Slave rebellion

“ The cause of the great War of the Rebellion against the United Status will have to be attributed to slavery. For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that "A state half slave and half free cannot exist." All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time, but since the war is over, reviewing the whole question, I have come to the conclusion that the saying is quite true. ”

“ It is slavery that renews the strife. It is slavery that again wants room. It is slavery with its insatiate demand for more slave territory and more slave States. And what does slavery ask for now? Why, sir, it demands that a time-honored and sacred compact shall be rescinded—a compact which has endured through a whole generation—a compact which has been universally regarded as inviolable, North and South—a compact, the constitutionality of which few have doubted, and by which all have consented to abide. ”

“ We cannot alter our course one hair's breadth, nor accept a compromise of our principles for the hearty adoption of our principles. I am for meddling with slavery everywhere—attacking it by night and by day, in season and out of season (no, it can never be out of season) —in order to effect its overthrow. (Loud applause.) Higher yet will be my cry. Upward and onward! No union with slave-holders! Down with this slave-holding government! ”

“ And now let us briefly inquire into the influence of slavery on the white man's character; for in this evil there is a mighty re-action. "Such is the constitution of things, that we cannot inflict an injury without suffering from it ourselves: he who blesses another, benefits himself; but he who sins against his fellow-creature, does his own soul a grievous wrong." The effect produced upon slave-captains is absolutely frightful. ”

“ Negro slavery, and its legitimate outgrowths of ignorance, tyranny and oppression, have caused this gigantic rebellion, which has cost our country thousands of millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of human lives in defending a principle. ”

“ Slavery is, after all, the great demoralizer of the human race. In addition to the marks of barbarism left upon the features of the African, he has the indelible imprint of the task-master. Want of food, clothing, medical attention when sick, over-work, under the control of drunken and heartless drivers, the hand-cuffs and Negro whip, together with the other paraphernalia of the slave-code, has done much to distinguish the blacks from the rest of the human family. ”

“ Slavery was nationalized, and freedom limited and circumscribed with the evident intent soon to strangle it in all the States, and spread forced labor over the continent, from the North to Cape Horn. Failing in the election, slavery then assailed the vital principle of the republic, the rule of the majority, and inaugurated the rebellion. ”

“ That small number of slaveholders sustains the system of slavery, and has caused this terrible rebellion. They are, almost to a man, rebels and secessionists, and we may cover the South with armies, and keep a file of soldiers upon every plantation, and not smother this insurrection unless we break down the power of that class. Their wealth gives them their power, and their wealth is in their slaves. Free their negroes by an act of Emancipation, or Confiscation, and the rebellion will crumble to pieces in a day. ”

“ As the anti-slavery movement developed, the call for immediate liberation became more insistent and imperative. The colonization method lost credit. Slavery was coming to be regarded by its opponents not merely as a social evil to be eradicated, but as a personal sin of the slave-holder, to be renounced as promptly as any other sin. ”

“ But all must see—and nobody can deny—that slavery is the ruling idea of this rebellion. It is slavery which marshals these hosts and breathes into their embattled ranks its own barbarous fire. It is slavery which stamps its character alike upon officers and men. ”

“ I said already, that I do not deem another victory of slavery over the national conscience impossible; but this reaction will produce new struggles, with passions more fierce, with resentments more acrimonious and reckless, and dangerous to our democratic institutions, and violent in their nature; but as to slavery, radical and conclusive in their results. [Applause.] This rebellion has uprooted the very foundations of the system, and slavery is not far from its death. [Cheers.] It will die, and if you would, you could not prevent it. ”

“ First, there are the five millions of mean, non-slaveholding whites. These the system has reduced to a condition below that of the slave himself, in many cases. Slavery becomes at once their curse and their infatuation. It fascinates while it crushes them ”

“ The revolting scenes of the inter-State slave trade, the abominations of slave breeding, the barbarities of the cotton field and rice swamps, the ferocities of the slave hunt with blood-hounds in the South, and with more savage men in the free States, the imprisonments and lynchings of Northern men found in the slave States and suspected of holding abolition sentiments, the many collisions between slavery and freedom, which have in some instances proceeded to bloodshed and death, have caused much irritation and deep indignation throughout the country. ”

“ Have not the providential developments of the rebellion revealed a new goal in our national progress? Instead of being a dire calamity, may we not rather consider the present civil war as a means, in the hand of Divine Providence, for the solution of a great moral problem—the overthrow of slavery? ”

“ The outlawry of all Northern men of known hostility to slavery—the numberless pro-slavery mobs and lynchings, her defiant and awful defence of the traffic in human flesh, her increasing rigor and cruelties towards the slaves, and finally her horrible treason and rebellion to secure her independence as a vast slaveholding empire, through all time, all mightily helped to defeat her impious purpose and to hasten the year of jubilee. ”

“ Slavery has gained victories large and numerous; but never as against this movement—against a temporizing policy, and against northern timidity, the slave power has been victorious; but against the spread and prevalence in the country, of a spirit of resistance to its aggression, and of sentiments favorable to its entire overthrow, it has yet accomplished nothing. Every measure, yet devised and executed, having for its object the suppression [369] of anti-slavery, has been as idle and fruitless as pouring oil to extinguish fire. ”

“ Now, I can truly say, that, during several years’ residence in the South, I have lived in families owning hundreds of negroes, and never saw any unnecessary severity, or wanton cruelty; but, on the contrary, ever saw the slaves treated with kindness and humanity, indeed, often with more than was judicious. And here I would inform the abolitionists that they are depriving the slaves of many privileges and advantages, by their incendiary doings. They are the worst enemy the slave now has. ”

“ If slavery were an unutterably evil institution, with no alleviating features, how are we to account for the fact that when the Confederate soldiers were at the front fighting, as they thought, for their independence, the negroes on the plantations took care of the women and children and old people, and nothing like an act of violence was ever known among them?... Is it not perfectly evident that there was a great rebellion, but that the rebels were the Northerners and that those who defended the Constitution as it was were the Southerners ”

“ The infusion of Anglo-Saxon with African blood has created an insurrectionary feeling among the slaves of America hitherto unknown. Aware of their blood connection with their owners, these mulattoes labour under the sense of their personal and social injuries; and tolerate, if they do not encourage in themselves, low and vindictive passions. On the other hand, the slave owners are aware of their critical position, and are ever watchful, always fearing an outbreak among the slaves. ”

“ Spite of the eloquence of the earnest Abolitionists,—poured out against slavery during thirty years,—even they must confess, that, in all the probabilities of the case, that system of barbarism would have continued its horrors far beyond the limits of the nineteenth century but for the Rebellion, and perhaps only have disappeared at last in a fiery conflict, even more fierce and bloody than that which has now been suppressed. ”

“ The assertions that the great contest between free and slave labor has no foundation in fact, that the origin of the slavery controversy is to be found in the fanaticism of a few Northern abolitionists, and that those who speak of an “irrepressible conflict” are to be made responsible for its existence—these form the argumentative staple of those who possess either not sagacity enough to discern or not courage enough to state facts as they are. ”

“ The faithful slave, who, in this reciprocal destruction, came to claim the protection of his master against those who on either side sought his life, was in many instances put to death by that very master himself. This blind severity served no purpose but to swell the ranks of the rebels, for the peaceable negro could find no security for his life but by assuming arms in the ranks of his countrymen. ”

“ The souls of the slaves fall prostrate, having no will of their own, and deeming every rebellion, insurrectionary thought and feeling, a crime deserving scourging and death, and eternal banishment from God and heaven. ”

“ We have got our wives, our daughters, our sons, our property, all at their mercy—a quantity of papers and pamphlets are circulated among them, in which the slave-holder is portrayed as a monster of hell—a picture or plate of some act of cruelty generally heads the production—individual acts of cruelty and oppression are selected, and so related as if similar deeds were daily committed by every slave-holder in the South! What must the poor man of colour think upon reading, or seeing, this? ”

“ The effects of Slavery on the bond and Colonization on the free. Of the first we shall say but little, but will here repeat the language of a high-minded Virginian in the Legislature of that State, on the recent discussion of the slave question before that honorable body, who declared, that man could not hold property in man, and that the master held no right to the slave, either by a law of nature or a patentee from God, but by the will of society; which we declare to be an unjust usurpation of the rights and privileges of men. ”

“ How the consequences of abolishing slavery would be dreadful and horrible, neither history nor experience informs us. Let us, then, see what they tell us of the consequences of holding men in bondage. In every instance which has fallen under my notice, insurrections have always been projected and carried on by slaves, and never (with the exception of Denmark Vesey in 1822, in Charleston, S. C.) by the free blacks. ”

“ If we say no, it is no! Slavery is a curse to the North. It impoverishes the South, and demoralizes both. It is the parent of treason, the seedling of tyranny, and the fountain-source of all the ills that have infected our life as a people, being the central cause of all our conflicts of the past and the war of to-day. ”

“ If slavery or any other institution stands in the way, it must be removed. I think the loyal masses are rapidly adopting the idea that to smite the rebellion, its malignant cause must be smitten. Perhaps we are slow in coming to it, and it may be even now we are receiving our severe chastisement for not more readily accepting the teachings of Providence. ”

“ But, soothing as these retrospections of our father's useful life and humane management of his numerous slaves are to my heart, I must turn from the pleasing picture, and tell you what the abolitionists have reported about us at the North. They say, "That one of our punishments is to bury our negroes up to their necks, and leave them for a whole day perhaps thus imprisoned." "That a master claims all the property of the slave when he dies, and his wife and children get nothing ”

“ But it is still here, it still works and one of the most magnificent anomalies in modern human history is the labor and fighting of a half-million black men and two million whites for the freedom of four million slaves and these same slaves, dumbly but faithfully and not wholly unconsciously, protecting the mothers, wives and children of the very white men who fought to make their slavery perpetual. ”

“ Now, at last, slavery has risen in arms against our nationality. It has defied us, for our own salvation, to destroy it. Slavery itself, with its defiance, has put the weapon into our hands, and in obedience to the command of events the Government of the Republic has at last struck the blow. ”

“ The negro chiefs would have no neutrals among those of their race, and the more faithful slaves, who were found concealing themselves from the rebels, were immediately put to de by their own countrymen. On the other hand, parties of enraged whites were traversing the country, and, with an undiscriminating vengeance, killing every living thing that was black. ”

“ God will not hold guiltless men and women who, hearing the stifled cries of the enslaved, heed them not! It behooves the sons and daughters of the brave men who freed the black slaves to rise in another and holier crusade to free the white slaves from a bondage blacker and more damning than any the world has yet known. ”

“ But the fact of freedom to many thousands of slaves by reason of this war, and the inevitable speedy breaking down of the institution of slavery as one of the consequences to slaveholders of their mad folly, are beyond dispute, and assure us of the wise Providence of Him who maketh even the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain. ”