New York, December 19, 1861, Afternoon.
. . . I do not wish to be misunderstood on the slavery
question. My opinion — I give it as the individual opinion of a citizen — is
that negroes coming into our lines must be, and are by that fact, free men;
for, on the one hand, the United States cannot become auctioneers of human
beings, and, on the other hand, our soldiers cannot see in a human being
anything but his humanity. Is the being that flies to us a human being? that
is, does he talk; has he reason; is he, black or white, a man, or is he a
gorilla? You may remember I stated this, in my “Political Ethics,” to be the
practical, the legal distinction. Or, to make it more distinct, does he belong
to a class of beings who, in their normal state, speak? If he is a man, I say,
then the army cannot, in its very essence, occupy itself with that mixture of humanity
and thing, or chattel, characterizing slavery, and creating all the difficulty
inherent in that institution (in antiquity as well as in modern times), — a
mixture which even the Roman law acknowledges not to be owing to the law of
nature, but to municipal law. That mixture of the two ideas, man and thing,
which the chemist would call unmixable (like oil and water), is a forced
one, — forced by municipal law or violence, — and ceases, I take it, by the
inherent character of war, which, by its physical contest of men with men,
reduces men again to their simple status of men. Suppose an Austrian peasant,
with all his feudal obligations thick upon him, had presented himself to the
army of Napoleon, and the feudal lord had asked his surrender; what would Napoleon's
general have answered? The only difficulty in this case — as altogether in the
slave question — arises from the black skin; but the law of nature does not
acknowledge the difference of skin, and war is carried on by the law of nature.
Those who commenced this Rebellion ought to have reflected upon this. It is now
too late to talk — in the midst of war — of rights made or guaranteed by
municipal or Constitutional law. They might as well ask for a writ of habeas corpus
for a spy we may catch. . . .
SOURCE: Thomas Sergeant Perry, Editor, The Life and
Letters of Francis Lieber, p. 322-3
No comments:
Post a Comment