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580 DOUGLASS MONTHLY. JANUARY, 1862 [[line across page]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] colored people, you will not want to get rid of them. Take away the motive which slavery supplies for getting rid of the free black people of the South, and there is not a single State, from Maryland to Texas, which would desire to be rid of its black people. Even with the obvious disadvantage to slavery, which such contact is, there is scarcely a slave State which could be carried for the unqualified expulsion of the free colored people. Efforts at such expulsion have been made in Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, and all have failed, just because the black man as a freeman is a useful member of society. To drive him away, and thus deprive the South of his labor, would be as absurd and monstrous as for a man to cut off his right arm, the better to enable himself to work. There is one cheering aspect of this revival of the old and thread-bare objections to emancipation——and it implies at least the presence of danger to the slave system. When slavery was assailed twenty-five years ago, the whole land took the alarm, and every species of argument and subterfuge was resorted to by the defenders of slavery. The mental activity was amazing; all sorts of excuses, political, economical, social, ethical, theological and ethnological, were coined into barricades against the advancing march of anti-slavery sentiment. The same activity now shows itself, but has added nothing new to the argument for slavery or against emancipation.——When the accursed slave system shall once be abolished, and the negro, long cast out from the human family, and governed like a beast of burden, shall be gathered under the divine government of justice, liberty and humanity, men will be ashamed to remember that they were ever deluded by the flimsy nonsense which they have allowed themselves to urge against the freedom of the long enslaved millions of our land. That day is not far off. O hasten it in mercy, gracious Heaven! [[line] A REBEL FUGITIVE ADVERTISEMENT.——One of the Beaufort negroes advertises his runaway master in the following clever travesty: $500 REWARD.——Rund away from me on the 7th of dis month, my massa Julian Rhett. Massa Rhett am five feet 'leven in. high, big shoulders, brack hair, curly, shaggy whiskers, low forehead an' dark face. He make big fuss when he go 'mong de gemmen, he talk very big, an' use de name ob de Lord all de time. Calls heself 'Suddern gemmen,' but I 'spose will try now to pass heself off as a black man or mulatter. Massa Rhett has a deep scar on his shoulder, from a fight, scratch 'cross de left eye, made by Dinah when he tried to whip her. He neber look people in de face. I more dan spec he will make track for Bergen kounty, in the furrin land of Jersey, whar I 'magin he had a few friends. I will $400 for him if alive, an' $500 if anybody show dead. If he come back to his kind niggers without much truble, dis chile will receive him lubbingly. SAMBO RHETT. BEAUFORT, S. C., NOV. 9, 1861. [[line]] GEN. STONE AND SLAVE-CATCHING.——Gov. Andrew of Massachusetts, a short time ago, sent to the Secretary of War an indignant remonstrance against the employment of Massachusetts soldiers in the business of catching fugitive slaves, as has been the case on the Upper Potomac. Mr. Cameron promptly sent a copy of the remonstrance to General Stone, with an emphatic request that he would treat fugitives according to orders. [[line]] [[image of finger pointing to the right]] The Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society will accept our best thanks for a donation of One Hundred Dollars. We have also to thank our friend Hon. GERRIT SMITH for Ten Dollars. [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] WHAT OF THE WAR? [[short line]] To the Editor of Douglass' Monthly: Never was a country, loved as this country has been, by all those who have shared the benefits wherein it has exceeded all others.——Whence then the domestic war, sudden, unexpected, which has convulsed it like an earthquake? Why, when the forces of the loyal are so immensely superior to those of the disloyal, does the war continue, and threaten to continue for many years? Is there no way of bringing it to a speedy and desirable end? These are questions that crowd out almost all others in the breasts of all. Are we any more to have the country of which we have been so proud, or has the vision faded and gone with yesternight's dreams? Though the great rebellion is guided by a few prominent leaders, it by no means grew out of the ambition of those men. That ambition takes advantage of a popular hatred which has grown out of a certain state of facts. It is proverbial that whom one injures he hates. Whether or not the proverb tells the exact truth of human nature, this certainly is true. If any one injures another, he hates all those who sympathize with his victim. It is probably true that a strong man may use a weak one with great injustice, and not be conscious of hating him. On the contrary, he may fondle him as a pet, and think he loves him. But let somebody else call attention to the injustice and take the part of the injured, and then the hatred will blaze out. The strong man will be bitter as death towards the sympathizer with his pet victim, and bitter, just in proportion as he is convinced of his own injustice. This hatred will swallow up all saintship that does not rise to the point of repenting of the injustice. Of all the odiums that ever inflamed and poisoned poor human nature, this is the most virulent. In the infancy of the world——out of which it has hardly emerged——strong men used weak ones very much as they would other animals. The wealthier made slaves of the poorer, even of the same race. This fault of internal polity, in spite of great advance in arts, carried nations to their tombs. Of more modern civilization, founded on law that does not permit the strong to enslave the weak of the same race, the pest has been that men have still been allowed to use, as domestic animals, men of uncivilized races. Supposing these uncivilized men not to differ materially from animals, either in character or capacity, it would not be easy to show the injustice of treating them as such. But from first to last, however much they may differ from more civilized men, they differ infinitely more from the beasts of the field. Hence slavery is unjust at first, and grows more so as it grows older. The great quarrel between Great Britain and her American colonies, found all of the latter more or less involved with African slavery. Their first act, as the basis of their independence, was a solemn resolution to have done with it, as unjust and inconsistent with the free government which they desired. This popular resolution was as strong in one part of the country as another, or if any thing, strongest where the proportion of slaves was greatest. But where the slaves were fewest, private interest most easily gave way to the public good, and hence the Northern part of the Union grew up free from slavery, while [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] the Southern retained it, in spite of all resolutions, declarations, bills of right, &c., which ought to have made an end of it. Nobody hates the Southern slaveholders, for the mere fact of holding slaves. Few fail to make all due allowances for the circumstances which have lead them into such injustice. Many have admired them for that easy generosity of disposition which naturally proceeds from wealth acquired without personal labor. Never in the whole history of the world was any thing criminal treated with such forbearance and leniency, as Southern slavery and its adjuncts have been treated by the people of the North, those most opposed to it having always, with almost no exception, restricted themselves to the mildest of moral suasion, and the very few who have resorted to opprobrious epithets, have met with popular rebukes from their neighbors, such as slaveholders have seldom or never suffered. The South has been loved by the North as well as if slavery had not existed there. The North has always conceded to the slaveholders more than their fair share of political power. Yet ever since the Revolution, every white man at the South, whether slaveholder or non-slaveholder, has been conscious of injustice to the enslaved Africo-American——the black man with usually more or less white blood in his veins.——And for seventy-five years, at least, the white Southerner has been growing to hate more and more all the rest of mankind who express or imply any sympathy with this slave, or any sense of the injustice he suffers. Here is the broad basis of popular hatred on which the slaveholders' rebellion stands.——For fiendish malignity, the annals of even religious wars cannot equal it. The ambitious leaders are borne up by it as neither superstition nor patriotism ever bore up any leaders. Of course, mere independence, or being let alone, was not the object for which the war was commenced. It was revenge, conquest, the reconstruction of the government in such a way that sympathy with the slave could be punished, and the peculiar hatred gratified.——Only those who have made it their special study, can have anything approaching a true conception of the depth and extent of the hatred towards the North, which has caused this war. It is not founded on misconception or ignorance, but is most intense in those who best know the North. It could not be diminished, but only be increased by letting every body at the South know exactly the truth about the feeling toward them at the North. They hate us the more the less we hate them. Our crime in their eyes, is, that we are sorry for their injustice to the black man. They can never forgive us for showing by our wealth that such injustice is not, on the whole, profitable. They would exterminate from the face of the earth every man who will not either participate in their crime, or cordially approve of it. Such is the hatred which naturally and necessarily grows out of slavery, surrounded by communities where all are free, and the freedom of all is a cherished principle. It is like the electric wrath within a Leyden jar, intensified by the accumulation of the opposite electricity without. It would be easy to bring almost innumerable proofs of the existence and overwhelming prevalence of the sentiment above described at the South; yet thus far the war has been managed by the Government as if no such [[/column 3]]
