Viewing page 3 of 16

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

November, 1861.      DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.      547

can history is full of warning, not only to the Southern rebels, but to our Government at Washington.  The voice of history and of human nature itself crys aloud with unsparing energy, "Have a care——have a care!"

With an army of thirty-five thousand men against an army of forty thousand, FREMONT is scourging the rebels beyond the borders of Missouri; while the Government at Washington has an army of nearly three hundred thousand men, right under its nose, and has yet allowed the rebels to blockade the Potomac, so that the Government is compelled to seek some other highway to the ocean than the very river, which has been in its hands since the beginning of the war.  While this is done by the rebels on the lower Potomac, Col. BAKER, with a handful of men, as usual, against three times their number, is cut to pieces.  Yet McCLELLAN is a model General, and FREMONT is to be superceded.  "Have a care"——the people notice these things.  They may get tired of reading daily telegrams that "General McCLELLAN, with his staff, at an early hour passed over the Chain Bridge," and "returned at a late hour in the evening;" "that the department under Gen. BANKS is in excellent condition," and that "everything is quiet along our entire lines."  To this tune the national baby has been sung to sleep during all the last three months; and during two-thirds of the same time, the indefatigable telegraph has been busy in disparaging the only General who is vigorously pursuing the retreating foe.  Whatever may be the unexplained grounds against JOHN C. FREMONT, the visible ones have anything but an honest face.  If good cause exists for his removal, an honest and brave Government would remove him at once.  If a doubt exists concerning him, a wise Government would, without delay, resolve that doubt.  If the complaints against him are groundless, a generous Government would give him its fullest confidence and its most efficient co-operation.  That neither of these courses had been pursued by the Government, is, to say the least, a just ground for suspicion that foul play is at work.

FREMONT has offended; he has struck rebellion in its most sensitive part.  Assuming that the rebels are to be put down by fighting, and not by catching their negro slaves and helping to hold them; that the business of the Government is not now to conciliate, but to conquer a peace, he has struck at the very heart of the rebellion by striking at slavery.  This is his offence.  The letter of the President to him proves it; and until he shall have been duly convicted of marked and decided derelictions of duty, the country will have to believe that the attempt to sacrifice JOHN C. FREMONT has this only foundation——that he loved his country better than negro slavery, and offered the latter a sacrifice to save the former.


The Louisville Journal says that a slave belonging to Jeff. Offord, a Secessionist of Spencer County, made his escape and delivered himself at Camp Sherman.  The officers of the camp handed him over to the Provost Marshall of Louisville, who, under instructions from Gen. Sherman, returned him without reward to his owner.  The same paper has a notice also of a fugitive slave belonging to a citizen of Louisville, that was arrested and promptly returned to his owner by the Federal authorities in Indiana.


SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

MEREDITH, October 14, 1861.

Dear Sir:——In your last issue, in the article "To Readers and Subscribers," last clause, you state that the signs of the times are favorable to the downfall of slavery, and that soon.  NOW DO, in your next issue, give us some of the signs.  In the last week's N. Y. POST, I see that our army on the Potomac has been in chase of a fugitive, and ran him down and sent him back to his master under an escort of soldiers.  Now, if this is one of your favorable signs, I must disagree with you.  I made up my mind that such great exploits as that MUST SHORTLY close the war, and leave slavery to guide its way as usual.  I am sick and disheartened.

Respectfully yours,     S. DUTTON.

The request of our respected correspondent shall be complied with, though in this compliance we freely confess our inability to specify anything AFFIRMATIVELY in the character of our Government at Washington, or in the recent conduct of the army on the Potomac, very favorable to our hopes of a speedy emancipation.  Fortunately, however, neither of these powers cover the entire moral sky upon which the friends of freedom are permitted to discern the signs of the times.——There are powers above those of the Government and the army——a power behind the throne, greater that the throne itself.  Governments act from necessity, real or supposed.  They move only as they are moved upon.——Our Government is no exception to this rule.  It cannot determine what shall be the character of events.  To these it stands in the relation of a ship to the gale.  It must adjust itself to the state of the ocean, or go down in the storm.  Our Government has already done many things which it would have gladly avoided.  Consulting its own discretion, the slaveholding oligarchy might have had everything for slavery in the Government, which they now profess to desire outside of it.  The Government, up to last April, was ready for anything in the way of a compromise, by which slavery should have received an open and scandalous recognition in the Constitution of the United States, from which the fathers of the Republic has been careful to exclude it, for the reason, as Mr. MADISON declared, that "they did not wish to have it seen in the Constitution that there could be any such thing as property in man."  They could have repealed all the Personal Liberty Bills at the North, and had the free States for an hunting ground, and Northern men for negro dogs, and slavery protected everywhere South of a certain line of latitude.  Senator SEWARD in his speech of January even offered to abandon the Republican party.  But events, greater than the Government, spoiled all this, and more too.  The first shot at the starving garrison at Fort Sumter awoke alike the Government and the nation from their filthy dreams of compromise.

Necessity is master over all.  It has compelled our Government, much against all its wishes, to draw the sword against the slaveholding rebels, to suspend in different parts of the country the privilege of the writ of habeus corpus, to place Baltimore under martial law, to abridge the liberty of speech and press, to invade the sacred soil of Virginia, to fill Fortress Monroe with slaves, to confiscate the property of slaveholding rebels, to blockade and threaten all the Southern coast.  It has seized private property, taken possession of railroads, captured telegraph dispatches, cut off the mails, and done many other things under the higher law, not of the written Constitution, or of its own inclination, but of necessity.  It has been from the first, and must be to the last, borne along on the broad current of events.  Its doctrines, its principles, and its measures are all subjected to the modifying power of this mighty current.

Herein, then, Mr. DUTTON, are the grounds of our hope.  There are two parties to this as to all other wars, domestic or foreign, and the action of no party can ever be independent of that of the other.  We see that on the part of the North, notwithstanding all the reverses and blunders of its army, the millions of treasure already swallowed up, and the millions more to go in the same way, its every indication and utterance grows stronger daily for the Union.  The Union shall not be dissolved, is the united determination of the North, and of the Government at Washington.  The last vestige of a contrary disposition has been swept away.  On the other hand, the slaveholding States, becoming familiar with hardships of war, and desperate in their determination to break up the Government, may be expected to stand their ground, while they have either money or blood to pour out in futherance of their object.  They evidently could not if they would, and would not if they could take a single step backward.

All signs portend that we are to have a long, revengeful and desolating war, in which both parties will be driven to extremities not dreamed of at the beginning of the war.  We are not fighting a servile people, but our masters, the men who have ruled us during a half a century.  They are not the men to easily bend to the authority of those whom they have ruled as serviles.  The are proud, brave, willful, determined, skillful, unscrupulous and cruel; and to their savage villainy, more than to the moral virtue and humanity of the North, do we look for that iron necessity, which shall compel our Government to aim a death-blow at the life of slavery, the prime cause and support of the rebellion.——When, therefore, we speak of the signs of the times being favorable to the speedy abolition of slavery, we must not be understood as looking to this or that incidental act of the army, but to the very core and vital element and philosophy of the strife.——We read the sayings of public men outside the Government, the utterance of the press, and study the situation of the whole contest, and deduce the abolition of slavery as the natural consequence of the war, whether our Government or Generals would have it so or not.  The very reluctance of the Government to strike the blow at present may be necessary to make it all the more powerful, effectual and successful when it is struck.  We have not yet been sufficiently deluged with slaveholding contempt and scorn, nor drunk deep enough of the poisoned cup of slaveholding malignity.  A few more of our patriotic Generals must be murdered, and many thousands more of our loyal troops slaughtered; our power must be more severely taxed, and our prowess more thoroughly tried.  We may even have to grapple with the iron hand of the slave in front of the battle, before we shall be ready to unfurl the banner of freedom, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.  In one way or another the work will be done.  The back-bone of slavery is already broken in Missouri, notwithstanding the efforts of the President to save it.  Slaveholders are leaving the State in

Transcription Notes:
Edited - no need for extra formatting codes; see instructions.