The Perils of Emancipation: 1863

The Perils of Emancipation
Source: The Polynesian, Honolulu. February 7, 1863

"My dear Abbe," sad Mirabeau to the Abbe Sieyes, "you have unchained the bull; do you expect he is not to gore with his horns?" This spirit interrogatory may with still greater force be addressed to President Lincoln after the ominous first of January, if he should succeed in making good the proclamation he proposes then to issue. What was there in the aspect of the French populace on the day of the meeting of the States-General from which even the acutest mind could have inferred the thick-coming excesses and atrocities which converted Paris into a grand carnival of devils? Those terrible orgies were the intoxication produced by a sudden change in the condition and hopes of the lower orders, of whom the Abbe Sieyes said: "They would be free, and they know not how to be just." Do the southern negroes occupy a higher rank in the scale of intelligence and virtue than did the free laborers, mechanics and shop-keepers of the French capital? Is the change proposed for them less great and sudden? Are the hopes it is calculated to inspire less wild and chimerical? Are the enthusiasts, under whose tutelage the negroes are likely to fall, less absurdly fanatical and ferocious? Let the reply be found in the respect they pay to the memory of St. John Brown. Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson is a mild and amiable type of this class of enthusiasts, and he blasphemously compared the execution of John Brown on the gallows to the crucifixion of Christ on the cross. If they did these things on the green tree what shall they not do do in the dry? If a mild and amiable litterateur, before the civil war had stirred up its fierce and envenomed passions, could thus sanctify and hallow the attempt of a courageous felon to incite the negroes to cut the throats of their masters, what moderation is to be expected from coarse abolition leaders, when backed by the government in an attempt to exterminate slavery at all hazards?

It is idle to say, as Gen. Wadsworth said in his electioneering letter, that the negroes are a mild and harmless race, who will never resort to violence. The horrors of San Domingo furnish one of a hundred answers to this piece of silly optimism. t is as certain as that there is a sun in the heavens, that the emancipation policy will not succeed at all, or else that its success will be accompanied by wide-spread, servile insurrections, and followed, at a longer or shorter interval, by a war of extermination between the back and white races. Jefferson, himself the sworn foe of slavery, wrote to John Holmes in 1820: "I can say, with conscious truth, that there is not a man on earth who would sacrifice more than I would to relieve us from this heavy reproach in any practicable way. The cession of that kind of property (for so it is misnamed) is a bagatelle which would not cost me a second thought, if in that way a general emancipation and expatriation could be effected. But as it is, we have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither safely hold him nor let him go. Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other." If negroes could not be emancipated, even by the South itself, and remain in the country, without dangers from which this bold apostle of liberty shrank back in horror, it bis likely that emancipation can be effected by armed force, against the armed opposition of the masters, without raising and letting loose the fiercest passions of the subject race?

It may be said that Jefferson was a Southerner and a slaveholder, and therefore no impartial judge of the perils of emancipation. But that fact that he had spent his life in the South, and had reflected earnestly on this question from his youth, is at least favorable to his knowledge, if not to his impartiality; an impeachment of which would come with peculiarly bad grace from the abolitionists. There is no honored name among our patriot ancestors which is so often in their mouths; there is nothing which they are so fond of questing as political apothegms drawn form his writings. But as his testimony may, nevertheless be excepted to on the ground that being a slaveholder, he seas an interested party, we will produce that of a more recent, and even more philosophical judge of the inevitable results of emancipation. It is no less a name than that of De Tocqueville, the calmest, ablest, and most far-seeing critic our institutions ever had, and, by universal consent, the first political philosopher of this century. De Tocqueville says: "The danger of a conflict between the white and black inhabitants of the Southern States of the Union-a danger which, however remote it may be, is inevitable-perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans. * * * I confess I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle between the two races in the United States. The negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites they will speedily declare themselves as enemies. * * * When I contemplate the condition of the South I can only discern two alternatives which may be adopted by the white inhabitants of those States, viz., either to emancipate the negroes and to intermingle with them; or, remaining isolated from them, to keep them in a state of slavery as long as possible. All intermediate measures seem to be likely to terminate and that shortly, in the most horrible of civil wars, and perhaps in the extirpation of one or the other of the two races."

The mad fanatics who domineer over the minds of the President and lead him captive at their will, of course scout all such gloomy predictions.; but we submit to candid men the question whether these passionate fools are more likely to be good judges than men like Jefferson and De Tocqueville.