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616   DOUGLASS MONTHLY.   MARCH, 1862

exception to this rule.  He loves ease and abundance just as other people love ease and abundance.  If this is a crime, then all men are criminals, and the negro no more than the rest.

Again, it is affirmed that the negro, emancipated, could not take care of himself.  My answer to this is, let him have a fair chance to try it.  For 200 years he has taken care of himself and his master in the bargain.  I see no reason to believe that he could not take are, and very excellent care, of himself when having only himself to support.  The case of the freed slaves in the British West Indies has already been dwelt upon in the course of these lectures, and facts, arguments, and statistics, have been presented demonstrating beyond all controversy that the black man not only has the ability and the disposition to work, but knows well how to take care of his earnings.  The country over which he has oiled as a slave is rapidly becoming his property – that freedom has made him both a better producer and a better consumer.

LIBERTY AN EXPERIMENT.

It is one of the strangest and most humiliating triumphs of human selfishness and prejudice over human reason, that it leads men to look upon emancipation as an experiment, instead of being, as it is, the natural order of human relations.  Slavery, and not Freedom, is the experiment;  and to witness its horrible failure we have to open our eyes, not merely upon the blasted soil of Virginia and other Slave States, but upon the whole land brought to the verge of ruin.

We are asked if we would turn the slaves all loose.  I answer, Yes.  Why not?  The are not wolves nor tigers, but men.  They are endowed with reason – can decide upon questions of right and wrong, good and evil, benefits and injuries – and are therefore subjects of government precisely as other men are.

But would you have them stay here?  Why should they not?  What better is here than there?  What class of people can show a better title to the land on which they live than the colored people of the South?  They have watered the soil with their tears and enriched it with their blood, and tilled it with their hard hands during two centuries;  they have leveled its forests, taked out the obstructions to plow and hoe, reclaimed the swamps, and produced whatever has made it a goodly land to dwell in, and it would be a shame and a crime little inferior in enormity to Slavery itself if these natural owners of the Southern and Gulf States should be driven away from their country to make room for others – even if others could be obtained to fill their places.

But unjust and revolting to every right-minded and humane man as is this talk of the expatriation of the slaves, the offense is not more shocking that it is unwise.  For a nation to drive away its laboring population is to commit political suicide.  It is like cutting off one's right hand in order to work the better and to produce the more.  To say that negroes shall not live in the Southern States is like saying that the lands of the South shall be no longer cultivated.  The dry has all along been, We must have negroes to work in the South, for white men cannot stand the hot sun and the fell diseases of the rice swamp and the sugar plantation.  Even the leaders of the rebellion made it one of their grievances that they could not get more negroes, though from motives of policy they have now dropped this plank from their platform.  No one doubts that the Gulf States mean to have more slaves from Africa just so soon as they shall get well settled in their independence.  Again, why not allow the colored people of the South remain where they are?  Will they occupy more room in freedom than in slavery?  If you could bear them as objects of your injustice, can they be more offensive as objects of your justice and your humanity?  Why send them away?  Who wants to take their places in the cotton field, in the rice swamp, and sugar fields, which they have tilled for ages?  The whole scheme of colonization would be too absurd for discussion, but that the madness of the moment has drowned the voice of common sense as well as common justice.

There is a measure now before Congress duly reported from one of its Committees proposing, first, to make the negroes leave the land of their birth, and secondly to pay the expense of their enforced removal.  If such a measure can become law, the nation is more deeply wicked than any Abolitionist has hitherto ventured to believe.  It is a most mischievous and scandalous proposition, unworthy of any man not dead to the claims of every sentiment of honor and humanity.  I predict that if it passes it will become like the Fugitive Slave law – it will lie dead upon the statute book – having no other effect than to alarm the freed men of the South and disgrace the Congress by which it is passed.

Once free the slaves, and at once the motives which now require their expatriation will become too weak to breathe.  In the single little State of Maryland, with climate and soil which invite the white laborer to its borders, there are at this moment nearly one hundred thousand free colored people.  Now, notwithstanding that Maryland is a Slave State, and thus possesses a strong motive for getting rid of their free colored people, the better to hold her slaves – and notwithstanding the circumstances of climate and soil – that Salve States only a year or two ago voted down by a large majority of their people the inhuman and barbarous proposition concerning her free colored population.

The number of colored people now on this continent and in the adjacent islands cannot fall far below twenty millions.  An attempt to remove them would be as vain as to bail out the ocean.  The whole naval power of the United States could not remove the natural increase of our part of this population.  Every fact in our circumstances here marks us as a permanent element of the American people.  Mark the readiness with which we adapt ourselves to your civilization.  You can take no step in any direction where the black man is not at your back or side.– Go to California and dig gold:  the black man is there.  Go to war with Mexico, and let your armies penetrate the very heart of the country, and the black man is there.  Go down the coast of North and South Carolina, and the black man is there, and there as your friend, to give you more important and more trustworthy information that you can find among all the loyal poor white trash you can scare up in that region.  The negro is sometimes compared with the Indian, and it is predicted that like the Indian, he will die out before the onward progress of the Anglo Saxon race.  I have not the least apprehension at this point.  In features and complexion, the negro is more unlike the European than is his Mongolian brother.  But the interior resemblance is greater than the exterior difference.  The Indian wraps himself in gloom, and proudly glories in isolation – he retreats before the onward march of civilization.  The humming of the honey bee warns him away from his hunting grounds.  He sees the plowshare of civilization tossing up the bones of his venerated fathers, and he dies of a broken heart.  Not so with the negro.  There is a vitality about him that seems a like invincible to hardship and cruelty.  Work him, whip him, sell him, torment him, and he still lives, and clings to American civilization – an Uncle Tom in the Church, and Uncle Ben on the Southern coast, to guide our Burnside expeditions.

My friends, the destiny of the colored American, however this might war shall terminate, is the destiny of America.  We shall never leave you.  The allotments of Providence seem to make the black man of America the open book out of which the American people are to learn lessons of wisdom power, and goodness – more sublime and glorious than any yet attained by the nations of the old or the new world.  Over the bleeding back of the American bondman we shall learn mercy.  In the very extreme difference of color and features of the negro and the Anglo-Saxon, shall be learned the highest ideas of the sacredness of man and the fullness and perfection of human brotherhood.

Throughout the delivery of his address, Mr. Douglass was interrupted with most hearty and enthusiastic applause.


The Senate yesterday [Feb. 5] expelled Mr. Jesse D Bright of Indiana by the decisive voe of 32 to 14 – most of the Republicans voting with the more determined Unionists of other shades to expel.  His offense consisted in writing, on the first of March last, a letter to the "Hon. Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States," recommending to him a Mr. Thomas B. Lincoln as inventor of a valuable improvement in fire-arms.  On being taken to task in the journals for this he avowed himself inflexibly opposed to "coercion."  Mr. Bright is a native of this State (Chenango County,) lived formerly in Kentucky, where he owned slaves after his removal to Indiana, of which State he was chosen Lieut. Governor nearly twenty years ago.– He has been seventeen years a Senator - for the last three under a pretended election which had no more validity nor claim to respect than though it had been made in a bar room by the crew of a passing Mississippi flat boat.  He was awarded the seat by a scandalous partizan vote, and would probably have lost it then but for the death of Judge Butler of South Carolina, who would act as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee have reported strongly against him, and could hardly have been overborne.  Mr. Bright is an able man, always a Democrat, supporter Breckinridge and Lane in 1860, and has ever gone with those who went farthest in concessions to Slavery.  Gov. Morton will doubtless send a better man in his stead and we do not think he has any chance to get back after the Legislative election in Indiana next fall.  The Indiana Democrats are mainly of the Couglas stamp, and can suit themselves far better in a Senator – should the fortunes of the canvas give them the power – than to take a further dose of Bright.– Tribune.

– A clerk in one of the departments in Washington was lately detected in the act of communicating information to the rebels, and was immediately discharged.  A few days after, he appeared at the Secretary's office with a letter asking his reappointment.  This letter was from the Governor of one of the Western States.  He writes to the Secretary that the ex clerk is an old and intimate friend of his, a good loyal citizen;  has been most unjustly dealt by, and ends by asking as a particular personal favor that Mr. ex-clerk be reinstated in his office.  And the request was immediately complied with.  Directly after an acquaintance meeting Mr. Reinstated, said to him:  "Where did you get acquainted with Gov.––?"  "I never was acquainted with him never spoke to him in my life."  "How did you get such a strong letter from him to the Secretary?"  "Oh I have a pretty sister who went to Alexandria the other day with the Governor.  She procured the letter for me."

– In the Convention of the New State o Kanawha Mr. Battell, of Ohio county offered th following proposition relative to slavery in the new State:  No slave shall be brought into the new State for permanent residence after the adoption of the Constitution;  all children born of slave parents in this State, on and after the 4th of July, 1865, shall be free and the legislature may provide by general laws for the apprenticeship of such children during their minority, and for subsequent colonization.

The above proposition was referred to the Committe on General Provisions, which committee will probably report some time this week.  It is not expected the committee will report any provisions of the above character, the majority being averse to the consideration of the slavery question;  but whenever that committee make their report, a proposition embodying the sentiments of free State men will be brought forward, and will from present indications be fiercely contested.

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