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466  DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.  June, 1861
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ment to give the slaveholders a stick to break its own head, is to take up and cling to a line of policy of favor to slavery.

4.  The glaring impolicy of alienating the slave population becomes the more striking in view of the situation of the conflict.  'Knowledge is power,' and no where more than in war.  Battles are won by knowledge, rather than by arms; and battles are often lost, rather by the want of knowledge, than the want of arms.  To know the movements, the position and the number of the enemy, just where and when they mean to strike, is of first importance.  Without this knowledge, we strike in the dark, and as one who beateth the air.  To gain knowledge of the situation of the enemy, and to keep that enemy ignorant of your own situation, is one of simplest dictates of military prudence.  Now, by making enemies of the slaves, the Government destroys one means of obtaining valuable information.  It might be in the power of a slave, in a given case, to save the lives of thousands, to prevent discomfiture and defeat to a whole army.  But what slave would put himself to the least trouble of imparting such information, if made certain before hand that he should be rewarded with slavery and chains?  What slave would hesitate to deceive and mislead an army when that army had only bro't to him and his, stripes, hunger, nakedness, and an every way more rigorous bondage?  The Washington Government, in offering to put down slave insurrections, in sending back to infuriated masters the slaves who may escape to them, enacts the folly of maiming itself before striking down its enemy, of increasing the number of its enemies, and diminishing the number of its friends, of weakening itself while giving strength to the arm that would strike it down, of abusing its allies to please its implacable foes.

5.  But while depriving itself of all possible advantage in the conflict with traitors, from their natural allies in the slave States, our Government seems bent upon making those natural allies efficient helps to the traitors.--We are for saving them all danger from sending spies into our camp.  The black slave makes his way into our camp, reports himself a runaway slave, seeking his liberty, and asks for protection.  While his tongue is busy, his eyes are busy also; and when he has seen just what he was desired to see, and obtained the information which those who sent him most of all want to know, we magnanimously send away the spy in peace, under military escort, to communicate his valuable information to our enemies.  What hinders the Confederate rebels from using their slaves as spies, while they can do so without fear of loss of life or property?  This, to be sure, is an idea of our own; but among the excited brains of the South they will not be long in hitting upon it if our Government persists in the gross absurdity of making their army the watch dog of the slave plantation, to guard and protect the rebels from insurrection, and from loss of the very species of property in defence of which they have plunged the nation into all the hardships and horrors of civil war.  Instead of retaining them to help uphold the law, by giving valuable information, and building fortifications, we send them back to help the rebels destroy the Government, by imparting information, erecting fortifications, and using arms against the friends of the Government.
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If this is military sagacity, where shall we look for military insanity?

6.  In a moral and humane point of view, the conduct of our Government towards the few slaves coming within their power, would be a disgrace to savages.  Even a man in arms against us will be spared when he cries quarter; but we pounce upon the slave who comes, not in arms, but flings himself upon our charity; we bind him with chains, and fling him into the hands of both his, and our deadly enemies, to be tortured and killed, only for the crime of loving liberty better than slavery, disregarding all laws of humanity, asylum and hospitality.  Such conduct, in the circumstances, is too monstrous, cruel and brutal, to be fittingly characterized by anything in the English tongue.

Perhaps, when the slaveholders shall have assassinated a few more ELLSWORTHS, poisoned a few more troops, sent out a few more pirates to prey upon our commerce, hanged and shot a few more Union-loving and loyal citizens, shed the blood of a few more soldiers, mobbed a few more loyal troops, our Government will begin to treat them like enemies, and no longer be guilty of the folly and crime of treating them as friends, for whom it may excusably stain its soul with innocent blood, to increase their power for future mischief and murder.  But whatever may come to pass after suitable instruction, in this slaveholding revolutionary school thro' which the nation is passing, the sad truth stares us in the face at every turn, that slavery is still the dominant and master power in the country, and that it has perverted the moral sense, blinded and corrupted the mind and heart of the nation beyond all power of exaggeration, and that overawed by the accursed slave system, our Government is still clinging to the delusion that it can put down treason without putting down their cause; that it can break the power of the slaveholders, without breaking down that in which their power consists.
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--At this point of our writing, a statement has reached us which, if true, slightly relieves the picture thus drawn, and shows that our Government is taking a wiser and more humane course towards those of the slaves who succeed in getting within the lines of our army.  General BUTLER, now at Fort Monroe, who a few weeks ago at Annapolis, under circumstances which made the act peculiarly and abominably hateful and shocking, offered, unasked, to suppress a reported rising among the slaves in Anne Arundel county, has now promptly received a number of fugitives into his camp, and set them to work, refusing, on the demand of the rebels, to give them up to their masters.  This is as it should be, and shows that better ideas are beginning to control the action of our army officers.  The men of our Northern army did not quit their homes and families, and expose themselves to all the hardships and dangers of war, to hunt slaves and put down slave insurrections.  They have not gone down there as the guards and watch dogs of the slaveholders, to ferret out the slave in the dismal swamp, and to rivet the fetters more firmly upon the limbs of the bondmen; and to compel them to do it, is a scandalous outrage, which should be exposed, rebuked and abandoned at once.  Gen. BUTLER has made progress, and that is something.--The end is not yet.  He has come to put
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slaves on a footing with other property, entitled to no more respect than any other--a new thing under the sun of the Old Dominion--but the General will not stop here.  He is within the broad and all-controlling current of events, and if the war continues, we shall see him contending for the freedom of all those slaves who have assisted the Government in putting down the slaveholding rebellion.  It is our work here to radiate around our army and Government the light and heat of justice and humanity, and make it impossible for them to fling one soul back into the jaws of bondage which has escaped to them for an asylum during this war.
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DANGER TO THE ABOLITION CAUSE.
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Very evidently we are on the verge of a new danger--a danger of thinking and acting as if our work were done, when in fact we are still only at the beginning of that work.  Speculations as to the final results of the tremendous conflict now going forward between the slaveholding rebels and the Federal Government, are of every variety; but they generally lean to the side of freedom, and we think properly so.  Anti-slavery men, characteristically hopeful, see in the result of this clash of arms the certain and complete abolition of slavery.  It is true they do not and cannot tell us how this thing is to be accomplished, or point us to any particular measure or policy of the Government at Washington, or of the army in the field, in any way calculated to bring about this result; but they still hope and believe that by some means now inscrutable, Providence will bring freedom to the slave out of this civil war.  Herein is the danger of our laying down our mighty arms of truth and love before our great work of moral regeneration has been in any measure accomplished, and the millions of our fellows are still in chains.

We, too, are hopeful, but look not for miracles.  We are not expecting to see the waters roll asunder, and give to those now in bondage a dry road to freedom, and then roll back again and swallow up the pursuing hosts of our modern Pharaohs; we are not expecting manna from heaven to satisfy the hunger of the emancipated, nor water to gush forth from the solid rock to quench their thirst.--We have to deal with stubborn facts and with fixed laws, and to regulate our conduct in the light of their certain operation.  Nothing should be left to chance or to accident.

In saying this we would not be understood as casting aside the consoling support arising from the faith that all the Divine powers of the universe are on the side of freedom and progress, for with a grateful heart and a cheerful spirit this faith should be firmly clung to, and closely cultivated.  In this we say to our friends, in every trial and season of darkness, 'cast not away your confidence.'  He that is for us is more than all that can be against us.  No people ever needed this faith more than we who are contending against the huge and powerful system of American slavery.  But we need it the better to enable us to work.  Our faith is at once to be suspected the moment it leads us to fold our hands and leave the cause of the slave to Providence.  This has been the great and deadly sin of the American church and clergy from the beginning.  They have piously left the question of slavery to Providence, loving their own ease,
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Transcription Notes:
It seems that the writer was stating his present condition and how he truly felt about his slave owner. That there is no point of fighting physical only way that he could win was by knowledge and out smarting his master. Shalom.