Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
I know that sincere philanthropy is earnest for the immediate
realization of its remotest aims; but time is always an element in
reform. It is one of the greatest acts on record to have brought
4,000,000 people into freedom. The career of free industry must be
fairly opened to them, and then their future prosperity and condition
must, after all, rest mainly on themselves. If they fail, and so perish
away, let us be careful that the failure shall not be attributable to
any denial of justice. In all that relates to the destiny of the
freedmen we need not be too anxious to read the future; many incidents
which, from a speculative point of view, might raise alarm will quietly
settle themselves. Now that slavery is at an end, or near its end, the
greatness of its evil in the point of view of public economy becomes
more and more apparent. Slavery was essentially a monopoly of labor,
and as such locked the States where it prevailed against the incoming
of free industry. Where labor was the property of the capitalist, the
white man was excluded from employment, or had but the second best
chance of finding it; and the foreign emigrant turned away from the
region where his condition would be so precarious. With the destruction
of the monopoly free labor will hasten from all pans of the civilized
world to assist in developing various and immeasurable resources which
have hitherto lain dormant. The eight or nine States nearest the Gulf
of Mexico have a soil of exuberant fertility, a climate friendly to
long life, and can sustain a denser population than is found as yet in
any part of our country. And the future influx of population to them
will be mainly from the North or from the most cultivated nations in
Europe. From the sufferings that have attended them during our late
struggle let us look away to the future, which is sure to be laden for
them with greater prosperity than has ever before been known. The
removal of the monopoly of slave labor is a pledge that those regions
will be peopled by a numerous and enterprising population, which will
vie with any in the Union in compactness, inventive genius, wealth, and
industry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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