Slavery

There are just three propositions that we wish to submit to our pro-slavery friends – to those gentlemen who are advocating the return of the rebel States to the Union, possessed of all the rights they enjoyed before they rebelled against the parent Government; and until they are refuted we must consider these persons as sympathizers with the South and actuated more by partisan zeal than love of country.  They are these: 1. Slavery caused this war.  2. Had it not been for slavery the war would not have occurred.  3. Remove slavery and there will be no cause for war.  Admit the truth of these propositions and the man cannot be regarded as the true friend of his country who advocates the retention of slavery among us.

That slavery caused this war, is acknowledged even by Jeff. Davis in his melancholy inaugural address of the 22d of February, and admitted by every well informed man in the North, of which we have any knowledge, who has expressed any opinion upon the subject.  Had slavery not existed in our country, the unhappy differences between the North and the South, which have at length culminated in war, would have had no foundation.  The tendency of slavery is to produce a state of society antagonistic to a republican form of government, by depressing one class of community and elevating another.  While it reduces the poor to the most abject condition of any creatures on the face of the earth, (vide Bayard Taylor’s comparative statement of the wretched condition of the poor whites of the South,) it makes an aristocracy of the rich, haughty, overbearing and exacting, who regard the law of force as paramount to the plain republican rule of their country.  Remove slavery, and society would settle down on a firm basis, and the distinction of wealth, which fosters aristocracy, would soon disappear.

Wealth is the distinctive feature of aristocracies, talent that of republican forms of government.  A fool can obtain a seat in the British parliament, if he have the rank and the money to command the influence of his dependents.  In a republic “rank is but the guinea’s stamp,” money is no recommendation to station, talent alone commands respect, and through its powerful influence a man may rise from the lowly paths of a day-laborer, from that of a rail-splitter, to the proudest position in the gift of the people.  Everything, then, that has a tendency to encourage a marked distinction in society should be banished from a republican form of government.  This is one of the least of the many evils that slavery entails upon our country.  Remove it at once and a “nation would be born in a day,” that would rival the history of the world to exhibit its equal for all the elements of greatness, happiness and perpetuity.

Yet for mere partisan purposes, with a knowledge of these facts before them, men are so degraded intellectually as to wish to retain slavery among us.  Men too, who live in that portion of our country that has never reaped one iota of benefit from it – if it possess any benefit – and that, too, at a time when the first fair opening in the history of our country is presented, that slavery can be legally, constitutionally, and rightfully removed.  We have known partisan zeal to carry men to great lengths, but never to a point so remote as this from all that tends to aggrandize us as a nation.  It seems sometimes in view of their course as if indeed ‘judgment had flown to beasts and men had lost their reason.’  But let us live in hope, hope that the dark cloud which seems to be settling down upon our country will yet emit flashes of light that will enable the helmsmen of our nation to steer the goodly bark through the rocks and shoals that menace it.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, March 7, 1862, p. 2