Carter Godwin Woodson

“ From the instant that your slaveholding States become the theatre of a war, civil, servile, or foreign, from that instant, the war powers of Congress extend to interference with the institution of slavery, in every way by which it can be interfered with, from a claim of indemnity for slaves taken or destroyed, to the cession of States burdened with slavery to a foreign power."—New York Tribune. ”

“ Slaveholding is simply piracy continued. Our people are beginning to spell out that short and easy lesson in the light of perjury, robbery, assassination, poisoning, and all the more than Algerine atrocities of this rebellion. It cannot require many more months of schooling like the last eight, to convince the dullest of us what are its essence and spirit. Our people also are rapidly finding out that no peaceful termination of this war will be permitted now by the Slave Power, except by its thorough overthrow. The robber has thrown off the mask, and says now to the nation, "Your life or mine!" ”

“ But Rebellion stalks through the land. A confederacy of slave States has repudiated that Constitution; and, placing themselves beyond its pale, openly seeks to destroy it, and ruin all whom it protects. They no longer profess any obedience to its requirements; and, of course, cannot claim its protection. By their own act, our duty to respect their rights, under that Constitution, ceases with their repudiation of it; and our right to liberate their slave property is as clear as would be our right to liberate the slaves of Cuba in a war with Spain. ”

“ Adams would not have been compelled to rely upon these comparatively trivial and unimportant instances of interference by Congress and the President for the support and protection of slavery. For the last twenty years, the support and protection of that institution has been, to use Mr. Adams's words at a later day, the vital and animating spirit of the Government; and the Constitution has been interpreted and administered as if it contained an injunction upon all men, in power and out of power, to sustain and perpetuate slavery. ”

“ O. A. BROWNSON ON THE WAR.
There is neither reason nor justice in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the great States northwest of the Ohio pouring out their blood and treasure for the gratification of the slaveholding pretensions of Maryland, Kentucky or Missouri. The citizens of these States who own slaves are as much bound, if the preservation of the Union requires it, to give up their property in slaves, as we at the farther North are to pour out our blood and treasure to put down a rebellion which threatens alike them and us. ”

“ It was impossible for Northern men to fathom the spirit and the desperate exigencies of the slave system and its outbreak, and consequently to comprehend the desperate nature of the struggle. We were like a policeman endeavoring to arrest a boy-ruffian, and, for the sake of his friends and for old acquaintance sake, doing it with all possible tenderness for his person and his feelings—till all of a sudden he feels the grip on his throat and the dagger's point at his breast, and knows that it is a life-and-cleath grapple. ”

“ We are stronger to fight the battles of the Union without them than we are with them.
But we have referred only to the slaves in the rebellious States, and if it is, or if it becomes, a military necessity to liberate all the slaves of the Union, and to treat the whole present slave population as freemen and citizens, it would be no more than just and proper that, at the conclusion of the war, the citizens of loyal States, or the loyal citizens of loyal sections of the rebellious States, should be indemnified at a reasonable rate for the slaves that may have been liberated. ”

“ We are no fanatics on the subject of slavery, as is well known to our readers, and we make no extraordinary pretensions to modern philanthropy; but we cannot help fearing that, if the government lets slip the present opportunity of doing justice to the negro race, and of placing our republic throughout in harmony with modern civilization, God, who is especially the God of the poor and the oppressed, will never give victory to our arms, or suffer us to succeed in our efforts to suppress rebellion and restore peace and integrity in the Union. ”

“ The South has sufficiently declared the cause of this trouble to be the irreconcilable conflict between their institutions and the fundamental principles of this government. While the cause remains in full strength, and after it has once burst forth in bloody and final collision, nothing will ever check that strife, whether in or out of the Union. The cause must be eradicated. Meanwhile, our own position, both before the world and in our own struggle at home, is a false one, so long as we blink the real issue. ”

“ But the men of the North know how to deal with them; and we tell them, once for all, that, if they dare grant a solitary letter of marque, and the person or persons acting under it venture to assail the poorest of our vessels in the peaceful navigation of the ocean, or the coasts and rivers of our country—from that moment their doom is sealed, and slavery ceases to exist. We speak the unanimous sentiment of our people; and to that sentiment all in authority will be compelled to bow submissively. ”

“ I say that military authority takes, for the time, the place of all municipal institutions, and slavery among the rest; and that, under that state of things, so far from its being true that the States where slavery exists have the exclusive management of the subject, not only the President of the United States, but the Commander of the Army, has power to order the universal emancipation of the slaves. ”

“ By land and water, if she places herself in the attitude of rebellion, Maryland may be overrun and subdued in a single week, including the extinction of slavery within her own borders; for war makes its own laws.
We are less concerned about Washington than about Maryland. Loyal to the Union, she is perfectly safe, negroes and all; disloyal to the Union, she may be crushed, including her institution of slavery. Let her stand by the Union, and the Union will protect and respect her—slavery and all.—Ibid, April 21. Virginia, next to Maryland, will be subjected to this test. ”

“ He asserted that, in time of war, all slaves were belligerents as much as their masters. The slave men, said he, cultivate the earth and supply provisions. The women cook the food, nurse the wounded and sick, and contribute to the maintenance of the war, often more than the same number of males. The slave children equally contribute whatever they are able to the support of the war. Indeed, he well supported General Butler's declaration, that slaves are contraband of war. ”

“ The day is not far off when the Union men of the revolted States will be asked to come to the relief of their misguided brethren, for, otherwise, the war which they have chosen to secure their institution of slavery may result in wiping it out of existence.—Ibid, April 23. ”

“ But the risk, nay, the certainty of the punishment to be visited upon the slave confederacy, will be far greater—of infinitely greater magnitude than they can well conceive; because it will be no more or less than the loss of all their slave property, accompanied with the necessity of contending, hand to hand, for their lives, with the servile race so long accustomed to the lash, and the torture, and the branding and maiming of their inhuman masters ”

“ Finally, the revolted States having appealed to the sword of revolution to redress their wrongs, may soon have to choose between submission to the Union or the bloody extinction of slavery, from the absence of any law, any wish, any power for its protection.—Ibid, April 20. ”

“ In the North, the case is different; the men who join the army of subjugation are the laborers, the producers, and the factory operatives. Nearly every man from that section, especially those from the rural districts, leaves some branch of industry to suffer during his absence. The institution of slavery in the South alone enables her to place in the field a force much larger in proportion to her white population than the North, or indeed any country which is dependent entirely on free labor. ”

“ That as slaves enable an enemy to continue and carry on the war now waged against our Government, it becomes the duty of all officers and loyal citizens to use every proper means to induce the slaves to leave their masters, and cease lending aid and comfort to the rebels. ”

“ To our apprehension, God is fast closing every avenue to settled peace but by emancipation. And one of the most encouraging facts is that the eyes of the nation are becoming turned in that direction quite as rapidly as could have been anticipated. Some men of conservative antecedents, like Dickinson of New York, saw this necessity from the first. But it takes time to accustom a whole people to the thought, and to make them see the necessity. ”

“ As long as they do not step out of their own bounds, and do not put the question to the people of the United States, whose peace, welfare and happiness are all at stake, so long I will agree to leave them to themselves. ”

“ The States and sections of States named have not a large number of slaves, and if the Union is preserved, it would not be a very heavy burden on it to pay their ransom; and to paying it, no patriot or loyal citizen of the free States would raise the slightest objection. ”

“ I might furnish a thousand proofs to show that the pretensions of gentlemen to the sanctity of their municipal institutions under a state of actual invasion and of actual war, whether servile, civil or foreign, is wholly unfounded, and that the laws of war do, in all such cases, take the precedence. ”

“ But every day's experience is scattering that notion to the winds. The ferocious spirit exhibited from the first by the Secessionists towards all dissentients, the invasion of Western Virginia by Eastern, the threats to put down loyal Kentucky, the foray in Missouri, the plan for capturing "Washington, which was part of the original scheme, are convincing proofs, that if by any pacification whatever our troops were disbanded to-day, to-morrow a Southern army would be on the march for Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and perhaps Chicago. ”

“ In order, therefore, to suppress disorder, maintain the public peace, and give security to the persons and property of loyal citizens, I do hereby extend and declare martial law throughout the State of Missouri.
The lines of the army occupation in this State are, for the present, declared to extend from Leavenworth by way of posts to Jefferson City, Rolla and Ironton, to Cape Girardeau, on the Mississippi river. All persons who shall be taken with arms in their hands, within these lines, shall be tried by court martial, and, if found guilty, shall be shot. ”

“ Real and personal property, owned by persons who shall take up arms against the United States, or who shall be directly proven to have taken an active part with the enemy in the field, is declared confiscated to public use, and their slaves, if any they have, are hereby declared free men. ”

“ The rebellion must be put down by some means or another, else it will put us down; and if nothing else will do, even to proclaim the abolition of slavery would be legitimate. All is fair in war. Gen. Fremont and the' other Generals must act according to circumstances, and their own judgment, unless when otherwise ordered. If he is acting on his own responsibility, he is only carrying out the Confiscation Act, so far as the slaves are concerned. ”

“ Its disorganized condition, helplessness of civil authority, and the total insecurity of life and devastation of property by bands of murderers and marauders, who infest nearly every county in the State, and avail themselves of public misfortunes and the vicinity of a hostile force to gratify private and neighborhood vengeance, and who find an enemy wherever they fiud plunder, finally demand the severest measures to repress the daily increasing crimes and outrages which are driving off the inhabitants and ruining the State. ”

“ The institution is a tower of strength to the South, particularly at the present crisis, and our enemies will be likely to find that the "moral cancer," about which their orators are so fond of prating, is really one of the most effective weapons employed against the Union by the South. Whatever number of men may be needed for this war, we are confident our people stand ready to furnish. We are all enlisted for the war, and there must be no holding back until the independence of the South is fully acknowledged.—Montgomery (Ala.) ”

“ Even the compromising Everett has boldly told the South, "To be let alone is not all you ask—but you demand a great deal more." And in his late oration, he has most powerfully portrayed the impossibility of a peaceful disunion. Many men, some anti-slavery, were at first inclined to yield to the idea of a separation. ”

“ A Northern invasion of Virginia and of Kentucky, if necessary, carrying along with it the Canadian line of African freedom, as it must do from the very nature of civil war, will produce a powerful Union reaction. The slave population of the border States will be moved in two directions. ”

“ Venture upon the capture of the poorest of those 'richly laden ships,' and, from that moment, your slaves become freemen, doing battle in Freedom's cause. 'Hundreds and hundreds of millions of the property of the enemy invite us to spoil him—to spoil these Egyptians,' says the same paper. ”

“ All persons engaged in treasonable correspondence, in giving or procuring aid to the enemy, in fomenting turmoils and disturbing public tranquility by creating or circulating false reports or incendiary documents, are warned that they are exposing themselves. ”