John F. Hume

“ President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion, and at the same time uphold its inciting cause, are preposterous and futile—that the rebellion, if crushed out to-morrow, would be renewed within a year if Slavery were left in full vigor—that army officers who remain to this day devoted to Slavery can at best be but halfway loyal to the Union—and that every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union. ”

“ There was another society which was called into existence by the slavery situation. Whether it was pro-slavery or anti-slavery was a question that long puzzled a good many people. It was the Colonization Society. A good many Anti-Slavery people believed in it for a time and gave it their support. "I am opposed to slavery, but I am not an Abolitionist: I am a Colonizationist," was a declaration that, when I was a boy, I heard many and many times, and from the lips of well-intending people. ”

“ If any one is desirous of estimating the extent of the sacrifice of life, of treasure, of home and family comforts, and of innumerable fair hopes that the institution of slavery, in its struggle, not merely for existence, but for supremacy, cost this country, let him visit a government cemetery in the neighborhood of one of the great battle-fields of the Rebellion, and there, while looking down the long avenues lined with memorial stones that a grateful country has set up, make inquiry as to the number of those that are there bivouacked "in fame's eternal camping ground." ”

“ When lighted up by the excitement of debate it could not fail to impress an audience.
Lincoln indulged in no gesticulation. If he had been addressing a bench of judges he would not have been more impassive in his manner. He was an animate, but not an animated, bean-pole. He poured out a steady flow of words—three to Douglas's two—in a simple and semi-conversational tone. He attempted no witticisms and indulged in no oratorical claptrap. His address was pure argument. Douglas's manner was one of excitement, and accompanied and emphasized by almost continuous bodily movement. ”

“ To say that extreme Abolitionists triumphed in Republican success and were causes of it, is as absurd as to call Prohibitionists successful if, after countless efforts totally to prohibit the liquor traffic, and after savage denunciations of those who try to regulate it, they should then turn round and form a comparatively insignificant portion of a victorious high-license party. The men who took a great and effective part in the fight against slavery were the men who remained with their respective parties. ”

“ So far, the South had been invariably victorious. In what appeared to be a decisive battle in the test case of admitting Missouri into the Union as a slave State, it had won. So pronounced was its triumph that whatever Anti-Slavery sentiment survived the conflict appeared to be stunned and helpless. All fight was knocked out of it. ”

“ Garrison was beyond all question a remarkable man. In the qualities that endow a successful leader in a desperate cause he has never been surpassed. He had an iron will that was directed by an inflexible conscience. "To him," says James Freeman Clarke, "right was right, and wrong was wrong, and he saw no half lights or half shadows between them." He was a natural orator. I never heard him talk, either on or off the platform, but I have heard those who had listened to him, speak of the singular gift he possessed in stating or combating a proposition. ”

“ Article.—All slaves who shall have enjoyed actual freedom by the chances of the war, at any time before the end of the rebellion, shall be forever free; but all owners of such, who shall not have been disloyal, shall be compensated for them at the same rates as is provided for States adopting abolishment of slavery, but in such way that no slave shall be twice accounted for. ”

“ As for the Union, by his services in successfully managing the finances of the country in its great crisis, he did as much to sustain the Union as any other man of that time. To accuse him of hostility and infidelity to the Union, is something that no one can do with impunity. In fact, so clear and so clean, as well as so bold and striking, is the record of Chase and his associates, beginning in 1840 and continuing down until the last shackle was stricken from the last bondsman's limbs, that even the shadow of the White House cannot obscure it. ”

“ The Far East is now certain to be the world's great battle-ground for the near future, and since we have entered that field as the master of the Philippines, like a knight of the olden time who was ready to do battle with all comers, we must be constantly increasing our preparation. We may not only have to fight the Russians and the Japanese and the Chinese, one or all, but those foolish Filipinos may again take it into their silly heads that they can govern themselves as well or better than we can do it for them. That means rebellion, and, of course, chastisement must follow. ”

“ Nevertheless, we have had some excellent people—not slave-owners—who, out of compassion for the black man, or from prejudice against his color, and, perhaps, from a little of both, have favored a policy of colonization in this country. Mr. Lincoln was one of them. "If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do with the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free the slaves and send them to Liberia." So said Mr. Lincoln in one of his debates with Douglas. ”

“ The only hope of ultimately suppressing slavery lay in the preservation of the Union, and every Abolitionist who argued or signed a petition for the dissolution was doing as much to perpetuate the evil he complained of, as if he had been a slaveholder. The Liberty party, in running Birney, simply committed a political crime, evil in almost all its consequences. They in no sense paved the way for the Republican party, or helped forward the Anti-Slavery cause, or hurt the existing organizations. ”

“ It did not take the country long to realize that in that young man, who was Wendell Phillips, a new oratorical luminary had arisen. He took up the work of lecturing as a profession, treating on other subjects as well as slavery; but when slavery was the subject no charge was made for his services. Said Frederic Hudson, the noted New York editor, in 1860: "It is probable that there is not another man in the United States who is as much heard and read as Henry Ward Beecher, unless the other man be Wendell Phillips." ”

“ They were by no means policy-wise. That was one of their peculiarities. Their idea seemed to be that they could drive people easier than they could lead them. They used no buttered phrases. They told the plainest truths in the plainest way. They gave their audiences hard words, and often received hard knocks in return. They called the slaveholders robbers and man-stealers. They branded Northern politicians with Southern principles as "dough-faces." But their hardest and sharpest expletives were reserved for those Northern clergymen who were either pro-slavery or non-committal. ”

“ The Society should be revived and re-established, not for a single campaign only, or for the rectification of such oppressions as are now in sight, but for all time. It ought to be made a permanent institution. It should be so arranged that the sons would step into the ranks as the fathers dropped out and that new recruits would be constantly enlisted. Thus reorganized the grand old institution would be an invaluable watchman on the walls of Freedom's stronghold. ”

“ Some idea—a faint one it is true—will then be had of the multitudes that gave up all they possessed that liberty might live and rule in this fair land of ours. They were martyrs in the very highest sense to Freedom's immeasurable cause. The war was the product of slavery. It was the natural outcome of the great moral conflict that had so long raged in this country. It was simply the development of an agitation that had begun on other lines. ”

“ Lincoln had claimed to be a Republican, and a leader of the Republicans, he had, in a speech at Bloomington, Illinois, asserted that, "the conclusion of it all is that we must restore the Missouri Compromise."
Now the adoption of the Missouri Compromise was the hardest blow ever inflicted on the cause of free soil in America. It did more to encourage the supporters of slavery and to discourage its opponents than anything else that ever happened. ”

“ It is beyond any question that his return to involuntary servitude in some condition or conditions, the disarming him of the ballot being the initial step in the proceeding, is seriously contemplated, if not deliberately planned. Indeed, under the name of "peonage" the work of re-establishing a system of slaveholding that is barbarous in the extreme is already begun. Men and women have been seized upon by force, and upon the most flimsy pretexts have been subjected to a bondage that in its inhumanities may easily equal even the slavery of the olden time. ”

“ Chase. "What a pity it is," he said, "that that young man is ruining himself. He is a bright man," he went on, "and I employed him professionally until he went daft on the subject of freeing the niggers whom the Lord made for the purpose of serving the white people."
Like pretty much all the early Abolitionists, Mr. Chase had a taste of mob violence. He had one singular experience. When the mob destroyed the printing establishment of James G. Birney in Cincinnati, Chase mingled with the crowd. He discovered that personal violence to Mr. Birney was contemplated and that his life was in danger. ”

“ On the contrary, he has only bitter words of condemnation. In his estimation, and according to his dogmatic utterance, they were criminals—political criminals. His words make it very manifest that, if Mr. Roosevelt had been a voter in 1840, he would not have been an Abolitionist. He would not have been one of that devoted little band of political philanthropists who went out, like David of old, to do battle with one of the giant abuses of the time, and who found in the voter's ballot a missile that they used with deadly effect. ”

“ The mention of Henry Ward Beecher's name is suggestive of oratory of the very highest order. It will not be denied by any competent and unprejudiced person that his great speech in England—there were five addresses, but the substance was the same—upon the American question (which directly involved the slavery issue) during our Civil War was far and away the finest exhibition of masterful eloquence that is to be credited to any of our countrymen. The world has never beaten it. ”

“ They looked to Liberia as a safety-valve. It did not take long for intelligent people who were really well-wishers of the black man to perceive these facts.
The severest blow that the Colonization Society received in America was from the pen of William Lloyd Garrison, who, under the title of Thoughts on African Colonisation, published a pamphlet that had wide distribution. It completely unmasked the pretended friendship of the Colonizationists for the negroes, free or slave. From that time they lost all support from real Anti-Slavery people. ”

“ It has now become absolutely necessary that slavery shall cease in order that freedom may be preserved in any portion of our land. The antagonistic principles of liberty and slavery have been roused into action, and one or the other must be victorious. ”

“ Writers of history—so called, although much of it is simple eulogy—have been more and more inclined to attribute the overthrow of slavery to the efforts of a few men, and particularly one man, who, after long opposition to, or neglect of, the freedom movement, came to its help in the closing scenes of a great conflict, while the earlier, and certainly equally meritorious, workers and fighters have been quite left out of the account. The writer does not object to laborers who entered the field at the eleventh hour, sharing with those who bore the heat and burden of the day ”

“ The idea, of course, was absurd. "Is it to be inferred that because I don't want a negro woman for a slave, I do want her for a wife?" was one of the quaint and pithy observations attributed to Mr. Lincoln. I heard Prof. Hudson, of Oberlin College, express the same idea in about the same words many years before.
And yet there were plenty of Northern people to whom "Amalgamation"—the word used to describe the apprehended union of the races—was a veritable scarecrow. A young gentleman in a neighborhood near where I lived when a boy was in all respects eligible for matrimony. ”

“ Roosevelt for the men and women—for representatives of both sexes were active sharers in the work performed—who inaugurated, and for a long period carried forward, the movement that led up to the overthrow of African slavery in this country. He has no encomiums to bestow on those same men and women for the protracted and exhausting labors they performed, the dangers they encountered, the insults they endured, the sacrifices they submitted to, the discouragements they confronted in many ways and forms in prosecuting their arduous undertaking. ”

“ At nineteen years of age he went to Wheeling, Virginia, to learn the trade of a saddler. He learned more than that. Wheeling, as he tells us, was then a great thoroughfare for the traffickers in human flesh. Their coffles passed through the place frequently. "My heart," he continues, "was grieved at the great abomination. I heard the wail of the captive, I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered into my soul."
But much as Lundy loathed the business of the slave-dealers and slave-drivers, he then had no idea of attempting its abolishment. ”

“ Wendell Phillips fairly thundered his denunciations. There was a general under-swell of indignation.
Now, Mr. Lincoln was not a man who was incapable of reading the signs of the times. He saw that he was drifting towards an irreparable breach with an element that had previously furnished his staunchest supporters. As a politician of great native shrewdness, as well as the head of the Government, he could not afford to let the quarrel go on and widen. There was need of conciliation. Something had to be done. We know what he did. He issued his Emancipation Proclamation. ”

“ The East, and especially New England, always believed in societies. If anything of a public nature was to be promoted or prevented, a society always appealed to the New Englander as the natural instrumentality. There is a tradition that when Boston was ravaged by a loathsome disease, a number of its leading citizens came together and promptly organized an anti-smallpox society.
When, therefore, it was decided that an Anti-Slavery movement should be inaugurated in Boston, the proper thing to do, according to all the standards of the place, was to organize a society. ”

“ Men came many miles to hear him, sometimes bringing their families with them. He succeeded in completely revolutionizing public opinion. It was too late for his adversaries to attempt a counter-movement, and the result was that Lane was re-elected by an almost unanimous vote.
There was no doubt about Lane's attitude on the slavery question. He was not only a radical Abolitionist, but the acknowledged leader of the Free-State men of Kansas. He recognized no right of property in man, as many Missouri slaveholders learned to their sorrow. ”

“ The fact that the Germans were fighting for an adopted government makes their loyalty more conspicuous. What they did was not from a love of war, but because they were Abolitionists. They were opposed to slavery. They owned no slaves. They wanted the Government sustained, because they believed that meant the end of slaveholding. They supported Frémont largely because of his freedom proclamation.
And here the writer, before closing his work, wants to say something about Frémont. He believes no man in this country was made the victim of greater injustice than he was. ”

“ Here—in Kentucky—they were property, and they generally received the care and consideration that ownership ordinarily establishes. The interest of the master was a factor in their behalf. In many instances there was genuine affection between owner and slave. "How much better off they would be if they only had good masters," was a remark I very often heard in Ohio, as the negroes would go slouching by with hanging heads and averted countenances. There is no doubt that at this time the physical condition of the blacks was generally much better in slavery than it was in freedom. ”

“ Nevertheless, notwithstanding the President, at the beginning of his official term, opposed Anti-Slavery agitation and Anti-Slavery action with all his might, he promptly faced about as soon as he discovered that the subject was one that would not "down." No one ever worked harder to find a solution of a difficult problem than he did of the slavery question. He began to formulate plans to that end, the most distinguishing feature, however, being the spirit of compromise by which they were pervaded. ”

“ In his interesting, though rather melodramatic, romance, The Crisis, Winston Churchill tells the imaginary story of a young lawyer who went from New England to St. Louis, and settled there shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. Having an abundance of leisure, and being an Abolitionist, he devoted a portion of the time that was not absorbed by his profession to writing articles on slavery for the Missouri Democrat, which, notwithstanding its name, was the organ of the Missouri emancipationists, and lived in part on the money he received as compensation for that work. ”

“ The Liberator was excluded from the United States mails in all the slave States, illegal as such a proceeding was.
There was, however, opposition nearer home. The Liberator establishment was wrecked by a mob, and Garrison, after having been stripped of nearly all his clothing, was dragged, bareheaded, by a rope round his body through the streets of Boston until, to save his life, the authorities thrust him into jail.
No man in this country was so cordially hated by the slaveholders as Garrison. Of the big men up North—the leaders of politics and society—they had no apprehension. ”

“ Roosevelt, the men of the Liberty-Free-Soil party had no share in fathering and nurturing the Republican party, to which he assigns all the credit for crushing slavery. Says he, "The Liberty party was not in any sense the precursor of the Republican party, which was based as much on expediency as on abstract right." It is very true that many Republicans, especially in the earlier days, were neither Abolitionists nor Anti-Slavery people. A good many of them, like Abraham Lincoln, were sentimentally adverse to slavery, but under existing conditions did not want it disturbed. ”

“ The fact will always appear that it was the policy of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and other advocates of the radical cure, with whom the President was in constant opposition, that prevailed in the end, and with a decisiveness that proves it to have been feasible and sound from the beginning. Mr. Lincoln's most ultra prescription—his Emancipation Proclamation—was ineffective. If it was intended to eradicate slavery altogether, it was too narrow; if to free the slaves of Rebels only, it was too broad. ”