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^[[RK. Ross]]

[[bold]] DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. [[/bold]]
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"OPEN THY MOUTH FOR THE DUMB, IN THE CAUSE OF ALL SUCH AS ARE APPOINTED TO DESTRUCTION; OPEN THY MOUTH, JUDGE RIGHTEOUSLY, AND PLEAD THE CAUSE OF THE POOR AND NEEDY."-- [[italics]] Proverbs xxxi. [[/italics]] 8, 9.
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[[column 1]] VOLUME IV. }
NUMBER III. } [[/column 1]]

[[column 2]] ROCHESTER, NEW YORK, AUGUST, 1861. [[/column 2]]

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{ PRICE--
{ ONE DOLLAR PER ANNUM [[/column 3]]
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[[bold]] CONTENTS OF THE PRESENT NUMBER. [[/bold]]
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The War and Slavery.......................497
The Rebels, the Government and the Differ-
   ence between them......................498
A Black Hero..............................499
John Jay's 4th of July Address............499
American Diplomacy........................500
West India Emancipation...................500
Lecture by Frederick Douglass.............500
Congress and Fugitive Slave Law...........502
Exciting Scene at Flushing................503
Letters from the Old World................504
The Lesson of St. Domingo.................505
The Question at the Door..................507
Denmark Vesey (concluded).................508
Extract from the President's Message......511
Anti-Slavery Pic-Nic in Rochester.........511
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[[bold]] DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. [[/bold]]
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[[bold]] THE WAR AND SLAVERY. [[/bold]]
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We have no change to report of the moral position of the Federal Government in respect to slavery. As the beginning of July left us, so the beginning of August finds us.  We are still treading the unsteady billows of events, and walking amid the flitting shadows of doubt and uncertainty. Aside from the mere compelling obedience to the laws, no high and inflexible principle of public policy has been announced by the Government.--From present appearances, nothing is contemplated but the restoration of the country to the same condition in which rebellion and bloodshed found it, leaving the elements of mischief to repeat, under more favorable circumstances, the atrocities and crimes by which the country is now afflicted.  Thus far we are contenting ourselves with trimming off the leaves and branches, and leaving the trunk and roots of rebellion firmly fixed in the soil, ready to gather new sap, and to sprout forth again with renewed vigor.  The great army of the North has moved into Eastern Virginia, and the Federal arms have been victorious in Western Virginia; but no moral progress yet marks the career of the Federal Government.  The political horizon is scanned with breathless suspense.  Those amongst us who believe that freedom is always right and best, and that slavery is always wrong and worst, watch and wait with longing hearts to see the Government stumble upon the only true and sound policy suggested and required by the crisis.--That policy is nothing more nor less than the complete and unalterable abolition of slavery, the known cause of all our present national troubles.  But thus far we have watched and waited in vain.  When Congress voted upon the resolution of Mr. LOVEJOY, declaring the recapture of runaway slaves no part of the present business of our army, we seemed on the verge of the right path; but when the Government decided that no more slaves should be allowed within the lines of our army, and that none should follow our soldiers, the loss was greater than the gain.  This decision evades, ignores the real issue.  The Government, in taking it, has settled nothing, but its own moral cowardice and insufficiency.  In this, however, the Government but reflects the mind of people.
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Self-deception is a chronic disease of the American mind and character.  The crooked way is ever preferred to the straight in all our mental processes, and in all our studied actions.  We are masters in the art of substituting a pleasant falsehood for an ugly and disagreeable truth, and of clinging to a fascinating delusion while rejecting a palpable reality.  Every reflecting man knows, and knows full well, that the real source and centre of the treason, rebellion and bloodshed under which the country is now staggering as if to its fall, is slavery.  Every one knows that this is a slaveholder's rebellion, and nothing else.  Every one knows that here is the source of its power, the fountain of its motives, and the explanation of its purposes; that the measureless enormity of rebellion and treason can be traced to no other parentage than that of the American slave system.--Neither merchants, manufacturers, lawyers, mechanics or laborers, whatever might have been their hardships, would have turned from the peaceful methods of the ballot box, to the deadly one of the cartridge box, to redress their wrongs, real or fancied.  Neither of these classes have possessed the ability, the temptation or the disposition to perpetrate such a crime.  The peril and misfortune of the country has been the existence among us of a privileged class of irresponsible despots, authorized tyrants and blood-suckers, who fatten upon the negro's flesh, and draw political power and consequence from their legalized crimes, rather than from their virtues.--Such a body are the slaveholders.  Proud, grasping, ambitious, nursed in lies and cruelty, these men are fitted for their present infernal work.  Feeble at the beginning, tolerated as a necessity rather than as a right, regarded as a transcient evil by the fathers of the Government, destined soon to pass away, something entirely extraneous to, and inconsistent with the constructive elements of American institutions--slavery, through various phases, but by regular processes of development, of repeated disturbances, and of multiplied compromises, has naturally reached the point at which we now see it, full of wrath and fury, covering the land with a mantle of fire and blood.  We all see it and feel it.  No body doubts it, and every body believes it; and yet the Government and people, owing to their chronic self-deception, their cowardly spirit and want of fixed principle, are practically rejecting what they know to be true, and accepting what they know to be false.

In the late Message of our honest President, which purports to give an honest history of our present difficulties, no mention is, at all, made of slavery.  Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from any thing there written that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government, determined to overthrow it, or so to reconstruct it as to make it the instrument of extending the slave system and enlarging its powers; while
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all here know that [[italics]] that [[/italics]] is the vital and an mating [sic] motive of the rebellion.  The proclamation goes forth at the head of all our armies, assuring the slaveholding rebels that slavery shall receive no detriment from our arms--While fugitive slaves are not sent back just now to known rebels, the inducement is held out to all loyal slaveholders that they shall have their slaves sent back to them.  While the slaveholders do not scruple to employ their slaves in the work of rebellion against the Government, our rulers at Washington steadily refuse to accept the aid of free colored citizens in defence of the Government--Thus do we belie and reject the issue presented to us in this contest.  Thus do we refuse to see even what it is impossible to hide from ourselves, that slavery is the cause of the war, and that its abolition is the true and only remedy for the war, and that all other remedies are but patch work, putting new wine into old bottles, and new cloth in old garments, and thus making the rent worse than before.  Up to this time, slavery has lost nothing in point of doctrine, or principle, by the war, and no principle has been laid down by the Government which can necessarily give the soul-drivers of the South the least possible alarm for the safety of slavery.  The impression which our Government seeks to make upon the slaveholders seems to be that slavery is safer in, than out of the Union.

The only circumstance which has thus far transpired, indicating an anti-slavery tendency on the part of the Government, was the approval of the action of Gen. BUTLER in treating slaves as contraband of war.  But even this was but a temporary arrangement, and was carefully left open to the most sudden reversal.  The final disposition of those already within the lines of the Federal army is even yet a matter of painful uncertainty.--They may even yet be handed over to the tender mercies of the cruel taskmasters from whom they escaped, or in some way be made an element in a trumped up paper settlement of the contest between the Government and the rebels.

From every view we have been able to get of the conflict through all the debates in Congress, the proclamations of Generals, and over all the smoke and fire of the battle field, we see the dark shadow of Compromise--the outlines of a new bargain--by which the slaveholders, though whipt, shall not be humbled, and though criminals of the deepest die, shall yet hold up their heads as free citizens and as honest men.  We are doing now all that we can to whip them without offending their tastes or injuring their interests.  History will, we think, set this down as the most amiable and forbearing Government ever assaulted by the sword of treason and rebellion.  We will not consent to the employment of negroes or Indians in our army.  that would offend the prejudices of our Southern traitors, and exalt these proscribed races to the dignity of citizenship, and might possibly
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