It is not our purpose to insist on the technical process of territorializing the conquered rebel States. What we do insist on is that the military authority, which the nation has so laboriously asserted and acquired over them, shall not be withdrawn until the natural and necessary and appropriate consequences of the war shall have been attained; and that among these is the inauguration of Freedom instead of the reinstitution of that hideous anomaly of the nations, American Slavery. We insist that the rising, but as yet the feeble and timid Freedom Party of the South, including the blacks and a growing number of the poor whites, so fast as they become rightly informed, with a small number of enlightened, generous, and noble-minded men of the planter class, who sympathize with freedom, and are truly loyal in sympathy and soul to American principles and the American Government, be regarded and treated as the new and loyal South; and not a trumped-up party, which may arise any day, of as bitter traitors as ever lived, but who, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, which is, at bottom, Slavery, and nothing else, under the present issue of war, shall give in a hollow and pretended profession of loyalty, in order to secure, by other means, the same end. Does this truly loyal party at the South anywhere as yet wish the withdrawal of the protection of the General Government, and desire to be turned over to the tender mercies of their false and subtle enemy—which are unheard-of cruelties? Let the representation of the thousand loyal men from Middle Tennessee, recently made to the President of the United States, answer. On the contrary, there is nothing which those men so greatly dread—nothing which so checks their more rapid development as a party—as the fear that they may be so abandoned before their work is sufficiently advanced to secure its completion.

The three years which the Times writer concedes to the existence of an anomaly in our Government, may be amply enough to accomplish all that is required. So far from imbittering the feelings of the true friends of the Union in the South, assurance of the continuance of such a protection over them, even for that length of time, would infuse new confidence and new activity into all their movements. It is clearly the right of the policeman to judge when the mob is effectually suppressed, and as much his duty not to allow himself to be surprised and over-mastered by a pretended and hollow submission for the sake of seizing an advantage, as it is to inflict effectual blows of his cudgel while the row is in its more flagrant stages of development. The United States, having interfered by force to suppress a national riot, has a clear right, and a bounden duty, not to abandon the region of the disturbance until the animus of rebellion is subdued as effectually as its open manifestation; and knowing that that animus is identical with the spirit, purposes, and designs of the slaveholding class—a conspiracy, in fine, to overthrow the Government in that sole behalf—it is alike bound effectually to cripple or actually to exterminate that malign influence.

Again says our writer under review: 'When the South has been overcome in fair fight, we must give its reason a chance to assert itself.' Very true, if the mode of doing so be not foolishly misunderstood. The error here is in speaking of the South as one, whereas from this time forward and for some years to come, there will be an Old South, rebellious at heart, malignant, defiant, cruel, and revengeful to the last degree—bold, accustomed to rule with unquestioned authority—and, when conquered, refusing to remain conquered, except as the grapple of the conqueror is still at its throat; and a New South, loyal, loving, and devoted to its deliverers, but timid, shrinking, and tentative of its powers—liberty-loving, and truly American in sentiment, but unused to the exercise of political supremacy, unorganized, and weak;—an old South, refusing every appeal to reason, and only thirsting for vengeance; and a new South, ready to reason and to be reasoned with, and looking gratefully to the National Government as its guide and protector in the unequal contest before it—more fearful to it than ever—at the close of the war. How, then, shall we 'give the reason of the South a chance to assert itself'? By withdrawing our support from our friends, and the friends of America, and of man, in the South, and turning them over, like sheep to the wolves, to their unreasoning and vindictive enemies; or by standing by them in the weakness of their first essay to depend on reason and justice in the place of force or fraud; by developing, in fine, the reason of the South, which has been for a century overridden and suppressed by the incubus of an organized despotism, from which there is now, for the first time, the chance of a redemption, if these friends of Southern reason do not commit a blunder in their understanding of the case?

'Whenever,' says the Times writer, 'there is sound reason to believe that a sound loyal majority of the State want it (reconstruction), let them have it—and that, too, without imposing any conditions concerning slavery.' That is to say, abandon the Proclamation of Emancipation, betray the colored man, who, trusting to our faith, is now enrolling himself in our armies; betray the timid friends of freedom, who, by our encouragement, have dared to proclaim their love of liberty, and subject themselves to inevitable banishment or extermination, unless the programme of a new free South be executed triumphantly and to the letter; furnish to the most malignant slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of 'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the rattlesnake. The most imbittering and offensive thing that can ever be done to those men is done the moment you pronounce the words of freedom and human rights, in conjunction with each other, as if they were the same thing. That done, every other measure grows mild. To territorialize the whole South, and place a satrap over every parish and county of it—saying no word for freedom—would be a gentle and conciliating procedure compared with the most innocent utterance of a mere sentiment in behalf of emancipation and the elevation of the negro to the status of a man. Why, then, strain at a gnat when we have already swallowed a camel? If we mean anything by Emancipation Proclamations, the organization of negro troops, or even by our own inherent love of liberty, nothing after that need ever be handled gingerly with the South. Every recommendation to abstain from giving her offence is simply a recommendation to recede, not only from our whole war policy now so happily inaugurated, but to recede from every genuine and efficient sentiment the Northern people may entertain, or ever have entertained, in behalf of the distinctively American idea: the freedom and equality before the law of all men.

'If this just and rational policy is faithfully carried out,' continues our editor, 'and no arbitrary issues are foisted in to impose a sense of subordination, we have not a doubt that every Slave State will follow the emancipating policy which the Border States, of their own accord, have already entered upon with such decision. Even if loyal duty don't prompt it, interest will; for slavery, after having been crippled, as it has been by the war, even if it could live, would only be an encumbrance. But it can't live. It is already half dead. Let the loyal men of the South finish it and bury it in their own way'.

Now it is precisely this simple-minded and easy credence that everything will go right if it be at once handed over to the management of the men who may have been whipped in the battle field—this overweening confidence on the part of good men, and intelligent men, too, in the ordinary sense of intelligence, at the North, which is the most dangerous feature of the whole matter. We are just entering upon the real crisis of the war, when the war, by many, will be thought finished. It is exceedingly doubtful whether in any single Border State the Anti-slavery Movement has received as yet any such impetus or gained any such secure foothold that it could maintain the struggle for a six months, if the influence growing out of the presence of the war in their midst were withdrawn, and the political power were remanded in full to the local authorities; and, in respect to the States farther South, and wholly committed to the institution, it is certain that Slavery has hardly received what would prove a serious scratch upon its epidermis, if such changes were now to take place.

Indeed, on the contrary, there was never a time when temptation to slaveholding was a third part what it is to-day, aside from the threat of danger hanging over it from the continuance of the war, and the supposed determination of the Northern conquerors to put an end to it. The vital principle of Slavery which overrides every other consideration, is the extra-profitable nature and state of slave-labor products. The writer has himself seen Slavery firmly seated in the saddle and unassailable in an exposed region of the South, with cotton at from eight to twelve cents on the pound, and the same institution trembling toward its downfall when cotton fell to four and a half and five cents on the plantation. What must then be its hold on the cupidity of Southern men when the condition of Slavery, by virtue of the same state of war which threatens its existence on the one hand, has caused the price of cotton to rule, on the other hand, from twenty-five to seventy-five cents a pound, and has affected, in a somewhat similar way, every other product of the sort! An immense premium is thus offered for the continuance of the institution, and the danger is not slight that our own Northern men, thrown into the South, would be seduced, in great numbers, by the temptation, into becoming themselves slavery propagandists, unless the exigencies of the war, the esprit du corps, and the solidarity of interests springing up between them and the negro soldiers, and the prompt and energetic activity of the Government in behalf of an emancipation policy were all to combine to prevent it. In talking of Slavery, its power, its weakness, or its prospects, men, unless they have been intimately mixed up with its workings, are apt to be reckoning without their host. Our own sentiment of justice in the matter, North, poor and feeble as it is in most of us, is immensely aided by the negative fact that our interests do not happen to be immediately involved adversely. Not one in ten thousand of Northern men or Europeans, thrown into the South previous to the war, ever withstood the infection of pro-slavery sentiment and action. Our soldiers do so now, only because they are in large bodies, because they are fighting the Southern men, and because they are becoming more and more identified with a distinct national policy in behalf of emancipation and the rights of man. Withdraw these causes, and the effects would be rapidly reversed. Northern officers and men could not be trusted to fraternize with the slave-holding aristocracy, previous to the time when the backbone of the institution of Slavery should have been effectually broken; not because they are bad men, but because they are men, and would act, under similar circumstances, as men—alike Northern, Southern, and European men—have acted in the years that are past. There is a far more reliable and trustworthy party of Southern anti-slavery men than are as yet their Northern allies; men who have suffered intensely from actual contact and struggle with the institution, and who have felt, in some measure, the steel of Slavery enter their own souls; but they are not numerous enough to stand without the aid of these same untrustworthy Northern auxiliaries, who already, at the first indication of incipient success for our arms, propose, like this writer, to remand them to the tender mercies of a Southern majority rule. It is the fear of this treachery which makes them so few as they are, and so weak. It is these men whom we wish to see sustained, recognized as the loyal and the new South, and aided in the work of reconstruction, when the somewhat distant period for it to be safe and wise shall have arrived. They are the men who will teach us wisdom, if we will follow their advice; and they, be assured of it, will not clamor for any early and thoughtless surrender of our present advantages, for fear of hurting the sensibilities of the South by imposing a sense of 'subordination.' With the agony of despair, such men would remonstrate against any such suicidal policy, and entreat the Government of the United States and the people of the North to stand by them in their great distress, through, until the end. While writing, the following newspaper paragraph attracts our attention, and is a fair expression of the truth we are seeking to inculcate:

'The Hon. Silas Casey, of Kentucky, brings news of the most intense feeling, on the subject of holding slaves in the Border States, among Union men. They contend that the restriction in the President's Proclamation has made Kentucky and Tennessee a 'national slave pen,' where slaves, fleeing from the 'confederate' States, are bought and sold by the thousand. He says the Unionists to a man are in favor of immediate and sweeping emancipation of all slaves within their borders—that there can be no protection for a Unionist as long as aristocratic secessionists are allowed to hold all their old slaves, and are protected in buying human beings, once freed by the President's Proclamation. The last and most important step to be taken by the Government, to insure Unionism in the Border States, is to emancipate the slaves of disloyalists in Kentucky and Tennessee. The military once removed from Kentucky, and again would commence the barbarism of slavery. Defenders of the Government would be murdered—freedom of speech be denied; the expulsion of Northern ministers, and the tar-and-feathering of Northern schoolmasters, for only preferring Union to secession, freedom to slavery, would go on as freely as in the palmiest days of the chivalry; Parson Brownlow would be driven from Knoxville, his press and dwelling burned, Casey and Green and Adams exiled forever, and the same old war would have to be fought over again, with all its blood and horror, on Kentucky soil.'

The following comments are equally true:

'Again we call the attention of thoughtful men to the current phases of 'Border State' politics, and ask that they be deeply considered. If we open a hundred 'conservative' journals in succession, we shall find at least ninety of them asserting or assuming that the revolted States are to be reconciled to the Union by new concessions, new guarantees to slavery. But those States themselves emphatically repel this assumption. Every man in Delaware, in Maryland, in Tennessee, in Missouri, who is heartily and thoroughly anti-rebel is also anti-slavery, and nearly every one is for immediate, not gradual, emancipation. They were not Republicans; not one in twenty of them voted for Lincoln; they make no special pretensions to philanthropy; but they mean to live and die in the Union, and they do not choose to have their throats cut by rebels; so they desire that slavery should die, knowing by practical experience, by personal observation, that slavery and the rebellion are but two phases of the same thing—two names for one reality.'

Slavery, as things are, is neither 'crippled' nor 'half dead.' It is only a little sick, and threatened with being made more so, if the same effectual blows which have been dealt it are followed up hereafter with other blows still more effectual.

We have reason to believe that the writer of the Times article we have been reviewing, has passed some time with the Army of the Cumberland; that he has viewed the subject impartially from what he deems a large field of observation; and that he speaks honestly what he believes. But no observation even of that kind is sufficient to open the whole case. Let him be a Southern man, or a Northern man residing at the South, and committed to the emancipation policy; let him stay behind and see the banners of our army gradually retiring to the North, and the banished leaders of the rebellion and other slaveholding tyrants and harpies gathering in the wake and gradually surrounding him and his little band of patriots—reclaiming all their old authority and overawing and trampling down every incipient blade of the crop of freedom, which had been planted in the presence and under the shadow of our armies—and he will be better prepared to judge. From even the high authority of General Grant himself, on this subject, we dissent. Let him first grapple with a Southern slaveholding public sentiment, as a peaceable citizen holding adverse opinions, and without a victorious army at his back, and he will be better qualified to form and give a reliable opinion. He is represented as having said, in a private letter to the Hon. E. F. Washburn, of the date of August 13th, 1863, that the people of the North need not quarrel over the institution of Slavery; that what Vice-President Stevens acknowledges as the corner stone of the confederacy is already knocked out; that Slavery is already dead, and cannot be resurrected; that it would take a standing army to maintain Slavery in the South, if we were to make peace to-day guaranteeing to the South all their former constitutional privileges, etc. With profound respect for General Grant as a man and a soldier, we would still prefer the opinion, on this point, of any earnest member of the young and feeble anti-slavery party of the South, who resides a few miles away from the actual reach of the authority and influence of a Federal army.

It is refreshing to know that to this opinion of the victorious general, of exceedingly doubtful value, upon the specific point in question, he adds these memorable and patriotic words:

'I never was an Abolitionist, not even what would be called anti-slavery, but I try to judge fairly and honestly, and it became patent to my mind early in the rebellion that the North and South could never live at peace with each other except as one nation, and that without slavery. As anxious as I am to see peace established, I would not, therefore, be willing to see any settlement until this question is forever settled.'

Almost the only men in the nation who are really competent to judge when Slavery is really dead, in any region, are those Northern and Western anti-slavery men who have come into long and deadly collision with its spirit and power in Kansas and upon the western border of Missouri. Even Northern and Eastern Abolitionists, better versed perhaps in the theory of the subject, would prove very incompetent if matched in practical hostility with slaveholding opinion and might—slaveholding vindictiveness, cunning, treachery, and recklessness of every consideration, human or divine, but the gaining of their one end, the retention of their hold over the slave.

It is again refreshing, in the midst of the open or covert defence and protection among us of the surviving remnant of Slavery at the South, granting for the moment that it is now reduced to that, and in the midst of such easy and over-credulous and mistaken assumptions of its complete, virtual destruction already, by undoubted friends of freedom, as in the case of the Times editor, General Grant, and numerous others, to listen to such hearty utterances, in the keynote of the right policy, as were made by Secretary Chase in his recent speech at Cincinnati, and to be able to believe that they foreshadow the course of the Administration in this trying epoch of our country's history. We quote the following report:

'It was never intended to interfere with States that were loyal. This Proclamation comes up as a great feature in this war. In my judgment the Proclamation was the right thing in the right place, and without it I am just as sure as I am of my own existence that we could not have made the progress we have made. And I hold that the man who denounces the Proclamation either speaks ignorantly, speaks about that of which he knows little or nothing, or else he really desires that the rebellion should succeed.

'There are two classes of States in the South; there is the class of States that is affected by the Proclamation, and a class of States that is not. With this last class of States, which is not affected by the Proclamation, we have simply nothing to do, except to bid God speed to the unconditional Union men of those States, that they will do their own work in their own way and in their own time, and all we have to do is to stand by them.

'But in the States which are affected by the Proclamation the case is different. Either the Proclamation was a great, monstrous sham, and an imposition in the face of the world, or else that Proclamation was an effectual thing, and there are no slaves to-day in the rebel States. They are all enfranchised by the Proclamation, for what says it? All the slaves of these States are declared now and forever free, and the executive power is pledged to the maintenance of their freedom. If it were not so it would be a national imposture, and I would no more be guilty of that piece of infamy than I would steal into your house at night and rob your pantry. But what have we to do with this Proclamation in the rebellious Slave States? It is a very simple thing: just simply recognise the Union men who remain in those States. Such men as Mr. Flanders, and Mr. May, and a whole host of others, who were known as slaveowners, are now satisfied that the Union men of the South must see to it that slavery must never be permitted to be reëstablished in those States. Take such a man as the Hon. Charles Anderson. When he went home and stood up for the Union, what did the slave aristocracy do for him? They drove him from the State, and his wife and little ones were obliged to take shelter in the bush. And so with multitudes of Union men in Texas at the present day. But all of them wish to get back and establish a Free State in Texas; because, they say, no other than a Free State can ever protect them from the enemies of human freedom, and, I was going to say, of human nature. Again, in Florida there were many who were driven away who are now anxious to return. Is there a man here who wants these noble, generous Union men of the South to go back to be trampled under foot by restored rebels! Let them go back, but let them go back under the ægis of the American Union, and the protection of the Government pledged to them, and then they will take care to settle this question of slavery. They will amend the Constitution so as to put the slavery question where it ought to be. When that is done, who is going to talk about the Proclamation? You have here, my fellow citizens, an intelligent statement, as it seems to me, of the manner in which this thing can be settled: simply by standing by the unconditional Union men—who almost all of them have embraced the doctrine of emancipation in the Border States—and standing by the Union men in the rebellious States, and letting them protect themselves against the institution of slavery.'

At this stage of the present writing, and having just transferred these manly, patriotic, and statesmanlike sentiments to our columns, hoping that they might foreshadow the fixed policy of the Administration, of which Mr. Chase is so able and distinguished a member, we are overtaken by more than a full fruition of the hope in the publication of the President's Message and Proclamation of Amnesty to the South, upon the sole condition of the perpetual maintenance of the Proclamation of Emancipation issued a year ago; in other words, upon the condition of the total and definitive extinction of Slavery in the South. The men of the South who are ready for this are to be recognized as the loyal citizens, the New South—precisely what ought to be done. The machinery of the old State Governments is to remain intact, but to be turned over to this regenerated Southern party for administration. The whole military and civil force of the Union is to retain its guardianship over the South, during the transition, and to remain pledged to the maintenance of the status of freedom united with loyalty, until, by the growth and stability of the new order of things, the conquered territory shall dispense with its continued intervention. The plan devised by the President is admirable, and symptoms already exist that, like so many other of his leading measures, it is destined to meet with unbounded acceptance and popularity, from even the most diverse and disharmonious quarters. Trusting, therefore, that the practical administration of the war is drifting into the right policy, based on the true theory of its causes and legitimate termination, we may leave these merely political and military questions, and revert, in conclusion, to the possible remaining eventualities of the war. These may be, for the time, (1.) Seemingly prosperous and fortunate, or, (2.) Seemingly accompanied with disaster, discouragement, and dismay—ulterior even to the eventual triumph of our arms over the open enemies of the existing order of things.

Firstly, then, it may happen, that from this time out we shall be more and more decisively triumphant over the 'rump' of the rebellion still extant in the South; that the new policy of emancipation now so favorably inaugurated may work like a magical charm, and that among the happy and startling surprises to which we are daily becoming addicted, may be that of an unexpected readiness in the exhausted and repentant South to acquiesce in the new order of things; that our new financial scheme may develop germs of commercial prosperity more than adequate to compensate for all the strain upon our national energy and resources imposed by the war; that an immense and unparalleled expansion of national prosperity, hardly marred by the ripple of our financial encumbrances, may be in waiting for the future United States of America, and lie spread out in the immediate future before us; that untold wealth may be unearthed from our mines, marvellous discoveries and inventions made to increase our manufactures and means of locomotion, and new sources of learning and art and practical action be opened.

Suppose even less brilliant and rapid results. Suppose that the war lingers; that numerous and desperate battles have yet to be fought, and some reverses to be endured; but that we continue to hold the heart of the South up to our present lines in Georgia and East Tennessee; that the new system of things is gradually established and becomes solidified within the States already possessed: even this state of things, if providentially enforced on us after our best exertions have been put forth to succeed, may, again, unexpectedly prove to have concealed under seeming failure a more fortunate termination of our herculean work. Perhaps there is even yet not enough national virtue among us to leaven the whole lump, and thus, by being delayed of our too greedy aspirations for success, we may only the more surely succeed. A halt at this period of the war was foreshadowed, it will be remembered by the reader, in the earlier portion of this series of papers, written more than two years ago. At any rate, if the remaining resistance of the rebel government should prove more obstinate and prolonged than is now generally anticipated, let there be no discouragement, and no serious disappointment. Remember again, in that event, that our supreme triumphs are moral and social, for which our military successes are merely a basis; and that moral and social changes demand time to be consolidated and secured. Immense changes are being rapidly effected in the public sentiment and the prospective action of the reconquered portions of the South; but such changes are not made in a day; and some retardation of the national aspiration for a speedy termination of the war may prove our providential security against evils which, our own precipitancy might possibly otherwise incur. The retention of our present hold, the gradual but slow progress to a complete final conquest, and the steady assimilation of the reintegrated portions of the South with our Northern and the truly American character and sentiment, would still, therefore, deserve to be reckoned upon the side of seeming or obvious success.

But on the other hand, let us consider, for a moment, the other alternative—that of apparent disaster, incurred from the war, not so much in the light of overwhelming military defeats, which need hardly now to be seriously apprehended, as from financial exhaustion and other secondary causes introduced into the working of our national and social life through the operation and influence of the war. Mr. Cobden, undoubtedly a friend of our nation, and a shrewd observer of the world's affairs on the basis of experience, or a knowledge of the past, warns us to look forward to a period of almost utter prostration after the war shall have terminated, and to a train of serious consequences from the terrific strain put by it upon our energies and resources. Forebodings of a similar kind haunt the imaginations of many of our own citizens. The history of past wars and their results justify the anticipation. Perchance all this may prove an unnecessary fear. It may happen that the almost boundless recuperative energies of this young American civilization of ours may be destined to astonish our enemies, our friends, and ourselves, as much as the extent of our resources for action have already done—that the strain put upon us, instead of enfeebling us in the least, has been merely a healthy exercise for the growing muscles and thews of a young giant just now ripening into a first manhood, and never heretofore called upon for any adequate exertion to display his strength. We once heard an enthusiastic and progressive orator, referring to the marvels of modern development, utter, with a sublime and audacious eloquence, the startling assertion that 'Experience is a fool.' There is a sense, no doubt, in which the sentiment is true. Neither the growth, nor the inherent power, nor the elasticity of the rebound from seeming exhaustion, nor the immense acceleration of the rapidity of the future career of the American people, is to be safely measured by a reference to what has occurred with former nationalities, in other and different times. Our experience of the future, whatever it may be, will be, no doubt, essentially different from any of the past.

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The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 3, March, 1864

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