The Freed Slaves

The Hawkeye has been guilty of furnishing aid and comfort to the pro-slavery press, by hazarding the impression that seems to have struck our cotemporary with the force of “brick-bat projectile from urchin hand,” that our Government will not know what to do with the slaves after they are liberated!  It is afraid they will starve to death from incapacity to take care of themselves, and instances those at Port Royal.  The Democrat of this city rubs up its fossilized ideas and declares the Hawkeye is “becoming sensible,” and in the same number its editor endorses by publication Amos Kendall’s letter from which we gave some extracts the day before yesterday, and in which the old politician says, that the end of this rebellion will be a negro community along a portion of the Southern coast, under the protection of the United States, and that if the war is protracted this is a result which the United States cannot avert if it would.  But, says the Hawkeye, the negroes will starve, they are incapable of self government.  Amen, responds the Democrat, you are “becoming sensible.”  We shall see whether they will starve.

The Atlantic sailed from New York a few days since as our neighbor should have known before he endorsed the old fogy idea, conveying about sixty persons, among whom was the estimable lady of our excellent Senator, Hon. Jas. Harlan, who went out as missionaries to the benighted slaves of Port Royal.  Some went to teach them the art and mystery of agricultural operations, how to raise vegetables as well as cotton culture. – For it be known, cotton is no longer king, he has been dethroned, and with his fall down goes slavery and up come the poor whites of the South.  The ladies went to open industrial schools.  Some few physicians and clergymen completed the assortment, and we doubt if a more intelligent or missionary lot of persons took passage on a vessel since the sailing of the Mayflower.  “Dear friends,” this is but the first installment, and if you are blind as fishes of Mammoth Cave and as impenetrable to intelligence as an inhabitant of the Silurian age, if you cannot see and understand that there is sufficient antislavery feeling at the North to keep from starvation the wretched victims of the accursed system, which the philanthropy of the last half of the nineteenth century shall vest with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Friday Morning, March 14, 1862, p. 2