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SEPTEMBER 1862      DOUGLASS MONTHLY.      707
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tent with the non-execution of the confiscation and emancipation acts, and with the retention of incompetent generals, and the humiliation of earnest and competent ones, are showing themselves in a variety of ways, and on these grounds we still wait and work hopefully.  We cannot despair of the slave, while his cause is thus becoming more and more palpably the real cause of the country.  A few weeks more of sufferings, disasters, defeats, and ruin of the slaughter of our country's first born; a few weeks more of successful rebellion and threatened intervention from abroad, a few weeks more of gloomy prostration of business and of earnest protest on the part of the suffering people, will we trust arouse the Government to a just and wise sense of the demands of the age and of the hours.  We are to be saved as by fire.  Nothing short of the bitterest drugs of the bitter cup of this slaveholding rebellion seem sufficient to wean our Government from the side of slavery, and to destroy its reverence for the slave power.  We grieve with the sorrow stricken families all over the North whose beloved ones are slaughtered on the altar of our American slave god, but their terrible afflictions and heavy sorrows are their educators.

The mild and gentle persuasions of abolitionists have been despised, their counsels and warnings have been scorned and rejected.  Now the fiery sword of justice waves over the land, and we must reap as we have sown, before we shall renounce the wrong, and pursue the right.  The tears and blood we are now pouring out may at last bring us to our senses.

By some, it is even now thought too late.  We have gone so far in this slaveholding business, we have dealt so harshly with the slave, and so tenderly with his rebel master; we have offended so deeply the spirit of Liberty, and bowed so low to the dark and bloody spirit of slavery, that it is doubted whether we have the requisite moral stamina to save our country from destruction, whether we shall not at last give up the contest, patch up a deceitful peace and restore the slave power to more than its former power and influence in the republic.  These things we say are doubted and not without cause.  It is plain that such a solution of our troubles would be strictly in keeping with a large part of the old Democratic party, which yearns for the loaves and fishes of office, which it has been temporarily deprived of by the treason of its southern allies.  There are too, many republicans who are as destitute of anti-slavery principle as their democratic rivals, who would acquiesce in some compromise arrangement, by which they can pursue hereafter as heretofore a 'course of political trimming between the anti-slavery sentiment of the north, and its opposite at the south.  The Government too, favors this idea of a settlement of our national troubles.  The President still talks of the "Union as it was," and the Secretary of State talks of doing one thing at a time, about saving the Union, and attending to other questious afterwards.  Verily there is much in this quarter upon which to hang doubts, and regrets and fears.

Nevertheless we have yet strong grounds of hope.  The rebels are firm, determined, enthusiastic and wonderfully successful.  They have beaten off McClellan, hold Richmond securely, and are menacing Washington, and all the Border States.  With slavery undisturbed
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they can prolong the war indefinitely.  Certain it is, they show no signs of weariness.  Every month gained in defying the authority of the Federal Government renders final success to the rebel mind more certain.  Already they have been a year and a half in arms against that authority.  They can say to Europe in a few months from now,that they have been free and independent two full years, defying all the power of the land and naval forces of the Untied States to subdue them, and there is reason to believe that such a fact will be respected by the Governments of Europe already eager for occasion to terminate the war.  Considerations of this character will make the south slow to listen to any compromise, and will, we still hope, compel the Federal Government to take at last the step, which it ought to have taken at the first i. e. destroy this slaveholding contagion, by destroying the filthy cause which produced it.  Than this there is no other way, slavery must die if the nation lives, and the nation must die if slavery lives.
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THE PRESIDENT AND HIS SPEECHES.
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The President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse.  Since the publication of our last number he has been unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely in his utterances,often saying that which nobody wanted to hear,and studiously leaving unsaid about the only things which the country and the times imperatively demand of him.  Our garrulous and joking President has favored the country and the world with two speeches, which if delivered by any other than the President of the United Sates, would attract no more attention than the funny little speeches made in front of the arcade by our friend John Smith, inviting customers to buy his razor strops.——One of the speeches of the President was made at a war meeting in Washington in vindication of Mr. Stanton, and in justification of himself against the charge that he had failed to send reinforcements to Gen. McClellan.  Very little need be said of this first speech.  In comparison with some speeches made on that occasion, the President's is short, but in comparison to the amount of matter it contains, it is tediously long, full of repetitions, and so remarkably careless in style that it reminds one strongly of the gossipping manner in which a loquacious old woman discusses her neighbor's and her own domestic affairs, and explaining herself solucildy that her audience, after listening with all due patience, are in the end as well informed about the subject in question as before the exposition.  In short the speech does not prove anything except that the Secretary of War is not responsible, but that the President is responsible for the failure to send re-enforcements to General McClellan.  We may at once have done with this speech, especially since the information it contains was explicitly given to the country full three weeks before its utterance at the War meeting in Washington.

The other and more important communication of the President it appears was delivered in the White House before a committee of colored men assembled by his invitation.  In this address Mr. Lincoln assumes the language
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and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for negroes and his canting hypocrisy.  How an honest man could creep into such a character as that implied by this address we are not required to show.  The argument of Mr. Lincoln is that the difference between the white and black races renders it impossible for them to live together in the same country without detriment to both.  Colonization therefore, he holds to be the duty and the interest of the colored people.  Mr. Lincoln takes care in urging his colonization scheme to furnish a weapon to all the ignorant and base, who need only the countenance of men in authority to commit all kinds of violence and outrage upon the colored people of the country.  Taking advantage of his position and of the prevailing prejudice against them he affirms that their presence in the country is the real first cause of the war, and logically enough, if the premises were sound, assumes the necessity of their removal.

It does not require any great amount of skill to point out the fallacy and expose the unfairness of the assumption, for by this time every man who has an ounce of brain in his head——no matter to which party he may belong, and even Mr. Lincoln himself must know quite well that the mere presence of the colored race never could have provoked this horrid and desolating rebellion.  Mr. Lincoln knows that in Mexico, Central America and South America, many distinct races live peaceably together in the enjoyment of equal rights, and that the civil wars which occasionally disturb the peace of those regions never originated in the difference of the races inhabiting them.  A horse thief pleading that the existence of the horse is the apology for his theft or a highway man contending that the money in the traveler's pocket is the sole first cause of his robbery are about as much entitled to respect as is the President's reasoning at this point.  No, Mr. President, it is not the innocent horse that makes the horse thief, not the traveler's purse that makes the highway robber, and it is not the presence of the negro that causes this foul and unnatural war, but the cruel and brutal cupidity of those who wish to possess horses, money and negroes by means of theft, robbery, and rebellion.  Mr. Lincoln further knows or ought to know at least that negro hatred and prejudice of color are neither original nor invincible vices, but merely the offshoots of that root of all crimes and evils——slavery.  If the colored people instead of having been stolen and forcibly brought to the United States had come as free immigrants, like the German and the Irish, never thought of as suitable objects of property, they never would have become the objects of aversion and bitter persecution, nor would there ever have been divulged and propagated the arrogant and malignant nonsence about natural repellancy and the incompatibility of races.

Illogical and unfair as Mr. Lincoln's statements are, they are nevertheless quite in keeping with his whole course from the beginning of his administration up to this day, and confirms the painful conviction that though elected as an anti-slavery man by Republican and Abolition voters, Mr. Lincoln is quite a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred and far more concerned for the preservation of slavery, and the favor of
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