Slave-holding even in Federal territory was not forbidden until June 19, 1862, which was just a month before the bill was passed providing that all “slaves of persistent rebels found in any place occupied or commanded by the forces of the Union should not be returned to their masters [as they had hitherto been under the law], and providing that they might be enlisted to fight for the Union.” A Constitutional Amendment (the Thirteenth), abolishing and prohibiting evermore the enslavement of human beings, failed to pass in the House of Representatives in the session of 1864, and would have failed altogether had not a member from Ohio changed his vote in order to move a reconsideration and keep it alive till the following session, when Mr. Lincoln having been reëlected, and having recommended its passage, and the war being evidently near its end, it was passed by a vote of 119 yeas to 57 nays. Indeed, before Mr. Lincoln issued his emancipation proclamation he gave one hundred days’ warning to the revolutionary States to lay down their arms, and in the proclamation he places the entire matter forever at rest by declaring in terms, in that unmistakable English of which he was a master, that the measure was adopted “upon military necessity.” No one can read this record and not admit that slavery was abolished in the providence of God, against the intention of the North and of the South alike, because its purpose had been accomplished, and the time was ripe for its ending. V The next step is the discussion of the attitude in which we, the white people of the South, stand to the Negro. This attitude is too striking, if not too anomalous, not to have attracted wide attention. A race with an historic and glorious past, in a high stage of civilization, stands confronted by a race of their former slaves, invested with every civil and political right which they themselves possess, and supported by an outside public sentiment, which if not inimical to the dominant race, is at least unsympathetic. The two races cannot be termed with exactness hostile—in many respects, not even unfriendly; but they are suspicious of each other; their interests are in some essential particulars conflicting, and in others may easily be made so; the former slave race has been for over thirty years politically useful to the outsiders by whose sentiment they are sustained, and the former dominant race is unalterably assertive of the imperative necessity that it shall govern the inferior race and not be governed by it. Now what is the question? Is it merely the question, “whether the Negro shall not have the right to choose his own rulers”; or is it a great race issue between the Negro and the White?