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FEBRUARY, 1863,      DOUGLASS MONTHLY      789
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joined it but for their dread of Union troops.

I said that Slavery might be put away and our nation be not saved.  If it be not put away in the spirit of penitence; if our hard national heart——our heart of injustice and oppression——shall survive slavery; then will the nation remain unsaved, and evils scarcely less or perhaps even greater than this Rebellion may soon break out to prove that it is unsaved.  The putting away of slavery in the spirit and for the purpose in which and for which the President's Proclamation would put it away, is good as far as it goes.  But to put away simply in this sprit and simply for this purpose would fall very far short of saving the nation.  If we put it away in the spirit of selfishness and merely to save ourselves, and out heart be still unbroken by a sense of our crimes against the black man, we may go on to become a greater criminal and marauder than ever, and be therefore further from national salvation than ever.  In its characteristic greed of territory and characteristic overweening confidence in its strength, our impenitent nation might be left to undertake wars of conquest and plunder against every nation within its reach.  Such or any other flagrantly iniquitous undertaking on its part would not begin its ruin, but, would rather demonstrate and deepen its previous ruin.  A nation no less than an individual given up to work injustice was long before ruined.  In this connection let me say that the first victim of injustice is always he who perpetrates it.  Moreover, whilst the injury it does to him against whom it is directed, may be but outward and superficial and easily cured, that which it does to him from whom it proceeds is inward and radical, and but too generally incurable.

I referred to the speedy termination of American Slavery.  Would that it might have been the bloodless termination which the handful of Abolitionists labored for during thirty years.  But they were not listened to.  No age listens to its prophets.  Hence slavery is going out in blood.  And one of the proofs that it is going out under God's own hand and in God's own way——the way not that He would have chosen, but which our impenitence compelled Him to take——is, that this is not the blood of the slave, but of his common oppressors, the whites of the North and the whites of the South.  When shall this blood cease to flow?  Perhaps not until these oppressors have repented.  And not very improbable is it that ere long English blood will come to flow with it——the blood of that England, who has so long been enriching herself out of the unpaid toil of the slave——of that England once so conspicuously and honorably opposed to slavery, but now, alas, through her influential men, in such guilty and shameless sympathy with it!  From the hour when, in the Trent case, England not allowing even one moment for negotiation or explanation, virtually declared war against hand-tied America, from that hour to the present American hatred of England has been growing wider and deeper.  Every arrival from England, freighted as it is with fresh evidences of England's growing hatred of us, increases our hatred of her.  Things look more and more as if God's time had at last come for punishing those nations, which have been the chief reapers of the blood-stained harvests of American Slavery.  Let impenitent England see to it, that her sympathy with slavery does not result in the dismemberment of her Empire.  And, let France, too, who also has interests on this side of the Atlantic, and who is insanely bent on extending them, begin to calculate the possible consequences to herself of her taking sides with a pro-slavery Rebellion.  England and France, especially England, are already suffering greatly from the effect of this Rebellion on their manufactures.  But far more may they yet have to suffer in consequence of their guilty attitude toward it.

Let me not be understood to do injustice to the English people.  They love justice.  It is their controlling leaders who do not.  It is these, and not the people, who are in sympathy with slavery and the South.  The people are with Freedom and the North.  One
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of the most beautiful touching things in our day is the patience with which the starving English operatives bear the sufferings, which this Rebellion has brought upon them.  They tell us that they would not have them terminated by wrong to the slave; and that they are willing to suffer on, if only the slave can be made free.  Sublime conduct!  Would we Americans, if brought into such circumstances, be found capable of it?

To return to the point whence I set out.——Will this nation be saved?  Will she consent to the cost of her salvation?  In other words, will she give up her pro slavery heart in exchange for a heart of pity and love of justice for the victims of her oppression?  I much fear she will not.  She would not do so in the day when she prospered in her oppression.  She has not done so in this dark night when she is suffering the penalties of that oppression.  The Church is here and there beginning to denounce slavery.——But scarcely anywhere has she begun to confess her own guilty share in it.  A self justifying spirit in regard to slavery still prevails in both the political Parties, and the press of the Democratic Party is still wicked and shameless enough to make arguments in proof of the economical and political advantages of upholding Slavery.  Half the voters in the Free States are ready today to vote for a Peace on the basis of pro-slavery compromises.  And not a very small proportion of our recently elected Governors would be glad to have the North succumb to the South and purchase Peace by consenting to such changes in the Constitution, as would favor the extension and perpetuity of Slavery.  In the light of such facts may we not well fear that our country is lost?

Another illustration of the deep, and perhaps desperate, debauchment of our country by slavery is that for thirty years "Abolitionist" has been the most odious name in it.——Church members have been quick to disown it.  Politicians have studied to show their lothing of it in every possible way, and to every possible degree.  Gen. Wadsworth (all honor to him!) is one of the very few of our eminent men who dare to welcome and wear the name.  And he does this even when in nomination for a high office.  But the name was fatal to him.  He was highly qualified for the office.  He was wise, practical, and just.  His generous use of his large estate had contributed to make him popular.  His having gone into the army, with his sons and son-in-law, and bravely and feely exposed his person in battle, had added greatly to his popularity.  But alas! he was an Abolitionist——and therefore could not be elected!  He would have been by the largest majority ever known in the State, had all voted for him who refused to do so because he was an Abolitionist, and also all, who voted for his opponent because his opponent was an anti-abolitionist.

Socially, as well as ecclesiastically and politically, "Abolitionist" is a disadvantageous, shunned and abhorred name.  Even now, after all that the Rebellion has done to redeem the name from its odiousness, the man who would get into what is called "good society," had better be a debauchee or drunkard——nay, both——than an Abolitionist.  I very well remember being told by that keen observer of men and things, Edmund Quincy, when walking the streets of Boston with him, more than twenty years ago, that the great objection of his friends to his being an Abolitionist was that the thing is so vulgar.  The Abolitionists were nearly all plain and natural people——and therefore vulgar in the eyes of fashionable and conventional people.  Moreover, their having identified themselves with a degraded and cast-off race made them intensely vulgar in such eyes.  Emphatically true is it that at West Point one could not formerly (however it may be now) be a gentleman and yet an Abolitionist.  Hence an Abolitionist in that School was well nigh as scarce "as a wolf in England or a toad in Ireland."  What folly to expect that officers educated to associate all that is honorable and gentlemanly with Slavery, and the reverse of this with anti-slavery, should put their whole heart into an earnest
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resistance to a pro-slavery Rebellion!  For my part, I think that our West Point officers, considering what a pro-slavery education the country chose for them, have done better than we had a right to expect.  It is true that when the Rebellion broke out, many of them paid us for that education by entering the Southern army, and that many who remained at the North paid us for it by sympathizing with the South.  But it is also true that many of the graduates of West Point are among the most faithful and able officers in the Northern army.  What is quite noteworthy in this connection is that the South, in running through the vocabulary of bad names for one with which most effectually to stigmatize and sting the Northern army, has finally lighted on Abolitionist.  She calls it the "Abolitionist Army"——and this, too, notwithstanding she must know what dangerous thoughts the name cannot fail to put into the heads of her slaves.  But she could not forego the opportunity——she could not resist the temptation——to mortify and disgrace us.

I spoke of "good society."  Being an Abolitionist——bred one and born one——it is not supposable that I ever was in it.  To get now and then into its suburbs or immediate surroundings would be as much as I could reasonably expect.  The thing itself would be ever beyond my reach.  I have said this much of myself to follow it with the remark, that seldom in my approaches to "good society" do I fail to witness such loathings of the Abolitionists and the negroes, and therein such insensibility to the claims of decency and justice, humanity and religion, as excite afresh my apprehension that Slavery has debauched and debased the country beyond a reasonable hope of its recovery.  The one thing which this nation needs to do is to make "Abolitionist" the most popular name in it——to make it as attractive as it is now repulsive.  For nothing short of this will express her adequate repentance for her stupendous crime of having held, during her national existence, fifteen to twenty millions of immortal beings in Slavery.  Will the nation be brought to do this honor——this merited honor——to that hated name?  Will her Seymours and Rynders, her Van Burens, and Bennetts, and Woods ever be found singing Garrison's sublime song:

"I am an Abolitionist——I glory in the name?"

I fear she will have to wait for their children, if not indeed for their children's children, to sing these brave words.

How great the change——ere the name of Abolitionist shall become thus popular!——Ere it becomes so the negro must cease to be driven from the public conveyance, and from the school, and church, and cemetery.  Ere it become so there must be tears of penitence over his wrongs, instead of the heartless laughter over his sorrows and helplessness, and the fiendish shouts of exultation over his crushed manhood.  I repeat, how great the change!  And yet until this change the nation cannot be saved.  For, until this change, God will continue to be at war with her.  And every nation, as well as every individual, with whom God is at war, is lost, all present, and seeming, and superficial appearances to the contrary notwithstanding——lost until repentance shall come: and lost forever, if it shall never come.

Great, indeed, must be the change ere "Abolitionist" shall become so honored a name!  Before that change can take place, our question: "What shall we do with the blacks?" will be regarded as no less absurd than would be their question: "What shall we do with the whites?"  Before that change, they will be left as free as any other race to go where they will.  Their equal rights will be recognized; and manhood would be held to be as sacred and inviolable in them as in others.  Emancipation will doubtless drain the free States and Canada of a large share of their blacks.  But this will be solely because Emancipation falls in with nature, and opens an inviting way South to a people who, in violation of nature, were dragged to the ungenial North.

I have glanced at this spirit of caste, which incessantly clamors for the expatriation of the blacks.  That our rulers, and our chief rulers 
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