The negro: the southerner's problemPage, Thomas Nelson
History
The negro: the southerner's problem
Page, Thomas Nelson
African Americans; United States -- Race relations
“5. It is evidently winked at by the city authorities. No efforts
have been made to arrest the leading rioters....”
All of this was within three years of the time when a bill to abolish
slavery in Virginia had failed in her General Assembly by only one
vote and that vote the casting vote of the speaker.
There is surely no necessity to pile up more authority on this point.
If there were it could be done; for not only in New England, but
elsewhere in the North, instances can be cited in which violence,
and once even murder, occurred. Elijah P. Lovejoy, after having his
printing-office sacked three times, fell a martyr to the ferocity of
a mob in Illinois for having, under an instinct of humanity, aided a
fugitive slave to escape. On one thing, however, the North may with
justice pride itself: that in the end, there was awakened in it a
general sentiment for emancipation. For this it was indebted to a
work of genius produced by a woman; a romance which touched the heart
of Christendom. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” overruled the Supreme Court of
the United States, and abrogated the Constitution. By arousing the
general sentiment of the world against slavery, it contributed more
than any other one thing to its abolition in that generation.
But not even then did the North set out to abolish slavery. President
Lincoln is universally accredited as the emancipator of the African.
It is his hand which is represented in bronze and marble as
striking the shackles from the slave. He was the chosen and great
standard-bearer of the most advanced element of the North, the great
representative of their ideas, the idolized chief magistrate, and
the trusted commander of their armies.
His words on this subject must be authoritative.
On the 22d of December, 1860, after South Carolina had seceded,
he says: “Do the Southern people really entertain fears that a
Republican administration would directly or indirectly interfere with
the slaves or with them about their slaves? ... The South would be in
no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
On the 4th of March, 1861, in his official utterance, his inaugural
address, he says: “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to
interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it now
exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no
inclination to do so.”
If there can possibly be a more authoritative declaration than this,
we have it in a resolution passed by Congress of the United States,
and signed by Lincoln as President in July, 1861, after the battle of
Manassas:
“Resolved ... that this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit
of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor
purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established
institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the
supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union with all the
dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired,” etc.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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