. Of course, the white men would not work 
 with the negroes, nor would the planter ask them to do so. And 
 as to such persons trying to persuade the negroes to run away, it 
 is all a humbug; there is not one man in ten thousand, even of the 
 so-called Abolitionists, that would advise a negro to run away it he 
 could, even if laborers were taken from the free states ; for there 
 is hardly one thing that our laborers dread more than the idea 
 that the blacks may somehow get up North, and compete with 
 them in wages ; or drive them out of the market by degrading 
 their toil ; and there is hardly a free state, where we can get even 
 a humane law passed, for the protection of such as do, and must 
 sometimes come, for that very reason. Laborers are the last of all 
 men that ever want to see a negro in the North ; and I believe all 
 this cry and alarm in the South, is kept alive by a set of combined 
 political knaves and fools, for mere selfish and political ends ; and 
 as they have got the control of the press, they keep it a-going. 
 The planters and masters would act wisely to take care of their own 
 real interests, without heeding them. I do not deny that there are 
 men in the North who think slaves ought to run away ; but they 
 are very few, and mostly of the middle class, who never go South, 
 or anywhere else, ten miles from home. 
 
 II. Again. The North can do something in this great and 
 glorious cause, beside merely to talk. If our Northern doughfaces 
 are not at this hour, as fully, and far more meanly responsible for 
 American slavery, than even the slaveholders themselves, I have 
 never been able to see it. The plain fact is, we have all been 
 silent or sleeping partners in the game, all the way through ; we 
 have quietly pocketed the full benefits of the Union, and sold our- 
 selves, body and soul, for its securities, offices, and emoluments. 
 When we therefore, strut up to the South and say, "Stand by, for 
 I am holier than thou," and demand of her alone to take all the 
 temporary evils and risks of emancipation, she is justly disgusted 
 and indignant. For she knows that if slavery be a crime, we are 
 socially and politically particeps criminis, and ever have been. 
 No, let the North at once manfully propose that, whenever any 
 state, in its own sovereign capacity, or any individual under the 
 laws of any state, shall desire to emancipate their slaves, they shall 
 receive out of the public treasury of the Union, a just and proper 
 
65 
 
 share of their real value per capita ; and the North, South, East 
 and "West, all share alike in the temporary losses and inconveni- 
 ence of emancipation, and in the final good and glory that would 
 accrue to the Union and the world, I am aware that many in the 
 North will here begin to stumble over their abstractions again; 
 they cannot run so big, and broad, and just a doctrine, through 
 their emancipation spinning jennies, simply because it is big, and 
 broad, and just. But my reasons for this measure, are : First. — It 
 is just ; due to the African race, for they have earned the whole na- 
 tion far more money than it would cost. It is only "giving to the 
 laborers who have reaped down our fields, their just hire." Second. 
 —It would be a finality ; that long sought charm of both the 
 North and the South ; and had it been done years ago, all our pre- 
 sent loss, and tumult, and alarm, never could have occurred ; and 
 we have actually lost more money, in clear cash, in the past six 
 months, than it would have taken to have prosecuted such a scheme 
 for the next ten years, under any ordinary necessities of such an 
 administration, aside from all the other manifold perils by which 
 we are now surrounded. Such a measure, seasonably and properly 
 prepared, would calm all unnatural and angry discussions, and all 
 fear for ourselves, for the Union, or for our posterity, because it is 
 just. And God himself stills all moral tempests whenever justice 
 is fairly done ; our full responsibility would then be met, and God 
 would require no more, even if man did. 
 
 The North can afford this. The North cannot afford to allow 
 the South to incur all the first costs and hazards, of ridding this 
 continent of slavery, and leave to her alone all the glory of such a 
 final result; the posterity of the North ought also to have some 
 just share in tins heritage of sunlight, this harvest of glory. 
 
 The South can afford it. Such a plan interferes with no real or 
 pretended state or vested rights of any sort. It approaches them 
 in no offensive spirit ; it gives them full liberty, and full time, for 
 the proper and necessary readjustment of all their civil and social 
 institutions, according to their own ideas of duty, of justice, and of 
 interest. It simply says to the man of the South, "Brother, we are 
 in an evil case, all of us ; we have, doubtless, all of us, been more 
 or less remiss and delinquent, as regards our whole duty. Let us 
 both now do our duty, heartily, as unto God, and not unto man." 
 Cannot the South afford this ; I think I know that she both could 
 —10 
 
66 
 
 have done it, and would have done it, if proposed at the proper 
 time. 
 
 •But would such a plan pay ? And first I answer that it will pay, 
 in cash down. Such a measure, if instituted, could, of course, pro- 
 gress only by slow degrees, and would make no sudden draughts 
 upon either the money or the labor of the country. But its effects 
 on social and political harmony and stability, on the rise of lands, 
 the impetus given to Southern hope, Southern enterprise, North- 
 ern capital, commerce and skill, would be so great, that it would 
 continually pay to the country in cash, far more than it would cost. 
 It is, in fact, the best speculation that the American people could 
 possibly enter into ; for there is but one thing on earth or in Heaven 
 that pays so much cash down in the long run, as justice ; and that 
 one thing is, mercy ; and in this measure they both meet, and are, 
 therefore sure to pay well. Since the above proposal Avas first 
 made to the public, it is said that a company of speculators, seri- 
 ously proposed to purchase all the slave estates in a neighboring 
 state, with the design of emancipating all the slaves, on the ground 
 of the profits that would ensue upon the rise of land in that state 
 alone. It may be too late, or rather not the right time, just now, 
 to propose such a plan, but it will never be finally too late to do 
 justice, so long as it is possible to be done ; and I would not give 
 two straws for all the emancipation gabble of that class of North- 
 ern philanthropists, who are only willing to talk, and not willing to 
 put their hands in their pockets, and their shoulder to the wheel, 
 and manfully help lift the black man, and the white man too, out 
 of their present unfortunate condition, let who will be to blame or 
 not to blame for it. A philanthropy that simply gabbles its ab- 
 stractions in the ears of its oppressed or unfortunate brethren, and 
 will do nothing more, lest it should commit some technical impro- 
 priety, is not worth the loss of the pure air that its eloquent speeches 
 spoils. No ; let us show that we are ready to do something, as well 
 as to talk, whenever and wherever the way can be opened to us, 
 to take our full share, and even more than our share of the burdens 
 and losses, if there are any te be borne. For myself, I never wish 
 the planters to free their slaves and colonize them South, without 
 giving me and all my friends our full share in all the first costs ; 
 and, therefore, in all the final glory of the work. 
 
67 
 
 But, again I ask will this pay ? 
 
 "When, in future ages, the equatorial warmth of the sunny South 
 has brooded into new life, adorned with new plumage, and inspired 
 with new songs, all the arts and ornaments of earth, clothed all its 
 dead and mummy forms with living flesh, and made all nature ra- 
 diant with the beauties, and vocal with the melodies of her own 
 tuneful groves; when she graces all arts with the polish of her 
 rich metals and woods; adorns all races with the splendor of her 
 diamonds, her jewels, and her gems; when she pours abroad, over 
 all lands, the odor of her spices, and the ocean of her sweets ; when 
 she completes the measure and the melody of their science, their 
 eloquence, their music, and their songs, fires anew the ardor of 
 their devotion, and gilds with a diviner radiance, the glory of their 
 faith; and when joyously responding to these new incitements to 
 enterprise, to justice and to peace, without painfnl'sweat from slave 
 or man, the myriad mechanisms of the North, like coral insects in 
 the sea, shall perform all human toil — nature alone the slave — 
 man forever free ; when her engines of speed and of power, like the 
 fiery wheels in the prophet's vision, shall course every land, and 
 throng every sea ; when the sorcery of her science shall gleam and 
 confiscate in every Northern sky, and ceasing from conquest, the 
 bow of her peace shall span the ocean and the land; when these 
 two great races shall thus stand on all their polar and equatorial 
 height-, like the Hebrews on Gerazim and Ebal of old, to shout 
 with their myriad tongues the final jubilee of earth; to bless him 
 thai keeps, and curse him that breaks the law of his God; then it 
 will pay; justice will pay; mercy will pay; God will pay; the 
 glory of earth and the jubilee of Heaven will pay; then shall the 
 mighty mystery of Africa be revealed, and the true glory of Ame- 
 rica disclosed to the world. Reader! white man ! black man ! mas- 
 ter and slave ! what part shall you and I play in this great drama 
 of the eternities ( We have each and all alike, our own appropri- 
 ate sphere to act in ; let us all remember then, that 
 
 "Honor and shame from no conditions rise; 
 Act well your part, there all the honor lies." 
 
 ''Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, ye 
 have done it also unto me." 
 

CHAPTER VI 
 
 It is often said that slavery, or the presence of the black man, 
 has been a curse to this country, Nothing could be more unjust 
 or untrue. Some parts of the eloquent and far-famed book of Mr. 
 Helper, on u The Impending Crisis," have given a wide currency 
 to this idea. The reasonings on which this charge is sustained are 
 based mostly on the relative value of real estate, in the North and 
 the South, per acre ; but a few words will suffice to demolish all 
 such reasonings together. It is self-evident that the value of real 
 estate, the world over, depends, in general, upon the density of 
 population on it, or anticipated upon it or around it, and the value 
 of the improvements put upon it by human labor — such as cities, 
 factories, railroads, roads, wharves, bridges, fences, houses, farms, 
 etc., etc. It is equally self-evident that a civilized and skillful 
 laborer will put more of this value, in the same time, upon any 
 given territory, than an uncivilized and unskillful one ; that is, 
 civilized and skillful labor is by far the best, but that does not 
 prove the other good for nothing, or an absolute curse to the land. 
 The poor, ignorant man, black or white, if he cannot do as much 
 as his superior, or do it as well, can still do something ; and God 
 knows, and the world knows, that the poor black man has done 
 much, and it is wrong to rob him of the full credit of what he has 
 done ; is it not ? Shall we slander the poor ? 
 
 We invaded the forests of North America with two distinct, 
 great armies of laborers : one from Europe, civilized and skillful ; the 
 other from Africa, uncivilized and unskillful. The one army now, 
 with all its white officers and commanders, in the South, amounts 
 to some ten millions, more or less ; while the great army of the 
 North amounts to nearly twenty millions — thus having a double 
 advantage over them in numbers, as well as in skill. Considering 
 
70 
 
 the capital and education and means they brought with them, their 
 natural efficient force is at least four (if not six) to one. Both 
 armies began alike, ax in hand, on the Atlantic coast, and 
 advanced, annihilating the forests as they went, toward the far 
 "West. But again the weaker division took by far the widest 
 breadth of territory, and, of course, advanced far less rapidly ; not 
 only from want of skill and of numbers, but from breadth of work. 
 Now, to suppose that each of these divisions should have put the 
 same value per acre upon the territory they have, occupied, is sim- 
 ply to suppose that one uncivilized and unskillful African can do 
 as much work as a slave, and is, therefore, actually worth as much 
 as some four or six civilized and skillful Europeans — which is 
 much more than we desire to claim for the black man ; for it is 
 more than any human being, black or white, bond or free, could 
 possibly do. But we still contend that he has done something — 
 yea, a great deal ; and that the whole country, instead of regarding 
 him as a curse and a nuisance, are bound to regard him as a heroic 
 co-laborer, to whom they owe a debt of gratitude they never can 
 or will repay. Suppose, now, this Southern army of laborers had 
 all stayed in Africa. No more would have come from Europe 
 than have now come ; for we have taken all that would come, and 
 had no means of forcing any more. Of course one of two things 
 must have happened: either the whole South would have remained, 
 to this day, a perfectly worthless wilderness, or the Northern army 
 must have turned down and cultivated it, instead of advancing to 
 the "West, as they have — and left an equally uncultivated wilder- 
 ness out of the grounds now occupied in the "West ; for they have 
 all had as much as they could do in the North and "West, and 
 could not have gone South without neglecting just as much some- 
 where else. 
 
 So far, then, from the black man's having been a curse to the 
 soil, and depreciated its value, and all that, he has really given all 
 the value to it it now possesses, under the direction and co-opera- 
 tion of his masters. They have hewn down its forests and built 
 its cities, wharves, roads, bridges, fences, farms and houses, and 
 thus actually given it all its real value ; which the white army 
 could not have done, for their hands were full at the North and 
 "West. In addition to this, the black man, by the culture of cotton, 
 has vastly cheapened the clothing of the whole Northern army, 
 
71 
 
 increased immeasurably their comforts, luxuries, manufactories, 
 commerce, wealth and arts, and thus stimulated emigration and 
 immensely swolen their numbers with all new sorts of artizans and 
 enterprises. These, and similar facts, again show the complete 
 social as well as civil obligation of the North to meet their full 
 share of the temporary responsibilities and losses in the manumis- 
 sion "i- removal of the -law, whenever and however it may occur; 
 for tin- North has really been more benefited by the indirect labor 
 than th<- South has by the direct labor of the slave — having none 
 of the drawbacks oi hi- presence and influence among them. 
 
 Call the black man a curse to the soil and to the county? How 
 astonishing! Do people really think that God has gone crazy, or 
 abdicated his throne? It' not. they themselves must surely be 
 insane! Why. the whole country ought to consider that it owes 
 the black men a debt it can never repay, except by doing justice, 
 loving mercy and walking a little more humbly with its God. 
 Look at the work ho has already done. These true heroes of labor 
 have already conquered one great empire from the wilderness, 
 while other empires and other conquests are still before them; and 
 the world owes them, already, a greater debt of gratitude than to 
 any army of the much lauded heioes of war, from Xerxes' day to 
 our own. They have no burning cities and blood sodclened fields 
 in their march to conquest and to empire. And they submit to no 
 meaner or more degrading despotisms— to no more cruel suffering 
 and hardships; and to a service infinitely less revolting, detestable 
 and degrading. Yet, forsooth, the one is a slave, and a curse, and 
 the other an angel and a her-: is he? "Oh, how this world is 
 given to lying, Hal.*' — Falstaff. 
 
 tion meek their useful toil, 
 u- homely j<>ys and destiny obscure; 
 Nor grandeur hear, with a disdainful sunk', 
 These short ami ample annals "i' the poor." 
 
 But is it Baid that all this should have been done without 
 Blaverj thai is, without compulsory labor ? If the wild man of 
 AtY'.ea, mi- even our own children, with centuries of hereditary 
 civilization in their veins, can be inured to patient and continuous 
 industry, without compulsion, it surely ought to be done, and some 
 wise man B hould Bhow us at once how it can be done. But suppose 
 the gentleman, fresh from the jungle, should choose to be excused, 
 and thus terminate at once his own task, his own duty and disci- 
 
12 
 
 pline, and all possible future high hope, both for himself and his 
 race: what shall then be done? I admit that all this could and 
 should have been achieved without cruelty, and without injustice 
 of any sort, especially such as constitutes the chief staple of many 
 of our infamous black laws ; but how it could be done without a 
 degree of compulsion that must amount to slavery, in one proper 
 sense of that term, I cannot conceive. The philosopher who could 
 explain it would greatly benefit the world. That the black man, 
 when kept too long on Northern soil, depreciates it, I am well 
 aware ; but this is wholly the fault of the indolence and negligence 
 of the white man, or of his greediness in retaining the negro after 
 his own proper work is done, and the time for his exodus further 
 South has come. It is not the black man's fault. But is it said 
 that the curse consists in the deterioration of the white race itself, 
 I admit the tendency and the fact. Mixing an inferior staple in the 
 hopper, necessarily detracts from the perfection of the product, of 
 course ; and while the white man has leveled the negro up, the 
 neo-ro has also leveled the white man down. And so it has ever 
 been. It was so in the old Roman invasions and incursions, on all 
 sides. If there were some way that we could draw out of a barrel, 
 with no tendency to empty it, it would be very handy ; but it so 
 happens there is not ; and the race that imparts civilization by 
 social contact must be content to be the loser, or to take barbarism 
 in part pay, for it is all they can get from that source ; and if they 
 hold up, they must derive a new inspiration from some other 
 source. But although I glory in being Yankee born and Yankee 
 bred, and an abolitionist at that, to the back bone — having voted 
 the extreme anti-slavery ticket for twent} r years — I confess 1 have 
 no sympathy with those terribly exquisite Anglo-Saxons who seem 
 to grudge the little loss of moral power their own race must incur 
 in conferring the great boon of civilization on other races and 
 other lands ; though I admit and deplore both the danger and the 
 fact. But one great cause of this deterioration of the master lies 
 in the fact that we have never proposed, either to ourselves or to 
 others, any rational solution of the great problem of slavery, either 
 as to its laws of progress, its rational responsibilities and aims, or 
 its final and hopeful result. "We have shut both races up together 
 in flat despaik — to an utter hopelessness of anything for the 
 negro, but interminable slavery where he now is. The one has 
 
73 
 
 felt that he must and should not be freed, and the other that he 
 could not be freed, on fl e soil, and neither could see any possible 
 hope abroad; and after the last flickering ray of hope from African 
 colonization tied away, the white man girded himself, sternly and 
 relentlessly, to the task of crushing the slave down to that inexora- 
 ble and eternal doom, for which alone it seemed God had created 
 him. In a despair still more hopeless, the slave sullenly and reluc- 
 tantly submitted, simply because he could not help it. But nature 
 jtself iV.rced him, even in spite of himself, to keep his eye out upon 
 every new election, and for every new hope, of either revolution 
 or Insurrection; and master and servant were both alike degraded 
 by this inevitable influence — the one by the rigor it incited and 
 the suspicions il engendered, the other by the recklessness it 
 inspired ; and it is hard to say which of the two most need, at this 
 moment, the re-invigoration of some rational hope fur the final 
 exodus of the slaves, by fair and honorable means, from the land. 
 The millions of the North need it, too, to enable them to shape 
 their policy and direct their power toward some truly practicable, 
 honorable and humane end. But all these untoward evils are not 
 the fault of the black man, nor is he therefore a curse to the land. 
 All men are apt to attribute effects which they both feel and hate, 
 to causes which lie outside of themselves: so the slaveholder quite 
 naturally ascribes the present sullenness and uneasiness of the slave 
 to Northern agitation and Northern abolition, instead of to that 
 appalling despair which has at length settled over both master and 
 slave, like a cloud of eternal night, engendering all sorts of rigors, 
 phantasies and fear,, in the mind of the one, and all modes of dis- 
 trust, tear and hate in the very bottom of the soul of the other. 
 [nstead of that genial, and gradual, and indispensable amelioration 
 which his increased capacity demands, he is met, of necessity, with 
 a more forbidding and hopeless frown than ever before. Now, in 
 the direct presence of a mighty and resistless, though silent and 
 unobtrusive cause like this, operating continually upon every human 
 sonl, white and black — shaping not only all their opinions and 
 policies, but the most secret thoughts and feelings of their hearts — 
 to attempt to ascribe the relative changes between master and 
 slave to Northern agitation, or any other mere external cause, is as 
 absurd as it would be to ascribe the daily revolutions of the solid 
 globe to the flapping of wings and the crowing of the cocks, before 
 
 —11 
 
the sun-rise of each day. Mere words of any sort can never be 
 causes; tliey are in tlieir own nature, simply effects. Remove the 
 cause, and the effect will die of itself. 
 
 The South may build a Chinese wall up to the stars, all around 
 their empire, excluding all ingress and all egress*, they may tar 
 and feather, and hang, and burn all abolitionists inside, and forever 
 silence all those outside; and it will not, in any considerable 
 degree, touch, change, or arrest the inevitable march and the 
 impending doom of this silent, omnipresent, invisible, but still 
 resistless spiritual power, ever holding the white and the black 
 man alike in its fatal and inexorable grasp — the grasp of a present 
 despair and a final death. For neither human nature nor human 
 society can live without hope. Give, then, to both the white man 
 and the black man, a new hope, as the primary and indispensable 
 condition of really benefiting either: hope, hope; help, fellows, 
 help. These men are in the frenzy of despair: give them hope, 
 give them hope, all history, reason and philosophy exclaim; the 
 human soul itself shrieks out, give them hope — the only light that 
 heaven itself can shed over the darkness of earth ; give them hope, 
 says the thunder-peal of God's providence, bursting from the sun- 
 lit clouds of their final tropical home, and from all the terrific 
 storm-clouds that, in their rear, are driving them toward it. And 
 to obey this summons, and strive to give a rational and soul- 
 inspiring hope to all the friends of humanity, is one chief design 
 of this unpretending little book. 
 
 But it is often said that the North and the United States govern- 
 ment has nothing to do with slavery, and that its sole duty is, like 
 Pilate before the crucifixion, simply to wash its hands and proclaim 
 its innocence. Well, that must be a very singular sort of a gov- 
 ernment that really has nothing to do with the present or final weal 
 or woe of four millions of black men and six millions of white 
 men, occupying more than half of its natural territory. I am 
 shrewdly inclined to suspect that God will teach them that they 
 have something to do with it, in spite of all their parchment 
 abstractions and declarations; and I wonder if this extremel}- 
 original thought has ever occurred to any other mortal man ? 
 Possibly the recent rumors of secession and civil war may have 
 suggested it to some one or two beside myself. I will not claim it, 
 therefore, as a wholly and exclusively original idea. Whenever 
 
75 
 
 the United States government, as such, can cease to have something 
 to do with slavery, common sense will cease to survive, and com- 
 mon humanity cease to walk above ground. And whenever its 
 agitation ceases in the halls of Congress, all slavery over the face 
 of the whole earth will have ceased, or all freedom on this conti- 
 nent will have been extinguished. There is not, and for genera- 
 tions to come there cannot be, a government under heaven, that 
 has not, yearly and hourly, to do with practical slavery, in some of 
 its multiplied forms. For wisely and humanely to guide, protect, 
 counsel, encourage, and lead onward and upward, to a capacity for 
 a wider freedom, the toiling and multiform millions now inevitably 
 under some form of masterdom and bondage, is the great end of 
 all possible human governments; and the State, the Government, 
 I lie Czar, the Emperor, the Monarch, or the Republic, that attempts 
 to ignore this high duty, is not simply a traitor, in the worst sense 
 of that term, but an absolute, unmitigated fool. You do not often 
 catch single monarchs in such a folly; they have too much self- 
 respect. What, then, can the United States government do with 
 slavery? I; can possibly do but two single things : it can act firmly 
 and wisely in its own sphere; or it can act foolishly and weakly, 
 either in or out of it ; and in both cases alike, it will still have very 
 much to do with slavery. In every important sense of the terms, 
 the government is. in its own nature, the servant, the mere creature 
 of the white man; and, in the nature of things, also the natural 
 and inevitable guardian of the final destiny of the black man — not 
 as responsible for his present weakness, or his consequent present 
 lot, but for the possibility of his present hope and his future ascent; 
 and while it has no legal right, and no legal jurisdiction over either 
 his emancipation or his person, it can, and inevitably will, shape 
 and control his history and his final destiny. And this is the most 
 and the best that any mortal power could possibly do for him, out- 
 side of his own personal master and friends. 
 
 As regards the proper policy of the government, two other 
 things are self-evident : 
 
 I. A true and successful state policy must coincide and co-ope- 
 rate with the manifested will of God — the true "higher law." 
 And the State, instead of flouting at a higher law, must simply be 
 content to execute it, either intelligently and knowingly, or stupidly 
 and blindly, until they get strong enough to dethrone Almighty 
 
76 
 
 God ; then they can do as they please. Till then, they will, in 
 substance, either wisely or stupidly — either by wrong doing, with 
 its attendant evils, or by right doing, with its attendant good— only 
 execute, in the end, his higher will — his sovereign, resistless, inex- 
 orable " higher law " — just as they always, in fact, have been 
 doing, only they have often done it reluctantly, stupidly, wickedly, 
 indirectly, and in spite of themselves ; whereas they should have 
 done it intelligently, directly, promptly and cheerfully. But, for- 
 tunately, the final success of his plan depends not at all on either 
 their wisdom or folly ; though their own transient well-being and 
 comfort, and that of their fellow-men, does depend upon it. 
 
 II. The second self-evident point is, that such a just and intelli- 
 gent state policy — such a wise and intelligent execution of this 
 higher law of God — will not at all points suit the local and transient 
 interests and prejudices, conventionalisms, axioms, customs or laws 
 of any party, sect, state or locality whatever, and, from their stand- 
 point, will appear at some points more or less wrong, inexpedient 
 and contrary — at least to all their notions of justice and humanity. 
 For God's policies are not and cannot be made to suit either locali- 
 ties, or narrow parties, or sects, or states, but the great eternal 
 whole of a broad and comprehensive humanity, whose final issues 
 are not with the day, but with the round of eternal years. Such a 
 policy, therefore, cannot wholly suit the narrow interests, and pas- 
 sions, and prejudices of the North or the South, the abolitionist or 
 the fire-eater, the Border or the Gulf States, the master or the 
 slave. All these will, at points, in. turn approve, and in turn resist 
 it. But in resisting, tliey will, in the end, though indirectly and 
 foolishly, only aid in its final execution ; and such has been the fact 
 through the whole history of this government. And no man or men 
 — nay, not even an angel from heaven — could execute to the letter 
 this truly just and humane policy, without encountering more or 
 less of this resistance, on all hands, and from all quarters— some- 
 times more from one, sometimes from another quarter. For God 
 has no pet races, or pet men, or pet sects, or pet states, or pet par- 
 ties, upon the earth ; only some that he has got along in the great 
 Lancasterian school of the eternities, a little further than others. 
 As Paul so truthfully says, " he is no respecter of persons " — much 
 less of conventionalities and parties, conditions and sects. And 
 yet, to hear some men talk, one would suppose that the Deity was 
 
blindfolded with mere parchments and abstractions, and compelled 
 to feel his way, in the government of the universe, under that, 
 obvious embarrassment, much like the fabled Cyclops in search of 
 Ulysg 
 
 But if it be the will of God that the slaves and black men should 
 go South, and not North, then the whole policy of this government 
 should tend to that end ; and such, as a matter of fact, it ever has 
 been, in spite of all opposition, all prejudices, all interests and all 
 legislation combined; and so it will ever be, simply because God 
 is both wiser and stronger than men of all parties and all states put 
 ther. Now, what are our Fugitive Slave laws, our Missouri 
 ( ' unpromises, and repeals, our exclusion of all slaves from North- 
 ern Stales and Territories, our Northern emigration societies, our 
 Kansas raids, our Southern conquests, wars, filibusterings and pur- 
 chases, and even our tolerated slave trade overall the* soil, but one 
 vast and consistent scheme of policy, directed with certain and 
 inexorable aim, and often by selfish, unjust and cruel means, to the 
 one great final end of concentrating the entire black race in the 
 extreme South? Good men and bad ones have voted against 
 every oneof these measures ; the strongest States and the strongest 
 statesmen haveopposed them; but the great statesman over all 
 was for them. The rest were mere puppets in his hand, still doing 
 his will, still executing the very "higher law" against which they 
 sometimes resisted, and sometimes railed and flouted; and he will 
 be very likely to rule this nation, and to really direct this interest, 
 for some time to come ; for He has a party that none are likely 
 either to out-general or defeat. Now, there never has been a single 
 party or interest, North or South, black or white, that has not been 
 crossed, baffled and and disappointed with this policy, at one point 
 or another, and that has not most vehemently opposed it at each of 
 these points of local, or partisan, or selfish interest; but the policy 
 still moves on, in spite of democratic numbers at the North, or 
 aristocratic pride and prestige at the South; and, worse yet, in 
 spite of all the both seeming and real interests of the individual 
 black man and white man alike. Now, this general policy is of 
 God; it is his great higher law, and should be the policy of the 
 State, and the Church, too. But its incidental cruelties, and acts 
 of outrage and injustice, are all of man — the mere depraved 
 human incidents, which ought, if possible, to be all swept away ; 
 
78 
 
 but so long as human beings are only human, they cannot be. It 
 is self-evident, then, in the third place, that it is the part of a great 
 and wise statesman not to attempt the impossibility of overthrow- 
 ing this general policy, but simply, with all available humanity and 
 justice, to strive to moderate, and limit, and assuage the attendant 
 evils of its execution — settling it in his heart, that- if he so does, he 
 must at some points offend all parties and all interests alike— until 
 a party can be raised up, with a breadth of philosophy and human- 
 ity, and a power of comprehension, adequate to embrace the com- 
 plex issues of the whole case — which perhaps is not likely soon to 
 be ; for parties cling to their precedents and records as vehemently 
 as club-footed men do to their stilts. But the true future record of 
 this whole policy lies in heaven, not on earth — in the mind and 
 thought of the eternal God, not in Democratic or Republican plat- 
 forms and manifestoes. We shall always have, therefore, a Fugi- 
 tive Slave law, a territorial exclusion law, and an international 
 slave trade of some sort, good or bad, just or unjust, in their mode 
 and form, because they are essential to the great end, though the 
 master's temporary and personal interests are opposed to the one, 
 and the slave's to the other; and as an abolitionist — as the true 
 friend of the black man, and without the least regard to the interest 
 of the master — I should be, and am, in favor ot this policy. For 
 it is in the highest degree impolitic, and in the end inhuman, to 
 suffer the black race to scatter all over the North, away from their 
 fellows, and away from all possibility of the final freedom and 
 elevation of their race. They are weak enough, in all conscience, 
 if kept together and united; and all proper care should be taken 
 to keep them from scattering their numbers, and frittering away 
 their strength in the Quixotic pursuit of a freedom that must still, 
 in the North, forever elude their grasp. There is not one-half the 
 real sympathy between the white people, as a whole, and the 
 blacks, to-day, in the North, that there is in the South. In spite 
 of the superior freedom and justice of their laws, the antipathy of 
 race increases everywhere as we go North. It is far stronger in 
 New Orleans than in Brazil — in Boston than in New Orleans — and 
 so intense in Canada, that nothing but the strong arm of monarch- 
 ial law could keep the blacks there from the violence of the mob 
 for a single year ; and to attempt to make a black community really 
 free and happy in any Northern climate, is just as absurd as to 
 
TO 
 
 attempt to grow oranges in Greenland. Why, then, encourage 
 them, in their weakness and ignorance, to wander from their com- 
 rades to these hopeless climes, and scatter their forces over frozen 
 zones, where they are sundered forever from all true sympathy 
 and all real service to their race, as such? Is it asked what an 
 intelligent slave can do in the South for his fellows? I answer, 
 much, every way ; and he is doing much. True, he cannot at 
 once overturn the laws, however cruel and unjust; nor can he 
 emancipate either himself or his fellows ; nor dissolve the Union, 
 nor shake down the solar system, not a whit more than his master 
 can. Perhaps he has intelligence enough not even to threaten it. 
 But there is a vast deal which every good and intelligent slave can 
 d", and i,- doing, for his fellows, aside from all this; and he cannot 
 live there without doing it. For God places no man on earth 
 where he cannot do good to his fellows, if he chooses — not even in 
 the solitude of a dungeon. Even Moses could do his people no 
 good while in the court of Pharaoh, nor while wandering' in Ara- 
 bia, but only when he came and took aphis lot with theirs, "choos- 
 ing rather to sutler affliction with the people of God, than to enjoy 
 the pleasures of sin foi a moment." Yet this Moses had a first 
 iate chance to run away, and say, "now I will take care of myself, 
 and lei my race and kindred go; tor I can see no hope for them." 
 And, though I have no idea that the slaves will ever be delivered 
 by miracle, or by servile or civil war, still there are other ways in 
 which every good black man is, in fact, of the highest possible use 
 to his fellows, and to his race, although oppressed and enslaved — 
 far more so than he can be, away off in Canada or elsewhere. 
 They need his advice, his guidance, his sympathy, and instruction, 
 and counsel, and example, and intercession, in all their heavy, 
 manifold temptations and trials. Make this case your own : If you 
 and your race were in slavery, would you wish to have all your 
 best, and boldest, and bravest, and shrewdest men run away, and 
 leave you to your solitude and your fate, alone? There is one 
 possible case in which you might, perhaps, wisely desire it: and 
 that is, if you could see no possible point or future hope, either for 
 yourself or any of your race. But that is not the case with the 
 black man. The presence of all such men tends, by an inevitable 
 law, to elevate the whole race, to "undo their heavy burdens," and 
 to fit them, and to secure to them, a broader liberty in a higher 
 
so 
 
 sphere; and it is the true policy of the government to throw all 
 possible just and humane obstacles in the way of such dispersions, 
 and such abandonments, even though it may seem against mere 
 individual interests. The government, as the general guardian of 
 the future interests of the race, has a wise and humane right to 
 insist that " every black man shall do his duty to his fellows," irre- 
 spective of all claims of the master, and not, for slight reasons, or 
 by illusive hopes, be enticed to abandon them ; and, either from a 
 right or a wrong motive, thank God, they are sure to do it, because 
 he will have it done. I knew there are here, as everywhere, hard 
 and extreme cases, which should be, and therefore will be, made 
 exceptions to all general rules. And. whether the government is to 
 treat free men like felons and wild beasts, because they simply do 
 their duty— their most solemn Christian duty, as they conceive— in 
 these hard cases, is quite another question. True, the will of the 
 devil may, and must at last, execute the will of God ; but it would 
 be far better done as angels do it. 
 
 Perhaps it may be said that no more slaves would, in any case, 
 run away than fairly come under the rule of hard cases ; or, at 
 least, no more than is necessary to render slave property insecure 
 on the border States, and thus hasten the migration of the whole 
 of them to the South. But were there no law against it, I fear 
 there would. They would be enticed away, in a multitude of 
 cases, by narrow-minded and evil-minded persons, in which it was 
 their most solemn duty to themselves, to their masters and to their 
 race still to remain — for many masters treat their slaves so well, 
 that they have no moral right to leave them, and no possible hope 
 of bettering their condition by doing it : aside from all their duty 
 to their race, and the inevitable dangers to both races from such a 
 course. 
 
 But in another aspect of the case the best interest of the black 
 man requires that his race should be spread widely over all our 
 States and Territories, and thus be allowed to work upon our farms 
 in all modes of culture, to enter all our ships, manufactories, cities, 
 wharves, navy yards and dock yards, and especially our capitals 
 and shire-towns, and all places where freedom is discussed and 
 justice administered and defended ; for this is his school, and must 
 constitute the greater part if not the whole of his education, till he 
 rises in the scale of being to a better capacity for the use of books 
 
81 
 
 and other means ; and it is the very best school in the whole 
 world that his Heavenly Father could have put him into. No 
 other country and no other place, for him, could compare with it. 
 But in the North he can learn but little, that will be of use to him 
 in his final home, that he does not find in the South ; and, in spite 
 of some little loss, perhaps, in this respect, the true policy of con- 
 centrating his race toward the South should be persisted in. But, 
 on his proper territorial limits he should be allowed the widest 
 range and the utmost freedom the government can secure to him ; 
 and above all things he ought never to be excluded from the 
 national capital, or from any of the national navy yards or other 
 domains in tin; free States. Exclude the black man from the 
 District of Columbia, the great seat and center of all those ideas 
 and policies that must forever shape the destinies of his race — the 
 only place in the Onion where the great principles of national and 
 international law are continually discussed, by all classes of society, 
 from the top to the bottom! How preposterous ! ! Why not 
 exclude the white man \ "But the black man can go there only as 
 a Blave." True; but infinitely better as a slave than not at all, 
 for without free access, or at Least some access, to the capital, the 
 education of the slave could not be complete, in this country. 
 "But he is neither allowed to hear or to see; he is a slave ; at 
 home to work for his master." True, again ; but he has got eyes 
 and ears, and bears and knows, and every day thinks about the 
 practical substance of the "high debate," oftentimes, in realty, 
 mor,. tnilv and more profoundly, though less learnedly, than does 
 the gabbling, brainless Senator, or the stupid and doughfaced 
 President and Judge. For Grod has put him in a position to see 
 things somewhat as they really are, and the mere farce of conven. 
 tionalisms, consistencies ami customs does not entirely hoodwink 
 him. it is the best school the black man — slave or free — has in 
 the country : the very highest department in his great manual labor 
 university; and why exclude him from it! There would be not 
 one slave the less. The only thing would be that some hundreds 
 or thousands of poor black people would be taken from a place of 
 comparative ease, and of immense moral and civil advantage to 
 their race, and sent to the Southern cotton and rice fields, where 
 they can learn nothing, see nothing and hear nothing but the dull 
 routine of their daily labor. Is it said that they learn nothing here ? 
 —V2 
 
82 
 
 It is slanderous, and stupid, and false ! They do learn ! Let any 
 man reflect on the daily influence of such society, and he can see 
 that no human being can fully escape it, no more than he can the 
 presence of the vital air. It is true, he may be shut up in the 
 house, where he neither sees nor feels the whirl and roar of the 
 great north- westers, but it still creeps in through every crack and 
 crevice, and occasionally some careless master or some black friend 
 leaves the door open, and the whole gale sweeps in. Has the 
 reader ever thought how large a number of our most intelligent 
 free blacks have come from regions within the moral and political 
 influence of the capitol ? and such is the mysterious law of this 
 hereditary civilization, that no man can tell how its impressions 
 are made, or carried abroad, or transmitted. It is supposed, for 
 instance, by many, that Napoleon Bonaparte received his first 
 impressions, as a warrior and a statesman, before he was born, 
 while his mother was fleeing, in terror, from an invading foe. 
 Many similar facts admonish us not to exclude the slave from any 
 possible position of observation or experience which it is consistent 
 with his final good for him to occupy, whether at the capitol or in 
 our navy yards and forts — whether under State or national control. 
 " Oh, but we must relieve the national government of all respon- 
 sibility for slavery!" Indeed; we must, then? Here is Pilate 
 washing his hands ao-ain ! The real amount of all of this is, that 
 we Anglo-Saxons, with whom all wisdom and freedom must neces- 
 sarily die from off the face of the earth, and for whom, therefore, 
 all other races should simply toil — we, the great, mighty, magna 
 c/iarta, habeas corpus, constitutional, grand jury, grandiloquent 
 people — must take care of our own abstractions, and consistencies, 
 and humbugs, and let black men, and eternal justice, and truth, 
 and realities take care of themselves. Well, now, we need not 
 discuss this matter further ; for, by fair means or foul, God will 
 keep the black man around our national and State capitols, our 
 court houses, and hotels, and bar-rooms : our arsenals, navy yards, 
 fortresses and dock-yards, and all such peculiarly public places, 
 because He knows he needs to be there. He will not, at present, 
 stick them all away off on the solitude of the plantation and the 
 farm, for that is not the best place for all of them. True, some 
 will be sold South, even from Washington — even under the stars 
 and stripes. I weep for the lot of the individual : but his mission 
 
83 
 
 South, with all his (to them) new and exciting ideas, will tend still 
 to elevate the race; and if God should ever permit the Northern 
 slave States to commit the atrocity. of selling all their free negroes 
 down South — which he may, in due time, yet do — it would 
 advance the race toward their ultimate freedom more than any 
 other measure that could be instituted, and would be permitted, if at 
 all, for that very reason alone. I have the highest respect for the 
 motives and for the humanity of those who seek thus to sunder 
 this government from all connexion with slavery; but I cannot 
 accept either their policy or their reasons for it. The African 
 slave trade will not be opened at present; not because it is any 
 worse than the home trade, and in some respects not as bad, but 
 simply because we have got as many blacks here as we can well 
 manage, and its influence would in no way tend to the elevation, 
 but to the depression of those who are here. 
 
 We thus Bee how wonderfully the Heavenly Father of the black 
 man has really taken care of him, through all changes and all 
 vicissitudes, in spite of all hatred of race, all seeming evil and' all 
 hostile legislation, as though he had been the sole and exclusive 
 object of 1 1 i s care. And while the government, for years past, has 
 attempted to ignore both the rights and the very existence of the 
 black man, and has meanly apologised if it even seemed to regard 
 them, it has in reality, done better for him than such creatures 
 could have done, from any capacity in themselves, if they had 
 made his interests alone their exclusive study and care; and thus, 
 while even scoffing at the higher law, it has still executed the will 
 of God, as a yoked hog runs into his sty: tail foremost. I would 
 only beg leave to suggest to them that there is a more dignified 
 way of doing the same thing. The idea that four millions of people 
 can exist, anywhere on the lace of the earth, and quietly and 
 industriously pursue their labors of industry and peace, without 
 having their final and most substantial interests en d fo& for, in fact, 
 implies, as we have said, that God has abdicated his throne, and 
 that the Devil is ruling in his place: a very popular theology, 
 which 1 cannot accept. But, however justly we may condemn and 
 despise the pride, arrogance, insolence, selfishness, meanness and 
 stupidity of the agents, and their motives, we cannot but admire 
 the consistency, grandeur, harmony, wisdom and beneficence of 
 the great final result — the policy and care of Heaven over the 
 
84 
 
 black race. And, after all, there is no conflict between the real 
 interests of the races, and no government can legislate for the real 
 good of the one, without promoting the good of the other. I defy 
 them to do it. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary here to advert to those truly wise and 
 brave and noble statesmen who have, even in the darkest times, 
 and amid the greatest obloquies and perils, public and personal, 
 manfully struggled to save the government and the country from 
 the imbecility and infamy into which it has been plunged. The 
 civilized world knows their history and their heroism so well, that 
 it is hardly necessary to speak of them as not included in any just 
 censures of a government which they could neither enlighten nor 
 control. Nor is it needful to say that the chief functionaries of the 
 government itself have been but too often the mere tools in the 
 hands of a few desperate and apostate political traitors and dema- 
 gogues, who have simply used them for their own ends more from 
 their imbecility than from their innate depravity. 
 
 Our whole difficulty, I repeat, evidently lies in the simple fact, 
 that we have, on the same soil, two extreme races, under two extreme 
 civilizations, and therefore requiring two extremes in civil institu- 
 tions, or in the mode and form of administering justice between man 
 and man. It is not in the power of man to adjust either one of these 
 extremes to the other, so' that the same laws and forms shall suit 
 both races. If it is in the power of God, Himself, it is certain He 
 has never done it on earth, and, therefore, never showed us the 
 way to do it. Hence we must perpetually keep up in form a 
 double administration : one to suit the actual wants and destinies 
 of the white race, and another to suit those of the black race. But 
 this should be a harmless and, indeed, beautiful variety within a 
 real harmony, without antagonism or injustice to any one : a mere 
 variety in unity; and so, wisely administered, it would be. 
 
 As regarrj-s^'the policy either of admitting, or of not admitting 
 any more slave States, the matter is somewhat more doubtful ; at 
 all events, we must not shut either master or slave up to despair, 
 in the limits of our present Southern States, for that is the worst 
 policy for both, and can result in nothing but St. Domingo twice 
 told ; and, indeed, it ought not to ; for if men will play the fool, 
 they ought to take the consequence of their folly. But whether 
 the iinal exodus of the slaves to the South is to be overland, round 
 
85 
 
 Central America, through a succession of slave or free States, so- 
 called, or through some mixture of Loth, or whether he will go 
 quietly across the seas, are questions still too far in the future to 
 demand a present solution. "Sufficient unto the clay is the evil 
 thereof." As an Abolitionist and friend of the black man, I am 
 unwilling - at present, to pledge myself either for or against "any 
 more slave States.*' I do not know what course it may be best to 
 pursue, when Mexico and Central America come into the Union, 
 as they are sure to do if the Union exists, (and if it goes to pieces, 
 it will come together again and take them in, in due time, though 
 Blavery may then be gone, and probably will be,) but I think it 
 probable that more slave States in some form, on the South will be 
 found a political necessity, equally for the good of the black and 
 the white man ; and it is nut wise to commit ourselves to distinctive 
 political measures so tar in the future ; although it is wise, like sen- 
 sible men, to look around and ahead upon the on-rushing destinie^ 
 that await us, and endeavor to forecast the general nature of the 
 ultimate and present policy, which these may force on us all, wil- 
 ling or unwilling. "Without doing this we may indeed be partisans, 
 and politicians, and "public functionaries," and demagogues, an 
 all that ; hut we cannot he statesmen, fit either to rule, nor yet even 
 to vote. That it might not he besl to add slave States from even 
 our preseni territory, is not perfectly clear. The wider the slave 
 arc spread over new and fresh lands, the better it will he for the 
 comfort of the present generation ; for slaves always fare bestunde 
 such conditions-, the whole objection, then, to spreading them 
 arises from its effect upon the future good of their race ; and tha 
 Southern additions to our slave territory would, in any respect, 
 harm the black race, is not clear. The political objection of in- 
 creasing the relative power of the slaveholders of the extreme 
 South, is the main objection, and a very great one, unless they 
 come to behave themselves a little more decently than they have 
 done of late. But if the North stands its ground now, and admin- 
 isters the government without fear and without favor, the South 
 can never again gain a political ascendency in the Union, however 
 much territory is left open to slavery, for she has nothing to fill it 
 with; and she will come out of the present contest bankrupt, in 
 prestige, in character, and in means. And although I voted for 
 Mr. Lincoln, as thousands of others did, because I believed that he 
 
S6 
 
 would, on the whole, administer the government in accordance 
 with my general principles, and more justly and impartially to all 
 classes and races, North and South, than any other man ; still I 
 did it with the reserved right of not assenting in full, and in ad- 
 vance, to the popular doctrine of "no more slave States." And 
 even if Mr. Lincoln himself, finds it necessary for the best good of 
 all, to admit still more slave States on the extreme South, I should 
 not be at all disappointed ; though if so, I hope their form and policy 
 may be so changed as to comport with the age and land in 
 which we live, a litttle better than some of our slave States now do ; 
 at least, I hope they will not fall under the same persons. 
 
 Much has been said about the black man's receiving no wages, 
 and this is urged as an objection to all forms of slave States. But 
 among all the white men whom I have hired, of a much higher 
 grade of civilization and skill than the negroes usually are, I know 
 of but very few whom I would be willing to take through life, and 
 be bound to furnish them and their families simply what, in my 
 own judgment, they might need from day to day. It would be 
 much better for me, as now, to pay them common wages and let 
 them provide for themselves, than to run any such risk ; and it is but 
 a poor provision that most of them can make for themselves, even 
 with the most industrious toil, if they have no other resource than 
 their daily wages. And most black men would do far worse, be- 
 cause they are not yet, in general, as far advanced as these whites 
 are, and will not be for some generations yet to come. As soon as 
 they are as far advanced, it will be better for the master to pay 
 them wages than it will to provide for them as now. But it is 
 neither fair nor honest to say, that because the slave has no daily 
 or weekly sums in money, that, therefore, he has no wages ; many 
 of them receive all, and actually more than they really earn, and 
 far more than they could possibly earn for themselves, apart from 
 their masters skill and care, superintendence and capital. Others 
 (and how many I cannot say) are worked, starved, whipped, and 
 jammed about in a way that it is shocking to contemplate, and a 
 disgrace to even a barbarian State to allow ; others, are, themselves, 
 worthless, and unprincipled, and ugly, and get nothing, simply be- 
 cause they deserve nothing ; others are intelligent, polite and 
 obliging to their masters, and all others ; far enough advanced in 
 their own civilization as individuals, to be capable, not only of free- 
 
dom, but of high responsibilities ; and if it were not for the need of 
 their social influence and example in helping to lift up their fellows 
 beneath them, justice would demand that they should be set imme- 
 diately free ; and in former times it was so, and will be so again, 
 when the present nightmare of the South has passed away, and a 
 better hope, and a consequent better temper, takes its place. I 
 volunteer these remarks mainly to show some of my Abolition 
 brethren in the North, the extreme injustice, if not wickedness, of 
 judging men, whether black or white, master or slave, by their 
 in. -re general name or class ; for we shall ever find the best of men 
 as well us the vilest, in nearly all classes. And although absolute 
 necessity compels us to deal with men politically, only in classes, 
 it is totally unjust, as a mode of private and social, and especially 
 of christian judgment and action. But suppose this whole system 
 «.!' service lor house rent, food and clothes, f.r themselves and their 
 families, was changed, and a system of weekly wages substituted 
 by the master in Its place. That there would be some advantages 
 I freely admit ; but that they would be practically as great as many 
 suppose, 1 deny ; tor ma ny of the most advanced negroes it would, 
 doubtless, be better; hut tor the others, I fear it might be even 
 worse. At any rate, the negro, whether he received his wages in 
 the form of money, or in the form of food, shelter and clothes, 
 must stiil be, while he is at work, under the absolute control and 
 direction of the master; with a liability, in sickness, in scarcity of 
 crop.-, or of work. «.r from his own but too easy negligence of the 
 future, to come to absolute want; and so long as the State held 
 him under the same practical outlawry and anarchy, under the 
 same doleful despair of all hopeful future, as now, such a chaise, 
 in my opinion, on the part of the master, could, in no crse, do but 
 little good, and in many cases would do evil. For the plain reason 
 that the mere hope of a pittance of weekly wages, in any form, is a 
 thing quite too small to inspire and sustain, much less to elevate 
 any human soul. Here, again, our higher hope is indispensable; 
 a hope of progress, of country, and of race, somewhere, either in 
 the present or the dim future, is indespensable ; and it is a mistake 
 to suppose that any race are to low to be either elevated and in- 
 spired by its presence, or too high to be crushed by its absence, 
 P >r God has never made any such races. But some few of my aboli- 
 tion friends think that no slaveholder can be a good man, or deserve 
 
88 
 
 any rights at all, from any source. "How," say they, "can a man, 
 who, by his example, sanctions the atrocious code of slave laws, be 
 a good man ?" Suppose now the United States should enact and 
 ordain that it should be perfectly lawful for any man engaged in 
 commerce on the high seas to rob, kill, and murder, to any extent, 
 with impunity, and declare it meritorious so to do. What should 
 be done % Should all commerce on earth at once cease ? Suppose 
 a man, favorably situated for commerce, should say to himself, "I 
 care nothing for this cruel and outrageous law ; I shall engage in 
 commerce as though it had never existed ; I shall rob no man, and 
 wrong no man, although this law gives me leave so to do." Does 
 this man now sanction the law f In my opinion, the common sense 
 of the human race would decide that he was giving the most ex- 
 plicit testimony against the law, that any man possibly could ; for 
 while he is under the greatest possible temptation to avail himself 
 of the selfish advantages of the law, he refuses to do so, and thereby 
 gives the highest possible testimony of moral principle against it ; 
 and precisely so of every slaveholder who treats his slave justly and 
 humanely in spite of the law ; instead of sustaining the cruel sys- 
 tem, as embodied in the law, no man on earth can do more to un- 
 dermine and destroy it. Is it said that the cases are not parallel 
 because commerce is a lawful business. If we consult the records 
 of the race, and the will of God, we shall find masterdom, absolute 
 power of man over man, a more lawful business, and more early, 
 and more widely introduced, than any form of commerce ; and in- 
 troduced, also, as we have seen, for higher and nobler ends — the 
 civilization of all races. Our practical difficulty is, I repeat, that 
 we have brought two extreme races together, one of which, by its 
 own nature and habit, is manageable only by masterdom ; the 
 other has passed so far beyond it, that it can have no possible sym- 
 pathy with it ; nay, can scarce tolerate its existence. And this 
 fact is giving this nation a higher schooling and discipline, a deeper 
 insight into the essentials of all freedom and justice, and a broader 
 comprehension of the true end of all laws and policies, than any 
 nation ever could have had before. And it is time for us to break 
 through all our conventional shells, and look out upon the great 
 facts and inherent principles of the case, as they really are. Is it 
 said that all laws and institutions requiring compulsory labor are a 
 barbarism, and tolerated only by barbarian society ? I admit that 
 
89 
 
 all laws adapted to a barbarian race, must, in their own nature, in 
 one sense, be barbarian laws; just as the laws for the soldier must 
 be military, and not civil law ; the laws for the insane, insane laws, 
 if you please, in the same sense ; but it does not follow that either 
 should be unjust, or administered insanely or barbarously, or by an 
 insane or barbarous man ; nor does it follow that the society which 
 enacts and tolerates such forms of law, are either uncivil, or insane, 
 or barbarian. But only, simply that they have soldiers, or insane, 
 or semi-civilized men to deal with ; a law most fit for these may 
 be perfectly absolute, strict, and rigorous, and totally unfit for all 
 ordinary civilized life, and, therefore, neither a civil nor a civilized 
 law; while still most wise, just and humane, both in its design and 
 its administration. Of course, I do not pretend that our present 
 infamous slave codes are such. But if made just what they ought 
 to be, they would still be, in one sense, only barbarian laws, just 
 so far as adapted to barbarian men. And, on this subject, we 
 should take care not to blind our minds, nor inflame our passions, 
 by the use of mere words. 
 
 —13 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 The present secession emeute lias sprung mainly from these 
 causes. Our lathers wisely and humanely tolerated the absolute 
 form of rule in the shop and the field, for the uncivilized race, 
 alongside of the democratic form for the more advanced race — 
 trusting to the humanity and patriotism of the master to make it 
 no more severe, and of no longer continuance, than the absolute 
 exigency of the case required. The direct contrast of the two 
 forms of administration inevitably provoked discussion and remark, 
 both from the free whites and from the emancipated blacks. The 
 freedom of the North aroused the violence and the antagonism of 
 the South, which finally eventuated in two opposite fanaticisms — 
 the one of the extreme North, and the other of the extreme South 
 — both hostile to the just and humane Union of the lathers, and 
 still more hostile to each other. In this contest the North was 
 perhaps the firsl offender in words, but the South in acts. The 
 three prime offenders at the North, as all the world knows, were 
 William Lloyd Garrison, the elder Lovejoy, and John Brown. 
 The first offense of each of these men was simply and solely that 
 they maintained that freedom of speech which, the world over, has 
 been deemed the indispensable prerequisite of free institutions, in 
 any shape whatever. For this, Garrison was imprisoned, and 
 driven from the South, and even mobbed, threatened and insulted 
 in the North ; Lovejoy was first expelled from St. Louis, and finally 
 shot in Alton ; John Brown had his property and rights outraged 
 in Kansas, and his children murdered before his eyes in its defense, 
 under the pretended authority of that very Constitution that was 
 pledged to give, both to freedom and to slavery, only substantial 
 justice; and, falling into a natural and almost inevitable hatred of 
 all tolerance of even a necessary absolute rule, he sought redress 
 and revenge in his own way, and finally perished on the scaffold. 
 
92 
 
 Senator Sumner spoke only as a free man — whether truly or not, 
 so lawfully, and so circumspectly, that his opponents, in full power 
 around him, could not call him even to order. He was afterward 
 smitten down, while sitting, unarmed and defenseless, in his own 
 seat in the Senate Chamber of the United States. The acts of 
 outrage of the Southern fanatics, in their manifold riots, and lynch 
 laws, and outrages — in seceding from the Union, seizing upon the 
 United States forts, arsenals, mints, ships, and property of all sorts, 
 firing upon the United States flag, and throwing all manner of 
 insults and indignities upon the citizens of the North and the 
 Union of the fathers — are too well known to need a rehearsal. 
 
 It thus appears that the Southern fanaticism has been, in every 
 instance, the eikst aggkessok in ACT ; and whether any less the 
 aggressor in wokd than their compeers at the North, the daily 
 records of Congress, and of the speeches there, as well as the whole 
 newspaper and other literature of the South, shows, and shows 
 beyond all question, to any tolerably sane man. It may be said 
 that the South had a "peculiar institution," and were therefore 
 placed in peculiar circumstances. And so had also the North ; for 
 slavery is no more the " peculiar institution " of the South, than 
 freedom and free speech are of the North ; and if the South or the 
 North have not sense enough to defend their own peculiar institu- 
 tions, without resort to tyranny and brutal violence, it is their own 
 fault, and their shame, too, and not the fault of their neighbors. 
 It will be seen from the foregoing pages how easy it is to defend 
 both forms of institutions, so far as they are either needful, or pro 
 fitable, or defensible ; and how entirely consistent they are for cer- 
 tain ends — those very ends which the Constitution of our fathers 
 proposes — and how utterly inconsistent they are on all other 
 grounds, and for all other possible ends, except those which God 
 has ordained, and which the whole spirit, as well as the letter, of 
 our almost inspired Constitution of the Union allows. Within the 
 bounds of that Constitution, nothing but real justice, in the highest 
 and most enlarged sense, can be done to either race ; step outside 
 of it, and God, and nature, and all history, and civilized man, are 
 equally opposed to the terrible anarchy you at once inaugurate over 
 the white race, and the still more terrible tyranny and despair you 
 bring, like one vast deluge of endless night, over all possible hope 
 of the black man. Fanatical seceders on both sides will lind at 
 
93 
 
 last that they are not warring against mere paper conventionalisms, 
 Lut against the deepest principles of God's eternal laws, and the 
 deepest elements of human nature itself. South Carolina is, at this 
 moment, at war with Almighty God, and with the whole human 
 race, as really as with the Union of the States ; and the whole 
 utterance of the monarchial press in England and in France shows 
 that they feel this outrage upon the rights of human nature as 
 keenly as we do, and are no more disposed to tolerate it. Still, the 
 grave Senator.-, and even the divines, of that great State, most 
 innocently inform us "that the citizens of South Carolina have by 
 no means lost any portion of their patriotism, but only transferred 
 Ll from the Union to the State." Indeed ! The patriotism of South 
 Carolinians, then, it seems, is really a transferable commodity, as 
 the world has always had good reason to suspect, And what would 
 the Sta!^ do. if at the next move they should take a notion to 
 transfer it to a pet monkey, or a favorite dog { But the .simple fact 
 is, that the Constitution is based on the simple and indispensable 
 idea of tolerating slavery, in State- where it must of necessity 
 remain, so long only as that necessity may continue, and even of 
 sustaining it there, so far as violence is appealed to by the black 
 man ; tor all such appeals could only result in his deeper degrada- 
 tion, or his utter destruction — and of propagating only freedom 
 in all other States and Territories which are in any sense prepared 
 to receive it. John Brown, and a very lev others on the extreme 
 of the Northern fanaticism, apostatized and rebelled against the 
 needful tolerance of the law; and he was executed upon a gal- 
 lows. South Carolina, and the Southern fanatics by thousands, 
 have apostatized from and rebelled against the indispensable feee- 
 oo.m of the law; and if they are not executed on a gibbet, they 
 will come to a still more disastrous and ignominious end. John 
 Brown and his associates, and Gov. Wise, Ehett, Keitt, and their 
 associates and conspiring traitors and apostates, stand on precisely 
 the same platform in principle against the Union, except that the 
 one revolted against the serfdom of the inferior race, and the other 
 against the freedom of the superior race. The first may have at 
 least the inferior races in its favor; the last is a simple conspiracy 
 against human nature itself, as a complete whole, and can meet no 
 sympathy the world around, except the sympathy of temporary, 
 excited tumult and passion. If we could hold it still, it would 
 
94 
 
 inevitably die in its own tracks. But we may undoubtedly set 
 down the war of these two apostate, inhuman and unreasoning 
 fanaticisms, as one prime cause of our present anarchy in the South. 
 Another cause is the continuous subserviency of Northern 
 doughfaces to Southern slaveholders, which has, in practical effect, 
 invested them with the entire control and management of the 
 government for many years past. Heal freedom has scarcely dared 
 to peep under the Constitution and laws, for almost half a century. 
 This is the most amazing and despairing view of all. That a free 
 people, brought to the polls every year, under a government wholly 
 in their control, and under a Constitution not only ignoring, but 
 abjuring, all nobilities and castes whatever, should, year after year, 
 steadily, practically stultify themselves, and paralyze their own 
 constitutional power in the administration of the government, by 
 throwing its whole force into the hands of one little clique, or 
 caste, or oligarchy, of not more than three or four hundred thou- 
 sand slaveholders, instead of giving it to the twenty millions of 
 non-slaveholders in their own ranks — this is a fact that would have 
 baffled all prophecy, and even now almost staggers all belief, as 
 well as annihilates all hope for the ultimate success of any mode 
 of free institutions in this present age of the world. I do not at 
 all blame the South for this. It is both natural and also right for 
 men to take power when it is offered to them, and use it as best they 
 can. I blame the mean, contemptible, low-lived, doughfaced North, 
 that never had, and I fear has not now, the manhood or the dignity 
 to stand for its own safety and its own rights. By this course of 
 policy, the slaveholders have become almost as much accustomed to 
 their own rule, in Congress, and over the twenty millions of non- 
 slaveholders, as they are on their own plantations, and over their 
 three millions of negroes. So far, at last, has this proceeded, that 
 all branches of the government combined are found as perfectly 
 powerless to resist or restrain, not only their lawful acts of rule, but 
 their confessedly unlawful acts of treason, rapine, robbery and civil 
 war, as are the negroes on their own plantations. And still, even 
 yet, these white negroes of the North sympathize with them, apol- 
 ogize for them, and even aid and abet them, or at least submit and 
 treat with them, in their crime and treason. Thus they have been 
 constantly, nurtured to the habit and use of this enormously dis- 
 proportionate share of power in the Union, till they have come at 
 
95 
 
 last to feel and to believe that no cheek whatever should bo placed, 
 or ean be placed, upon their free and absolute will, and, if it is 
 attempted, that they will secede, and form an empire by themselves. 
 Let no man, then, say that these three hundred thousand slave- 
 holders have destroyed this government. It is not so; they had 
 no power to do it. It is the twenty millions of abject non-slave- 
 holders, led on by our Northern doughfaces, who have, time after 
 time, sold out the Union, to save the State stocks and mortgage 
 deeds to slave property, and other assets in their pockets, as Judas 
 betrayed Christ for thirty pieces of silver, and in the same way 
 -ever with a line, smirking, hypocritical kiss of pretended fra- 
 ternal peace of .- me sort; and they are just as ready to enact the 
 same farce over again to-day as they ever were before, in spite of 
 all that has happened, and, I fear, will be even more ready for it 
 in 1864 than they are now. What wonder that these stern, unfeel- 
 ing and unscrupulous Roman soldiers of the South should crucify 
 a liberty which they can neither use nor understand, thus hypo- 
 critically betrayed into their hand- ! 
 
 But the immediate cause of the Una! explosion of this train of 
 causes was the temporary and unexpected reaction of the majority 
 (1 f the nonslaveholders against tins combined and procrastinated 
 tyranny and treachery of the slaveholders and their allied dough- 
 laces of the North; and, as all reactions are liable to go too far, 
 the one now proposed to close up the only natural egress for 
 slavery from this continent on the South, as well as arrest its 
 spread aifd it- power on the North, and thus it shut up the slave- 
 holder ias we have seen) and the black race together, to the terrible 
 despair of fighting oul their final destinies in a climate which inevi- 
 tably gave to the white race an ever-increasing supremacy of power 
 and to the blacks an equally fearful final supremacy of numbers, 
 with no possible hope of either real freedom or real peace to 
 either race, except by lifting the black man into an equal, if not 
 a superior democracy, on that same soil, or crushing him into 
 utter insignificance and annihilation; and it is hard to tell which 
 is, in reality, the most absurd, impracticable and cruel of the 
 two possible plans. For the white race could not survive the 
 one. nor could the blacks endure the other; hence nothing was 
 left but blank, outright despair for at least one race, if not for 
 both ; and, with the present power of the whites, which of the two 
 
96 
 
 must, in fact, take the practical if not the actual extermination, in 
 the end 2 Even the negroes themselves have sense enough to see, 
 and hence, too, their despair. This new aspect of affairs at once 
 fired the whole train of antecedent causes, and threw the slave 
 States of the extreme South into an attitude of open rebellion and 
 resistance, either for the purpose of again frightening the dough- 
 faces of the North, and recovering again their lost empire in the 
 Union, or of forming a new empire outside of it, under which 
 slavery and the black race shall either have free scope to travel 
 still on its journey South, or be sustained by political institutions, 
 in harmony with its perpetual existence on the soil where it is. 
 Probably some cherish at heart one of these plans and some the 
 other. 
 
 Thus it seems that the natural antagonism and mutual exasper- 
 ation of these two fanaticisms — the one against the tolerance of 
 the law in the North, the other against the freedom of the law in 
 the South — nurtured, and inflamed and spread abroad by the 
 inherent cowardice, and treachery, and insolence, and toryism of 
 South Carolina politicians for almost half a century past, and the 
 nurtured habit of the unquestioned supremacy of the slave power 
 in the State meeting with a sudden and unexpected defeat: with all 
 apparent hope of relief, for their slave population, toward the South 
 thus cut off, combined with a cherished ambition for empire in that 
 direction, either in the Union or out of it — are the real, moving 
 causes of the present emeide. 
 
 Whether the weak and contemptible old man at the head of the 
 government was paralyzed by the explosion, or cpiietly and treach- 
 erously aiding in the firing of these various trains, is perhaps not 
 material to consider : for, in either case, he was alike, as usual, the 
 mere tool of others, and has done nothing either for himself or his 
 country ; but it is self-evident that but one of two things can now 
 be done : First — Save the Union by the just, impartial and fear- 
 less execution of its constitution and laws, at all risks and at all 
 hazards whatever. Second — To sell it out by some sort of bar- 
 gain or compromise with traitors, with arms in their hands and 
 millions of its stolen property still in their possession — on some 
 programme presented by their special attorneys in Congress and 
 their doughface, stock-holding and stock-jobbing allies, and slave- 
 holders and slave-dealers in our great cities at the North. 
 
97 
 
 Bat, after we have thus saved the Union, and really found out 
 that we have a government of some sort, at least, to use, we 
 should take care, and in all proper ways pledge ourselves to use it, 
 in advance, if need be, only for the ends of justice, and for the 
 highest good of both of the two great races of men over which 
 it i- to be administered ; and, if there is any truth in the principles 
 of this book, the general government should never interfere with 
 the master in any shape, either directly or indirectly, in the slave 
 States — should in noway, by free States or otherwise, block up 
 or impede the free exodus of the race toward the South, but in all 
 possible ways encourage it as the only hope of either race; while 
 it should restrain, by all proper means, their spread and emigration 
 toward the North: tolerating and encouraging,- meantime, the 
 presence of the black man at the capital, and on all public grounds 
 and places, whether as a free man or a slave, within the general 
 range of the territory on which it is proper for him still to remain 
 — always preferring freedom to slavery and freemen to slaves, or 
 to slaveholders, oven, where they can be had; but where they 
 cannot, oppressing none, injuring none: nay, not even annoying 
 any man, whether black or white, on the ground of any mere 
 nal and conventional usage or law of human society whatever. 
 
 There are two Ideas in connection with this subject that, if real, 
 are truly most, appalling. The one is, that the whole South has 
 come, at last, to the unconscious and unuttered conviction (but all 
 ore real because if still is both unconscious and unuttered) 
 that any democratic form of government whatever is totally incon- 
 I with their cherished institution of slavery, and have there- 
 fore instinctively set themselves about righting their position, 
 without knowing or confessing the dreadful fact, even to themselves, 
 that a military despotism is in reality indispensable to their condi- 
 tion, whatever honeyed names and forms it may assume. 
 
 The other idea is still worse: it is the suspicion that the South, 
 under slave rule and nurtured mob law, have become so reckless, 
 selfish and insolent, and the North, by so long cowering before 
 that domination, have become so demoralized, mean, dastardly and 
 cowardly, that neither party are lit any longer to preserve or to 
 have free institutions, but both parties must alike go into the mill 
 of despotism and be ground over again, along side of the negroes, 
 before they can be refitted for any such high use. 
 — 1 I 
 
98 
 
 The developments of a few months will probably decide all these 
 great questions; and that shows us, at once, that we are in the very 
 midst of a political and moral crisis, such as neither this continent 
 nor the history of the world ever but once before saw, and that 
 was an event that shook the earth and darkened the sun itself. 
 
 If it should turn out, in the end, that the South cannot any 
 longer maintain free institutions, and needs and must have an 
 entire system of government peculiarly her own, let her rebuke 
 her present traitors, restore the property they have stolen and 
 petition the North to let her go free, by mutual consent, and we 
 are bound to do it by every consideration of right and of humanity; 
 and all this gammon about inevitable civil war — if the thing is 
 needful for them, and sought and. obtained honestly and openly — 
 is a mere humbug. "We need not fight across a mutual slave State 
 line, no more than we do across the Canada line, or across the 
 same line now. Most true such a division implies costs and 
 hazards, more or less, and is inexpedient in itself, if it can be 
 avoided, and totally inadmissible as a concession to treason, under 
 evert possible iiazard, but as a thing found indispensable to our 
 friends at the South — if in fact it be so — and properly sought and 
 obtained, by them, on grounds that do nut destroy the possibility 
 of ail hope of any future government whatever — it is nothing so 
 very dreadful, after all ; and I notice that those declaimers, who 
 have some political "ax to grind," either North or South, have 
 always been most loud and terrific on the utter hopelessness of all 
 possible peace or civilization outside of our present form of Union. 
 Why, lit is scarcely six months, now, since the whole gang of 
 political traitors, and hypocrites and scoundrels who are now plot- 
 ting its destruction, orated, in precisely the same way, about the 
 unutterable value and necessity of the Union as it now is. But 
 then they wanted to scare the Northern doughfaces, and drive a 
 political bargain with them, which should place themselves in 
 power in the Union as it is. Now it is quite another thing ; and, 
 as they are not in power, they are quite ready to destroy it— not 
 by a fair and honorable dissolution, but by the most open and 
 shameless hypocrisy and treason. Just so some of the special 
 attorneys of these traitors still talk, when they want to scare 
 doughfaces; but if the slaveholders, and property owners, and 
 sober, thinking men of the South— without the coercion of politi- 
 
99 
 
 cians, minute men, vagabonds and beggars— deliberately come to 
 the conclusion that their peculiar form of society needs a different 
 i , ernment from ours of the North, and simply and quietly 
 ask us to grant it, without any succumbing to traitors or any 
 rous implication of all future rule, why, in the name of com- 
 mon sense, should we not grant it to them, and let them manage 
 their own affairs wholly in their own way, as well as to let them 
 manage both, theirs and ours too, as they have done for twenty 
 years past? We surely have stood it very well, and are still 
 standing it very well, to let them manage both their affairs and 
 ours, too: not only by law, but without law, by apostacy and 
 treachery and outlawry of the most damnable sort; and if we can 
 so quietly stand all this, and if all our old political grannies and 
 bfaces and white negroes of the North can not only stand it, 
 but connive at it, and apologise for it, they could surely afford to 
 let the South manage simply her own affairs in her own way, if 
 she realbj i ad properly seeks to do so. What so terrible in 
 
 all this \ 
 
 It is my own most unwavering conviction that it is utterly 
 impossible for the South to allow of the freedom of speech or of 
 the press, or to sustain any form of free institutions, coincidently 
 with the idea, either of the perpetual and interminable slavery 
 of the black race or of their emancipation on the soil. In the 
 -e, the barbarism of the master, in the other case, that of the 
 slave, would inevitably destroy all possibility of any such freedom. 
 Under either of these ideas a, despotism of some sort, and of the 
 strongest kind, too, is not only the best but the only hope of the 
 South, and she ought to be allowed to choose it whenever she 
 pleases properly to signify it, whether instituted under republican 
 ormonarchial names and forms. But let her state her case and 
 her wishes manfully and honestly. We cannot allow her political 
 demagogues and traitors and low border ruffians to enact treason 
 and institute a hypocrisy and a farce, in her name or in ours. 
 Emigration and colonization of the black: race toward the south 
 is, therefore, not only the only social hope of each race alike, but 
 the full and free proclamation of this hope, with the great Southern 
 highway ever open for their free passage to the South, is the only 
 possible basis of free speech or a free press, or of any form of free 
 institutions in the South, except in the bare name, like theEepublc 
 
100 
 
 of Kome under the Caesars, or the Democracy of France under 
 Louis Napolean. 
 
 On the basis of this hope, duly proclaimed, appreciated, and fos- 
 tered by the States and by the co-operating policy of the general 
 government, the South might remain in the Union ; find all her 
 interests secured; more secure than they have ever been before, be- 
 cause placed on a humane and logical basis, that commends itself 
 to the humanity of mankind ; all her institutions, both defensible 
 and free; her taxes and expenditures light; and her future career 
 one of unprecedented development, beneficence, glory and renown ; 
 ever doing good to all races on the face of the earth, and evil to 
 none ; and beloved and respected, therefore, by all, and hated and 
 feared by none. Under such auspices, the North would feel easy, 
 and willing to concede all ample time, and all possible aid to their 
 brethren, thus striving to work out one of the greatest problems 
 for the race, and of all ages of the world, and no longer be impelled 
 to attack her State, and Church, and family, and even her philoso- 
 phy, as the most hideous barbarism on the two civilized continents. 
 And if the South cannot thus take up this policy and this new 
 hope, and give it to all her people, black and white ; and if the 
 North cannot thus quietly and humanely wait, and watch, and aid 
 in its realization, the quicker the two parties peacefully separate all 
 their formal political relations, the better it will evidently be for 
 both ; for they can have no common element, either of philosophy 
 or of faith, of government or of law, of destiny or of hope ; and it 
 is possible that they should longer continue under the same insti- 
 tution, only in bare name and pretense— not in reality and in truth. 
 Why then try to play off the miserable farce in the face of the 
 world ? Why longer make both parts of the government a perpet- 
 ual correlative lie to each other, and a conscious hideous cheat to 
 all the rest of the world, under pretexts of a union, when all possi- 
 ble reliable union is a self-evident absurdity ? Civil war itself could 
 scarce be worse, and far less demoralizing than such a mean, mis- 
 erable, hypocritical farce, continuously enacted in the face of the 
 civilized world ; for the meanest of all villains, though the least 
 bloody, it may be, is the conscious hypocrite and liar. Let us 
 have our manhood ; in Heaven's name let us have our manhood, 
 though we have to take it, single handed and alone, and sink all 
 mere" Unions and conventionalisms in the bottomless pit to get at 
 
101 
 
 it : and if the true manhood of the South is, and must be, in its 
 form, different from our own, and if there is no honorable help for 
 it, no rational hope for a common development under the same 
 final hope, and the same present forms, why, let her, in due form, 
 seek to take her own destiny in her own hands, and go along with 
 it as best she can, and God bless, and keep, and enlighten her as 
 she goes. Why should we cripple, or restrain, or harm her, if she 
 does not as>ail us; and she is bound, under her system, by four' 
 million op justices of the peace, to keep the peace with all man- 
 kind — bonds that are heavy enough in all conscience; and the 
 North could make some treaties of alliance with every State on the 
 the continent, in three months' time, that would render all undue 
 extension of her empire, far more hopeless outside of the Union, 
 than it ever has been within it. 
 
 [t is most true that cotton is king, and must be for some centu- 
 ries to come, simply because the interest of clothing the human 
 race can, and will be, concentrated and monopolized in the manu- 
 facture, while the collateral interest of feeding them cannot be. 
 But then, it should be remembered that cotton is a king that, like 
 South Carolina, holds to secession and a transferable patriotism. 
 He lias already, u . and removed his throne from 
 
 the midsl of traitors to more genial regions in the far South; and, 
 as tilings are now going, it cannot be half a century before his en- 
 tire court, and prime ministers, will be the myriads of black men 
 between the tropics, instead of a handful of white mad-caps in the 
 South, and all his great capitals and emporiums of commerce will 
 be there; for he is evidently ashamed, both of his retinue, and of 
 his company, where he now is. Queen flax is also evidently fit- 
 ting up her royal robes, and preparing, meantime, to establish a 
 Correlative, if not a rival empire in the far North ; and after South 
 Carolina has been ground for half a century between the upper 
 ami nether millstones of these two secessions, she will be look- 
 ins- out for some new "transfer of her patriotism." 
 
 If this secession should be. in fact, dealt with in strict accordance 
 with those laws of nature, of freedom, and of God, which have al- 
 ready been referred to, it will, in the end, prove the greatest bless- 
 ing to this country and to the world, that has happened to it for 
 many a year. It will, of necessity, break up and annihilate all 
 those infamous and detestable hypocrisies, and shams, and lies, that 
 
102 
 
 we were trying to enact, and to palm oft' upon ourselves, and upon 
 the world ; it will show all good men at the North and the South, 
 more clearly and more truly to each other, and to the world ; and 
 cause them to fear each other far less, and respect each other far 
 more ; it will disclose more clearly the true grounds, and peculiar 
 nature, workings and value of our civil and social institutions, and 
 lead either to their more ardent and earnest support, and to a bold 
 and manly exchange, or readjustment of them to suit our present 
 actual condition and wants; and if the South and the North only 
 but once come to see each other, and all their peculiar relations, 
 interests, wants and duties, both to white men and to black men, 
 precisely as they, in fact are, the reign of quacks, hypocrites, 
 knaves, cheats, liars and rebels, will cease ; the reign of reason, 
 truth, and real righteousness commence ; and whether under sepa- 
 rate and somewhat diverse forms of civil order, or together, and 
 under the same forms as now, the whole country will, as a natural 
 consequence, become more peaceful, prosperous, happy, glorious 
 and free, than it has ever been before. 
 
 Do men really think that God has undertaken to colonize this 
 great continent with these two great races of men, and that he is 
 now about to cave in, and back down, and give up the enterprise, 
 and throw the whole continent back into a barbarism, because the 
 great State of South Carolina has failed to appreciate properly, our 
 paper constitutions, and laws, and under the temporary guidance of 
 a few fanatical fools and traitors, refuses to obey them ? If this is 
 really so, he had better abdicate the government of this part of the 
 world, in favor of old General Jackson, and let us go on again to 
 achieve the glorious destinies evidently before us. 
 
 But, no. It is possible that we need checking and chastising, 
 and even some new direction in our career ; but not its arrest, or its 
 final or even temporary annihilation. Under the constitution of 
 the United States, we started right ; right politically, right socially, 
 right commercially, right industrially, right philosophically, right 
 humanely, right morally, and right religiously ; and the man, the 
 party, or the power that simply restores the administration to its 
 original spirit and power, will be right before God and man; and 
 if opposed and assailed by cowards on the one hand, or by rebels 
 and traitors on the other, he will still meet the approbation of the 
 truly wise and good in all ages, and the sympathy and respect of 
 
103 
 
 the civilized world. May God in His mercy grant us the man and 
 the grace for the hour. 
 
 So far as the principles of the eternal justice are concerned, the 
 constitution is well enough; and all we need is, that it should be 
 enforced on all men — black, white, North and South. I would not 
 imply, that in all its details, and all its words, it is absolutely infal- 
 lible, as some seem to think it to be ; but that it is infinitely better 
 than any other instrument that we could hope to construct in the 
 .; condition of agitation, in which we are now thrown; for if 
 we are — as facts abundant show — wholly incapable of its rational 
 
 ;• relation and adminstration, what sort of a figure should we 
 cut in a council, over its reconstruction and amendment. Politi- 
 cians, for instance, and even grave divines of the South, call on the 
 North to put down by force of law, all "unchristian and violent agi- 
 tation of the slavery question." Others call for the hanging of 
 Henry Ward Beecher, Garrison, Sumner, Greeley and others. 
 But for what' Why, simply and solely for freedom of speech!! 
 Thus it is plain thai one of the first platforms in our new constitu- 
 tion of freedom, must be either to punish or hang men for the hon- 
 est utterance of their opinions!! Indeed, this is the main point 
 
 ted upon by our Southern friends. Well, what, sort of a figure 
 would a free Republic cut in the history of the world, which begins 
 with punishing or hanging men forthe utterance of their opinions ? 
 1 admit it is far better to do it by constitutional and' enacted law, 
 than by lynch law, as it is now suffered to be dune in the South. 
 But it seems to me it would be quite an innovation on our present 
 
 itution, and the common idea of democratic freedom, to hang 
 by constitutional law, all men who differed from us in opinion. 
 And if this is to be the first article in the proposed constitution, I 
 have some fears that even the doughface North, however servile 
 in the past, mighl seriously object to the ordinance. For example: 
 I have written this little book with the honest and hearty intent of 
 
 iding the just rights of the master and the slave ; of the 
 North and the South, I have givenit freely into the printers' hands 
 to publish, if they see fit. I am well aware that in many things I 
 have wholly erred; but whether I have erred ornot, I have 
 some very particular and personal objections to being hung, even 
 by a constitutional Republic, for simply writing it; and I am of 
 the opinion that it Mould not be pleasant to my publishers to swing 
 
104 
 
 for publishing it. I think we should therefore vote against the 
 first article in the new constitution, whether anybody else did at 
 the North or not. 
 
 But leaving the general principles of the constitution to stand as 
 they are, I frankly confess that it has ever been my opinion, that 
 its provisions for administrative capacity and effect, are wholly de- 
 fective, and on all philosophical grounds, call most loudly for some 
 practical remedy, though I see not now how it could be supplied. 
 
 The first defect in our practical administration relates to the dip- 
 fusion of the franchise ; the second to the diffusion of intelli- 
 gence; and I think the one has been suffered to run in quite too 
 wide, and the other in quite too 'narrow limits. It seems to me 
 that the true theory of republican government, and the only theory 
 that can be widely and safely applied in this age of the world, is 
 the theory of a succession of sovereignties, confined strictly to the 
 established households of the white race on this continent. I do 
 not believe that the gregarious multitude of rambling men and 
 boys, with no fixed home, and no fixed responsibility for anything, 
 can be safely intrusted with the conduct and the issue of our pecu- 
 liar and critical responsibilities in the government of the diverse 
 races and interests on this great continent. This individual sove- 
 reignty and franchise rests on no principle whatever that is at all 
 defensible, till all our woman and children are brought to the polls, 
 as well as ourselves, and then its innate absurdity would be fairly 
 and logically played out. 
 
 But suppose we start with the principle of equal household 
 sovereignty, and consider every house or family of white persons, 
 in other respects eligible to that position, as the frimary, ultimate 
 sovereignty in the land, and therefore to be entitled to one vote, 
 to be cast by the lawful head of that family, whether male or 
 female — all such heads of families or households to be recognized 
 and registered by law, in the precinct where they vote, previous to 
 their right to vote in that precinct. I think any thinking man 
 will at once see the equality, justice and expediency of this system, 
 and the great and terrible dangers which it would avoid, which lie 
 inherent in our present system. I will not, therefore, argue in its 
 defense, further than to say that it begins the organization of the 
 the State precisely where God and nature begin the first organiza- 
 tion of human society, and is therefore both natural and divine in 
 
105 
 
 its origin and foundation. It alone recognizes the proper dignity 
 and privilege, and presents proper encouragement and security to 
 that elemental institution of God, the family. It relieves us of a 
 ing and utterly irresponsible vote, in the shape of thought- 
 ad reckless young men, wandering rovers and vagabonds, 
 who care nothing for the family, or the State, and can be held to 
 no proper responsibility for either. It is equal to the poor and the 
 rich, for every family, high or low, would have one vote ; and as 
 regards what that should be, it should be left to be decided by pri- 
 vate <' a and moral influences, wholly among themselves; 
 for the State should assume that a house or family cannot be divi- 
 ded, just as the nation now assumes that a State cannot. Thus 
 the family is the first or elemental empire; the school dis- 
 trict the next in order; the town the next; the cottxty the next; 
 the State the next; and the Union over all — a perfect, natural 
 and logical system, starting out of the original germ planted by 
 God himself. That this would result in a great contraction of our 
 tit individual poll, 1 admit; but is there a thinking, unbiased 
 man, either North or South, who does not see that such a contrac- 
 tion would conduce greatly to the -lability, the good order and the 
 dignity of the State '. ( m tin- ground, also, I approve of the law 
 which, under the Constitution, recognizes the master as the head 
 of Mi' household, however many slaves he may have; and I only 
 wish tin; same principle was in effeel extended over the whole 
 North. From what lias before been said, however, I am opposed 
 to a black man's having anything to do with the political institu- 
 tions of the United States, for tin 1 same reason that I am opposed 
 to a white man's having anything to do with those in Liberia or in 
 Ilayti, or in any other place out of his own natural climate, and 
 under the Equator. For the rule of the white races in all the 
 South, and of the black races in all the North, is an outrage upon 
 nature, which should never be; tolerated, except in cases of dire 
 iiy, where no other rule can be instituted ; and even then, 
 only to meet such a temporary exigency. 
 
 But the proper diffusion of intelligence is a still more impor- 
 tant matter than the control of the franchise; for fifty thousand 
 stupid or misinformed men could as readily destroy the govern- 
 ment as twice that number, if they controlled the election by their 
 own will. All parties, and all statesmen, from Washington down, 
 — 15 
 
100 
 
 have eloquently declaimed on the indispensable necessity of intel- 
 ligence to the perpetuity of our free institutions. But what sort of 
 intelligence is needed ? Must it be apposite intelligence ? or intel- 
 ligence wholly inappropriate, and therefore useless, or wholly 
 absurd and false, and therefore to the same degree dangerous in 
 the extreme ? If a man had a ship at sea under his general care 
 and superintendence, he would hardly fancy that reading about old 
 Greece and Rome, whether in Latin or Greek, or about the laws of 
 grammar, or the pure mathematics, or the fixed stars, would give 
 him precisely the right sort of intelligence about the whereabouts, 
 and dangers, and wants, of his ship at sea, Still less, if he was 
 informed that it was in Japan, when in fact it was at Cape Horn ; 
 or that it was still safe in the harbor, while it was almost in the 
 great Northern Maelstrom ; would his intelligence be of mnch 
 practical use to him. In other words, our intelligence must in all 
 cases be specific, apposite and reliable, or it is only useless, or 
 infinitely worse than nothing. If we mean anything, therefore, 
 worth saying, when we speak of the intelligence indispen- 
 sable to the safety of the Republic, we mean that all our voters 
 should be duly supplied with specific, apposite and reliable 
 political intelligence ; for it is self-evident that no other sort of 
 intelligence can in the least degree aid them, in the discharge of 
 their political duties. And yet, strange as it may seem, we have 
 never, to this day, taken the least pains or care, after all our talk, 
 to diffuse this precise intelligence among any portion of our people ; 
 and we have never inaugurated one single rational institution, 
 instrument, process or means for so doing. "We send our children 
 into our schools, and they study everything under heaven but that ; 
 and a bright, smart boy might stay in our schools, and study in the 
 regular courses of instruction, and study hard and successfully, too, 
 from the time he is ten years old till he is thirty, and come out 
 without knowing definitely how the magistrate or clerk of his own 
 county is appointed, or how the President of the Republic is chosen. 
 So much for the schools. 
 
 And as to the pulpit, the next great organ of public instruction, 
 it is considered a sort of treason, ever to even refer to the subject 
 in the u sacred dark," except down South, of late, they are getting 
 to deem it quite orthodox, it seems, to preach treason out and out, 
 against the government. But the next organ of public intelligence 
 — the press — if regarded as a whole, is still worse, as every one 
 
107 
 
 knows. Few men, it is known, can afford to take the papers and 
 read them on all sides; as an inevitable consequence, each man, as 
 a general rule, either from choice or from necessity, reads only the 
 strictly exparte statements and special pleadings of his own party, 
 all of which, oftentimes leaves him a little more ignorant than he 
 would have been, if he had not read at all. Of course, under this 
 slate of facts, if the citizen ever really gets at any specific, apposite 
 and reliable political intelligence, lie must pick it up in the 
 street, or where he can get it, for it is self-evident that the State 
 has not taken either the least thought, or care, to provide him with 
 it either through the school, the pulpit, or the press ; and yet the 
 State mousingly and stupidly, even though truly, affirms that her 
 own veey existence depends upon the universal diffusion of such 
 intelligence among a!' of the people!!! Is not this truly 
 
 marvelous? What if this state should keep saying, for a whole 
 hall' century, that military and naval schools; arsenals and dock- 
 yards; men-of-war, and an organized militia, are indispensable to 
 her own i and still never move a finger to supply either, 
 
 because we have A, B, C schools: some men have shot-guns and 
 tow-boats; and pop-guns and bow and arrows; would 
 
 thai be d? Or does the State assume that the bare gram- 
 
 mars, languages, ologies and tologies, isms and seisms, of our 
 schools ami out the weekly good round lies of 
 
 their partisan presses, constitute exactly the sort of intelligence 
 ill to the wants and duties of an American citizen, and ade- 
 to the safety of the Republic ? What then shall be done ? 
 1 cannot say what can be done and what ought to be done ; but I 
 can suggest one course of policy that might have been originated 
 at the outset of the government, which would have been, at least, 
 in some degree, consistent with the declaration that intelligence is in- 
 dispensable to Republicanism. But whether, with all our vested and 
 antagonistic rights, or, at least, claims of right, it would be possible 
 to institute any such safeguards now, I cannot say, fori am really too 
 ignorant of the whole field to be able to judge even for myself. 
 But some of our best statesmen can surely tell, or, at least, suggest 
 SOME remedy for this great and appalling inconsistency and evil. 
 Suppose, at the outset of the government there had been pro- 
 of plain and simple political class books, explaining 
 and illustrating by apposite and interesting concrete cases, and an- 
 ecdotes, all the great fundamental and practical principles of free- 
 
108 
 
 dom, and of our republican constitutions and governments, suited 
 to the capacities and ages of our children, and introduced and 
 taught in all our schools, and read in all oar families and social 
 circles. Would not these be as interesting, and useful, and impor- 
 tant to the American citizen, and furnish him as good mental dis~ 
 cipline, and as apposite political intelligence, as the study of the 
 laws and customs of Greece, or Rome, or Kamskatka, or China, or 
 Japan ? Again : Suppose our clergymen should occasionally be 
 allowed to enlighten the consciences of their hearers about some 
 solemn, moral, and political duty, instead of calculating the area of 
 Noah's Ark ; or the origin of the bow after the flood ; or the sort 
 of whale that swallowed Jonah ; or the probable sins of the antedi- 
 luvians; or preaching downright rebellion and treason as they now 
 do in some places at the South ; would it be an unpardonable dese- 
 cration of the Sabbath? But more than all : suppose the govern- 
 ment had taken some reliable method, truly to report to its constit- 
 uents and real sovereigns, its own views, acts, and doings, instead 
 of leaving it to chance whether it was done or not ; or to a corrupt 
 partisan press to misstate and misrepresent all facts and all princi- 
 ples just as it pleases. For example : suppose the successful candi- 
 date for the Presidency should be obliged by law to nominate and 
 appoint an editor to edit weekly at the capital, one side of a large 
 weekly political paper, and the next highest candidate required to 
 edit or appoint an editor for the other side of the same paper, so 
 that every man should find one side of that paper a correction of 
 the other, in all matters of policy, principle, or fact, and thereby be 
 able to judge of the real facts in the case, as a juryman does when 
 he has heard both sides, and not simply one side of a case in court. 
 Such a paper in the general government, in my opinion, would dif- 
 fuse more specific, apposite, and reliable political intelligence 
 among our people than all our schools, papers, orators and presses 
 of the land, ever have done, or ever can do, under our present 
 reckless and senseless system, if indeed, that deserves the name of 
 system, which is in fact, only "chaos worse confounded." But, 
 at any rate, if intelligence is indispensable to a Republican gov- 
 ernment, as diversities of interests and populations, increase all 
 hope of such freedom, must inevitably perish, without some more 
 effective mode of diffusing that intelligence, than we have ever had 
 as yet, Such papers might be either furnished at the public ex- 
 pense to every voter, or safely left to be purchased by them at 
 
109 
 
 such cheap rates as the government could well afford. The prac- 
 tical result of these would be simply a weekly report to the voters 
 — the p: sovereigns of the land — of the views and doings of 
 
 their agents in power, on the one side of the paper, and a search- 
 ing practical commentary of those views and doings, by their po- 
 litical opponents, on the other side of the same weekly paper; only 
 embodying the same principle in the legislative and executive 
 branches of the government, involving the annual interests of thirty 
 millions of people and hundreds of millions of money, which is 
 now thought so indispensable, in every judicial case where the 
 juryman is to decide on even the value of a dog, or of a ping of to- 
 bacco, namely: that he should hear both sides simultaneously 
 argued, and thus be put in possession of information or intelligence 
 which is app - pecific, and reliable, in the case on hand ; and 
 
 what other sort of intelligence is of the least practical present use, 
 to any man, in any case on earth I For more than half a century 
 now, tin- government has been saying that its very existence de- 
 pended on the universal diffusion of such intelligence, (that is if its 
 language means anything worth saying or worth hearing,') and still 
 it has never taken the first rational step towards granting that in- 
 dispensable supply; the people have asked for bread, and it has 
 given them, in this line, only stone-, and scorpions; the one in life- 
 less and useless generalities, which they could neither masticate 
 nor digesl ; the other in a fiery partisan press, which bit and pois- 
 oned, instead of nuturing and strengthening them; and even to 
 this hour the government has no available reliable means, of even 
 showing to one-half of the Union what the other half really thinks, 
 wants, believes, proposes, and intends, or what is the real basis of 
 its own policy, no more than the chief sachem of the Cherokees 
 ha-. Such papers would be sought and read by all classes: and 
 a- they would be edited by the first men in the nation, and as 
 every falsehood, or mere pretense, or appeal, to low partisan pre- 
 judice and passion, on one side of the paper, would be exposed and 
 rebuked on the other; it would not only tend to assuage the passions, 
 and elevate tin- tastes of all parties alike, but it would correspond- 
 ingly elevate the general tone of the entire political press of the na- 
 tion ; and if circulated gratuitously to every voter, who would pay 
 the postage on it, it is doubtful whether the whole expense to the 
 government would be much greater than our present system, 
 of franking mere partizan papers and documents. The probable 
 
110 
 
 effects on the present political press might, perhaps, array an oppo- 
 sition against it, under one pretense or another, on merely selfish 
 grounds : just as all improvements meet the steady, selfish opposi- 
 tion of those parties on whose personal interests it is feared they 
 may, in some manner, trench ; and some pretext of benevolence or 
 philanthrophy is, therefore, at once set up against them. But if 
 so, it would only show, the more clearly, the real spirit of our pre- 
 seut press, and the real necessity for some such move in behalf of 
 the people and institutions of the country. An editor who has any 
 conscious self-respect, need not fear any such paper, but has every 
 reason to hail and welcome it as the most desirable of all coadju- 
 tors and allies ; and the quicker those who have none are out of 
 the way, the better: at least for the public. Ot course such a paper 
 would have nothing to do with advertisements, or mere local or 
 ordinary interests of any sort; it would only be the government's 
 own weekly political report to its constituents, attended with a 
 constant commentary from the opposition, in such form as to give 
 it the practical effect of able and opposing council in the great 
 legislative forum of the nation, and thereby insuring the confidence 
 and intelligence of the great body of these legislative jurors of the 
 nation more fully than it will ever be possible to do under our 
 present utter destitution of all system, and even of all effort to 
 attain one, on this confessedly vital and fundamental interest. 
 Why not be consistent, and conform our legislative department of 
 the government to the judicial in principle, as it now is, or else 
 give over one half of our jurors to the facts and special pleadings 
 of the counsel on one side, and the other half to that of the counsel 
 on the other side, or leave both sides to pick up their information 
 in the street or from the popular press, as they can best find it ; for 
 it is self-evident that accurate, specific and reliable intelligence is 
 not as important, in deciding the value of a horse, or even the fate 
 of a single man, as it is in acting upon the constant and complex 
 rights and interests of thirty millions of men ; and even if we can- 
 not secure the same certainty and the same system in one case as 
 in the other, does that prove that nothing should be either done or 
 attempted % It seems to me that if such a position is not too absurd 
 for rational beings longer to tolerate, its necessary and inevitable 
 results are too near at band to be much longer resisted, if indeed 
 they are not already fearfully and fatally upon us. Does any 
 rational man. really believe that if we had had such an organ in all 
 
Ill 
 
 times past, it would have been possible to have thrown us into our 
 present demoralized, absurd, distracted and contempible position? 
 so pitiable, that even the Cherokee Indians regard and treat onr 
 government with utter contempt. At this rate, how long will it 
 be before the negroes, too, will try their hand at it? If history 
 teaches lessons of truth, it cannot be a great while. The massacres 
 of St. Domingo began first in a conflict for supremacy between the 
 rival masters, and ended in the revolt of the negroes and the 
 destruction of both of the ruling parties. No man who has any 
 intelligent regard for the highest and best ultimate good of either 
 party or either race, can look with complacency upon the inaugura- 
 tion of such a train of causes on this continent, But how are the 
 frequent repetition of such disasters to be forestalled and prevented? 
 There are only two possible ways : the one by an increase of force; 
 the other by an increase of such intelligence as is above described, 
 for it is self-evident that the increase of the bare general intelli- 
 gence diffused by the schbol, the pulpit and the press, as now used, 
 has no tendency whatever to correct the evil, as we see from the 
 appalling fact that our political degeneracy and corruption has 
 Steadily increased with the increase of their power; and the most 
 consummate scoundrels we have in the land — our boldest and 
 mo.-t daring and successful defaulters, knaves, robbers, thieves and 
 traitors — are not only found in our most highly educated classes, 
 but some of them even in the very sanctuaries of our schools and 
 sects. Shall we, then, invoke force, and organize anew our police 
 of forts, arsenals, armies and navies, or shall we attempt some new 
 method of inspiring the masses of our people with a higher degree 
 ■ lore specific and reliable political intelligence, so that their 
 honest impulses, as well as their selfish interests, may have some 
 sort of a fair chance to operate as a constant and steady check to 
 the necessary corruptions of power, instead of falling as inefficient 
 and hopeless tools into its hands for the worst uses and ends. 
 
 Reader, would you yourself like such a paper? Or do you pre- 
 fer to l;e the mere hoodwinked tool of some particular party, and 
 its mere partisan press: Then why should you not have one? 
 You could have it at less than half the cost you now pay for papers 
 not half as able, interesting, instructive or valuable; and if you 
 and all others would simply say so, it could be had, with far less 
 cost and more advantage than our present absurd system of insipid 
 negligence and indifference to all inevitable laws, and a'rl consequent 
 
112 
 
 direful results. Which is really guilty of the most consummate 
 folly, that nation that should professedly base its rule on force, and 
 rely on the general forces of the schools, of gravity, electricity, 
 &c, to sustain it, without any specific and reliable organized force 
 directed to the precise end in view ; or that nation which bases its 
 rule on intelligence, and relies on the same general and vague 
 intelligence of the schools, without even an effort to make that 
 intelligence either reliable, or specific, or apposite to the end in 
 view ? If the folly in the one case is more apparent than in the 
 other, it is only because the thing relied upon in the one .case is 
 more sensuous and gross, and therefore better understood, and 
 more easily seen and felt; and not not because the actual folly is 
 any more real. Does not all the world know that any amount of 
 knowledge, any sum total of means whatever, is in all cases alike 
 totally useless, unless first efficiently directed to the specific ends to 
 be accomplished ? The mere storing up of a sort of general intel- 
 ligence has not one whit more of a tendency either to save or 
 relieve us, in any particular crisis, than the mere storing away of 
 gunpowder in all the shops and houses of the land would have a 
 tendency to save us in time of war, without specifically applying it 
 £o a single gun. It only renders it so much the more easy for our 
 enemies to blow us all up together ; for an accumulated, unused 
 and unguarded power, of whatever sort, whether material or spir- 
 itual, must always, by law of nature and by ordinance of God, 
 prove only a dangerous power; for it his will that no power what- 
 ever should be safe, unless fully applied to its apposite use. 
 
 Hence, the very increase of our general intelligence has only 
 proved in fact a political curse to us, simply because we have 
 refused, or at least neglected, to even attempt to apply it to its 
 appropriate ends. 
 
 Nor is it the least disparagement to our predecessors that they 
 did not perceive all these things; for God opens the great book of 
 the eternities to mortal men, one leaf at a time. Our fathers nobly 
 saw and nobly read the page presented to them. It is not their 
 fault that they could neither see nor read the one opened to us; 
 and if we fail to do so, the fault must be forever our own, and not 
 that of those who have gone before, or of those who shall come 
 after us. 
 
 Freemen of the land ! awake, arise, look and see ! Read, reflect, 
 and act, or Ue forever fallen ! ! 
 
N*M \- k\ ■ t. 
 
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