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552 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. November, 1861 MR. BROWNSON ON IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION. The October number of Brownson's Quarterly Review, edited by Mr. ORESTES A. BROWNSON, the ablest and most influential writer in the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, contains an able and patriotic essay on the different questions raised by the pro-slavery rebellion, and taking the ground that the only true way to put an end to the war is to issue a proclamation of emancipation on the part of the Federal Government. This important paper is too lengthy to be published entire in our columns, and we have only room for the following extracts: We need not say, for the fact is well known to our readers, that no man, according to his ability and opportunity, has, since April, 1838, more strenuously opposed the Abolition movement in the free States than we have; not because we love slavery, or had any sympathy with that hateful institution, but because we loved the Constitution of the Union, and because we believed that liberty at home and throughout the world was far more interested in preserving the Union of these States under the Federal Constitution, than in abolishing slavery as it existed in the Southern section of our common country. But we believe, and always have believed, that liberty, the cause of free institutions, the hopes of philanthropists and Christians, both at home and abroad, are more interested in preserving the Union and the integrity of the nation, than they are or can be in maintaining negro slavery. If we have opposed abolition heretofore, because we would preserve the Union, we must, a fortiori, oppose slavery whenever, in our judgment, its continuance becomes incompatible with the maintenance of the Union, or of our nation as a free republican State. Certainly, we have said in the article on 'The Great Rebellion,' in our last Review, the North has not taken up arms for the destruction of negro slavery, but for the maintenance of the Federal Government, the enforcement of the laws, and the preservation of the Union. This is true. The liberation of the slave is not the purpose and end of the war in which we are now engaged. The war is a war against rebellion, an unprovoked and wicked rebellion, engaged in by the rebels for the purpose of making this a great slaveholding republic, in which the labor of the country shall be performed by slaves, either black or white; and if, to defeat the rebellion, the destruction of slavery be rendered necessary and be actually effected, it will change nothing in the character or purpose of the war. It will have been necessitated by the rebellion, and the rebels will have only themselves to thank for the destruction or abolition they force us to adopt in defence of liberty, the Union, and the authority of the Government. A WORD TO WORKING MEN. Look at the question as we will, we have now no alternative but to subdue the rebels or be subjugated by them. We must either depose that Confederacy and enforce the authority of the Federal Government over all the rebellious States, or it will enforce its authority over the free States, and impose upon them its system of slave labor. If it enforces its authority over us there may still, perhaps, be liberty for a class or caste, but our laboring classes will no longer be freemen—they will be placed on a level with the negro slave on a Southern plantation. For the Christian commonwealth founded by our fathers, toiled for and bled for, we have re-established a Pagan republic more hostile to the rights of man and the rights of nations than was ever Pagan Greece or Pagan Rome. We put it to our Christian countrymen, if such is the commonwealth their fathers fought and suffered through the long seven years' war of the Revolution to establish, and if they can be contented to let the hopes of liberty in the New World set in a night of blackness and despair. THE WAR A SERIOUS MATTER. It is no time to mince our words or to study out honeyed phrases; we must call things by their right names, and treat all who are not for us as against us. We have something more than even the Constitution and laws to maintain; the very existence of the nation is at stake; and, as no means are scrupled at to destroy it, we have the right to use all the means which the law of preservation renders necessary or expedient. We wish our readers and the public at large to understand that we are in war, and to let it get through their heads that the war which the rebellion has forced upon us is no mimic war, is no child's play, and is not to be conducted to a successful issue on the principle of treating the rebels as friends, giving them every advantage and doing them no harm. They are in downright earnest, and are putting forth all their strength, and doing their best to subjugate us; and we also must be in downright earnest, put forth all our strength, and do our best to subject them. War cannot be conducted on peace principles or successfully conducted by men who do not enter into it with spirit, resolution, and energy. THE SLAVE POPULATION * * * * This brings us to the question of the slave population in the rebellious States. In these States there are over three million of the population held by the laws or usages of those States as slaves. These people are an integral portion of the people of the United States, owe allegiance to the Federal Government, and are entitled to the protection of that Government. The Government has the same right to make friends and allies of them, and to enroll and arm them against the rebellion, that it has to make friends and allies, or to enroll and arm the white population of Western Virginia or of Eastern Tennessee. It makes nothing against this that these people have heretofore been slaves by the laws or the usages of the States in which they reside; for those laws or usages are deprived of all force against the Union by the very act of rebellion. Rebellion dissolves all laws for the protection of the life or property of the rebels. By the very act of rebellion, the rebel forfeits to the Government against which he rebels both his property and his life, and holds henceforth neither, save at its mercy or discretion. If it were not so, the Government would have no right to confiscate the property of rebels, or to attempt to suppress a rebellion by force of arms. If the slaves held in the rebellious States are property, they are forfeited to the Government, and the Government may confiscate them, as cotton, rice, tobacco, or any other species of property found in the hands of the rebels. The same principle that gives to the Government the right to confiscate a bale of cotton owned by a rebel, gives it a right to confiscate every negro claimed by a rebel master. This is perfectly clear, and is implied in the recent act of Congress on the subject. But if these people held as slaves are not property, they are and should be regarded as citizens of the United States, owing allegiance to the Federal Government, liable to be called into the service of the Union in the way and manner it deems most advisable, and, if loyal, entitled to the same protection from the Government as any other class of loyal citizens. Noboby can pretend that the Federal Government is obliged, by virtue of the laws or usages heretofore existing in the slave States, to treat these people as property — Whatever might have been its obligation before the rebellious acts of those States, that obligation is no longer in force. THE BORDER STATES AND FREEDOM But if it be required to treat them as free and loyal citizens by the military operations for the preservation of the Union, or even to remove the causes of the present rebellion, the Government is bound so to treat them.— The only doubt that can arise is as to the fact, whether it would or would not prove useful to this end. It may be objected to such a measure that it would deprive us of the aid of Western Virginia and Eastern Tennessee, and drive into open hostility to the Union Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. This objection deserves grave consideration. But it is in substance the objection that has embarrassed the Government from the outset, and compelled it to take only halfway measures to suppress the rebellion. For ourselves, we cannot respect the fear to which this obligation appeals. Fear is the worst possible counsellor in the world, and the government that hesitates to adopt the best policy for fear of alienating its friends, is lost. Let the lines be at once sharply drawn between our friends and our enemies. In a crisis like the present, lukewarm friends, or friends who will be our friends only by virtue of certain concessions to their interests or prejudices, are more embarrassing than open enemies, and do more to weaken our forces than if arrayed in open hostility against us. If these States are for the Union, they will insist on no conditions incompatible with the preservation of the Union; they will make sacrifices for the Union, as well as the other loyal States, and there is no reason why they should not.— There is neither reason nor justice in Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the great States northwest of the Ohio, pouring out their blood and treasure for the gratification of the slaveholding pretensions of Maryland, Kentucky, or Missouri. The citizens of these States who own slaves, are as much bound, if the preservation of the Union requires it, to give up their property in slaves, as we at the farther North are to pour out our blood and treasure to put down a rebellion that threatens alike them and us. If they love their few slaves more than they do the Union, let them go out of the Union. We are stronger to fight the battles of the Union without them, than we are with them. EMANCIPATION. But we have referred only to the slaves in the rebellious States, and, if it is, or if it becomes a military necessity to liberate all the slaves of the Union, and to treat the whole present slave population as freemen and citizens, it would be no more than just and proper that, at the conclusion of the war, the citizens of loyal States, or the loyal citizens of loyal sections of the rebellious States, should be indemnified at a reasonable rate for the slaves that may have been liberated. The States and sections of States named have not a large number of slaves, and, if the Union is preserved, it would not be a very heavy burden on it to pay their ransom; and to paying it no patriotic or loyal citizen of the free States would raise the slightest objection — The objection, therefore, urged, though grave, need not be regarded as insuperable; and we think the advantages of the measure, in a military point of view, would be far greater than any disadvantage we have to apprehend from it. Whether the time for this important measure has come or not, it is for the President, as Commander-in Chief of our armies, to determine. But, in our judgment, no single measure could be adopted by the Government that would more effectually aid its military operations, do more to weaken the rebel forces, and to strengthen our own. Four million of people in the slave States, feeling that the suppression of the rebellion and the triumph of the Union secures to them and their children forever the status of free citizens, are more than a hundred thousand men taken from the forces of the enemy, and twice that number added to our own; for they wo'd not only compel the rebels to keep a large force that might otherwise be employed at home, to protect their own wives and children, but would deprive them of the greater portion of that labor by which they now sustain their armies. Now slavery is to them a source of strength; it would then be to them a source of weakness. Its abolition would, in our judgment, be striking the enemy at his most vulnerable point, precisely where we can best sunder the sinews of his strength, and deal him the most fatal blow. Moreover, it would not only bring to the
Transcription Notes:
I'm working on Douglass' Monthly. When I come across a semicolon, there's a space before it. I'm ignoring it since it isn't current with our conventions, plus, I don't know if it was an oddity of typeface that put that space there, or whether it was deliberate. If I'm doing it wrong, please advise!
2. Reviewed - removed unnecessary formatting details - see Instructions... & fixed a couple of typos
