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APRIL, 1862.    DOUGLASS' MONTHLY.   633
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cost of forty million of dollars and many lives, in conquering the handful of Indians and negroes in Florida.  A terrible element in war especially a guerilla war, would be the millions of Southern negroes, with their intimate knowledge of all retreats in marsh and mountain, with their habits of coarse and scanty fare, and with their powers of well nigh inexhaustible endurance.

But need we study in this connection the capacities of the negroes in war?  Would it not be morally impossible to prolong the war with the rebels after their resort to emancipation, and their abolition of the cause of the war?  Would not the moral sense of the world, including even that of the North itself, forbid it?  Emancipation by the South would but too probably be the division of the nation.  Not a day, then, should be lost in anticipating by our justice and benevolence to the negroes, this apprehended measure of the South.

Admitting it to be not certain that the negroes will in any event become our enemies, our armed and deadly enemies——nevertheless, can we afford to incur the risk of their becoming such by persevering in our unrighteous and cruel treatment of them?  We cannot, as it respects our war with the rebels; we cannot, as it respects our relations with Europe.  The impatient and harsh spirit manifested by England in the matter of the Trent, and the purpose of England, France, and Spain, to establish a monarchy, and that too of the American type, in Mexico, are among the indications that Europe's jealousy of Democracy is on the increase, and that at no distant day she will break out in fearful war upon it.  Surely, surely, the present is no time for us to be making enemies, and making them so gratuitously, too.  But this is our time to be making friends——friends of all men——of black as well as white men.  Now is emphatically our time to make our institutions sound and strong, and to eliminate from them every element of weakness and corruption.

I advised you to take counsel of the nation, instead of Kentucky.  I close with beseeching you to take counsel of God.  Take it of Him, and you will be safe.  "The name of the Lord is a strong tower:  the righteous runneth into it and is safe."  "Thou hast a mighty arm:  strong is thy hand and high is thy right hand."

"Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott;
Eine gute Wehr und Waffen:"

Take counsel of Him, and you will quickly drop your policy of "Reconstruction."  A guiltier policy there is nowhere under the sun.  For what can be guiltier than to repeat the preeminent crime and reestablish the blood-drenched system of our national slaveholding?  Nor a madder policy than to put back the nation into the hands of that matchless Barbarism, than Infernal Power, which has broken it up——and at the cost of such life and treasure.  But, thank God, "Reconstruction" is impossible!  You might as well undertake to set back into their former position, shape, and appearance, the tossed and tumbled buildings of the city which an earthquake has plowed up, as to undertake to restore slavery after the tossings and tumblings it is getting in this war.  Moreover, ere they get through this war the people of the Sates will have had enough of slavery——quite enough of it to cure them of any remaining disposition to re-establish it.  I cannot hope that the border slave Sates will also become so sick of slavery as to be willing to give it up.  For I have had too much proof that a people very rarely give up slavery until they are obliged to.  A community, in which though not more than one in fifty is a slaveholder, will nevertheless be under the sway of slavery.  It will be ignorant and poor.  The intelligence and wealth in it, and therefore the power, will be concentrated in the handful of slaveholders.  How strikingly is this clinging to slavery exemplified in the case of Western Virginia!  Northern troops hurried to deliver her out of the hands of traitors.  Nevertheless, she is to-day, like Kentucky, a more dangerous enemy to the North and to the Union than is a Gulf State.  In going for the Union she 
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gets the confidence of the friends of the Union.  In going at the same time for slavery, and making far more account of it than of the Union, she betrays the friends, and vitally stabs the cause of the Union.  Even Delaware, although she has but one or two thousand slaves, is still, as may be seen in the course of both her State and National Legislators, in the hands of the Slave Power.——Nevertheless, I repeat it, that "Reconstruction" is impossible.  Slavery has received its mortal wound.  The rebels meant to give it an endless life.  But their own hands are bringing it to a speedy death.  Devotees of "Reconstruction!" be you in Congress, the Cabinet, or the Army, you will very likely, kill your country and kill yourselves by presevering in your folly.  But be assured that you cannot save slavery from being also killed.  The question is no longer whether slavery shall die.  The sole question now is whether our slavery-bewildered nation shall live.  It will live, if the government resolves unconditionally, that it shall.  But it will not live if the government persist in the purpose that slavery shall also live.

I said that slaver must die in this war.——How painful would be the prospect of its surviving the war!  There is sometimes a partial recompense for the horrors of war in the good which grows out of it, or, to say the east, [sic] follows it.  But how pertinent will be he [sic] inquiry, "To what purposa [sic] is this waste?" if, notwithstanding all our various and bondless [sic] sacrifices in this war, the crime and curse of slavery shall still be upon us?  The saddest of all wars will this be, should the hateful and guilty cause of it continue.

Once more I beseech you to take counsel of God.  For then will He inspire you with love and justice toward all men, black and white, slaves and slaveholders.  Then will you be moved to enact laws in the presence of which all persons will be equal; in the presence of which the lash will fall from the hand of the oppressor, and the chains from the limbs of the oppressed; in the presence of which parents and children shall own each other, and guiltless husbands and wives no longer be torn to returnless distances from each other; and the presence of which it shall no longer be a crime to learn to read the Bible and spell the name of Jesus Christ.  Take counsel of god, and then you will tie the North and the South together in bonds never more to be broken.  The North and the South, which should be equally loved by us all, and which, if I know my heart, are equally loved by me, would no longer be diverse in their interests and opposite in their character and mutually repellant.  But they would be blended in a harmonious whole and in a homogeneous nation.  Take counsel of him, and then will America be what she has always professed to be, but never yet been, the great light house of the world, to guide the voyaging nations through darkness to light, through storms to peace, through oppressions to freedom, through the ignorance and deprivation of human rights to the knowledge and enjoyment of them.  Then, in a word, will America have a people worthy of the rich provision which the great and good Father has made for the dwellers in this broad and beautiful land.
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——The new Article of War which passed the United States House of Representatives some time ago, prohibiting officers and soldiers of the army from returning fugitive slaves was yesterday adopted by the Senate, by the decisive vote of 29 to 9.  We trust this will effectually put a stop to the disgraceful and illegal meddling with slavery which has hitherto been indulged in by a few fanatical officers who, taking their views of the Constitution solely from the New York Herald, have ignorantly usurped functions which belong exclusively to United States Marshals and Commissioners.  The army of the United States has no right to recognize any man as a slave, nor has any private citizen a right to arrest and return fugitives.  By the law of 1850 that disagreeable duty is assigned exclusively to certain civil officers, and no one else has any 
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business with it.  Gen McClellan, it is stated heartily approves this additional Article of War, and the army itself will be glad to be formally relieved from again incurring the odium of maltreating the most loyal and serviceable portion of the Southern population.

The House bill forbidding the Union armies to be concerned in negro hunting has been considered and approved by the military committee of the Senate.  It will doubtless be soon reported and passed.  It cannot be a day too soon.  The outrages on humanity and decency already committed in the surrender of loyal negroes to the traitors who claim to be their owners, and who thereupon proceed to torture and mutilate them in punishment of their services to the Union cause——are enough to cause the very stones to cry out against the suicidal baseness.  Let the house bill be promptly passed, and let our soldiers attend strictly to their own business, which is something very far removed from slave hunting.——Tribune.
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A LESSON IN EMANCIPATION.——The experience of Russia in the emancipation of her twenty millions of serfs is decidedly adverse to that gradual approach to justice and to right which it was supposed the magnitude and the difficulties of the undertaking required.  The nine years' compromise with slavery which the ukase of emancipation dictated, in order to fit these Slavic slaves for the freedom which it bestowed upon them, is found to be a failure so utter and so miserable that the nobility, the slaveholders themselves, are petitioning the Czar for immediate emancipation.

In an address to the Emperor, recently presented the nobles of the Government of Moscow, after reminding him of their devotion in 1812, beg leave to suggest that it is necessary, in order to render the great measure of emancipation more just, and to secure from it its legitimate fruits, that the elective principle should be extended to certain offices, executive and judiciary, that the right of property should be affirmed, that the budget of receipts and expenditures should be published, that banks of credit should be established, that a national assembly be convened, and "that the term of nine years prescribed by the ukase be shortened, so that emancipation may be complete, and the peasant may be entirely free from all engagements with the proprietors in relation to lands."——Tribune 
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FORT DONELSON'S STRENGTH——WHAT PRISONERS SAY.——The Worlds correspondent says:

Fort Donelson must be seen to be appreciated.  Its formidableness must be witnessed to be comprehended.  Its height, length, breadth, and expanse, and the outline of it method of construction you have in numerals and diagrams; but its ditches and dimensions, its batters and battlements, must be looked up at, and down at, and in at, in order to get at its commanding and august appearance.——The men-of-war's men here, who have been round the world call it the third best institution of the kind they ever laid eyes on.

The Mr. Lewis, the proprietor of the Cumberland Rolling Mills that were burned by our boats, is now a prisoner.  He is a person of considerable culture and sense, confesses to having helped on the rebellion to the extent of his vast financial ability, but also that he, like thousands of his countrymen, were deeply deceived in the matter.  He obtained his information solely from southern newspapers and secesh spouters.  He had no opportunity of discovering what he now knows to be the genuine sentiment of the North.  He says:  "I give it up now.——You've carried our Sebastopol.  It's all over with us!"

HOW IT IS DONE.——The following paragraph form the Richmond Dispatch shows how the rebels are persuaded to volunteer:  "Read all the calls for recruits in our advertising columns, and voluntarily take your place in one of the many companies which need you, before you are forced to bear arms nolens volens."
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