  Some of the Almost Insuperable Difficulties which Embarrassed Every Plan of Emancipation (Concluded) "Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely." In these words Lord Macaulay fixes free discussion as a prime requisite to the right solution of problems, however difficult. It was one of the baneful features of slavery and the racial problems attending it that in the period just antedating the Civil War tolerant discussion was almost banished from the arena. As a rule, men of moderate views and sane counsels were driven to the rear, while the Fanatics of the North and the Fire-eaters of the South held the centre of the stage. Virginia was not wholly exempt from these conditions which in her case had their origin and growth in causes arising both within and beyond her borders. LACK OF FREE DISCUSSION IN STATE As we have seen, slavery in Virginia existed in certain well-defined localities and was confined in ownership to a small minority of her people. Thus the divergence of interests between the two classes of her white population assumed a sectional character which was, in turn, intensified by reason of an archaic arrangement with respect to representation in her General Assembly. As heretofore explained, the representatives in her Legislature were apportioned among the various cities and counties of the commonwealth not on the basis of their respective white populations, but upon what was known as the "mixed basis"—that "Slavery is a cancer in your face," declared that master of epigram, John Randolph of Roanoke. The world saw it. The victim of the disease knew it was there. Between the pain of its presence and the dread lest the surgeon's knife might not work a cure, the patient halted and hesitated and, by manifold methods, sought to mitigate its pain or banish the thought of its existence. Thus silence for to-day and hope for to-morrow was his fatuous policy. CAUSES IN THE STATE, WHICH HINDERED Slavery was at war with the ideals upon which Virginians had founded their commonwealth. It was a burden upon her advance along every line of normal achievement. It was Slavery made its home among the great plantations spreading their broad acres far from the centres of population, their owners living distant one from the other. It required, therefore, some more persuasive force than bolts and bars, to protect these isolated whites from the fury of the blacks if ever roused to a maddened discontent with their lot, and a consciousness of their power. Thus the daily precepts of slavery,—obedience, submission and reverence for the white man,—must not be dissipated by public discussions in which the rightfulness of slavery was questioned and the glories of freedom held up before the eyes of the wondering blacks. San Domingo sent its warnings, the horrors of the Nat Turner Insurrection were still fresh in the minds of men, and so the imperilled slave-holders denounced as the enemies of their race white men who indulged in academic discussions as to the advantages of emancipation. The foregoing were some of the causes arising within the state which served to discourage public discussions with respect to the abolition of slavery, and to invest with unnatural heat and bitterness the sentiments of those who nevertheless essayed the task. CAUSES FROM WITHOUT, WHICH HINDERED From beyond came movements and voices even more destructive of the spirit of free discussion and which lent to the reactionary elements in the state an advantage which they could never have acquired except for this outside interference. As far back as 1835 John Quincy Adams noted in his diary: In the same year there assembled in Faneuil Hall what the biographers of William Lloyd Garrison called "the social, political, religious and intellectual elite of Boston," who, under the leadership of Theodore Lyman, Jr., Abbott Lawrence, Peleg Sprague, and Harrison Gray Otis adopted resolutions denouncing the Northern Abolitionists for seeking by their inflammatory publications "to scatter among our Southern brethren fire-brands, arrows, and death," and pledging the meeting to support all constitutional laws for the suppression of all publications, "the natural and direct tendency of which is to incite the slaves of the South to revolt." Margaret Mercer, of Maryland, whose devotion to the cause of negro emancipation was well attested by her act in manumitting her own slaves, as well as in her life of service devoted largely to their interests, writing to Gerrit Smith, laments the incendiary appeals of William Lloyd Garrison and the direful forebodings which they aroused among the Southern people especially in the imaginations of the women. She says: "For while the well-disposed and faithful servants of kind masters will suffer and die with the whites in a general insurrection, the lawless and vicious will have in their power to massacre men, women and children in their sleep. VIEWS OF ADAMS Rev. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who visited Virginia and the South in 1854, published the results of his observations, from which we take the following extracts. After describing the activities of the Northern Anti-slavery Societies in scattering among the Southern negroes publications and pictures tending to stimulate slave insurrections and to inculcate ideas of racial equality, Dr. Adams writes: "When these amalgamation pictures were discovered, husbands and fathers at the South felt that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defense, the protection of their households against servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office and seized and burned abolition papers; indeed no excesses are surprising in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed." Again he writes: "They seem to be living in a state of self-defense, of self-preservation against the North." "As Northern zeal has promulgated bolder sentiments In his message to Congress, December, 1860, President Buchanan writes: "The incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question through the North for the last quarter of a century has at last produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. The feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehension of servile insurrection. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning." VIEWS OF LUNT Mr. George Lunt, of Boston, in his work, The Origin of the Late War, writes: "It thus appears that an active and alarming system of aggression against the South was in operation at the North thirty years ago, threatening to excite servile insurrection, to imperil union, to stir up civil war. This fact rests upon testimony which cannot but be considered impartial and conclusive." Again the same author, referring to the attempt of John Brown and his associates, writes: "Nothing was here wanting to insure a more widespread scene of horror and desolation than the world perhaps had ever before witnessed, except a totally different relation VIEWS OF BURGESS Professor John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, in his work, The Civil War and the Constitution, has portrayed the disastrous effects upon the sentiment in favor of emancipation in various parts of the South, occasioned by the virulence of these agitators and above all by the attempt of John Brown and his followers to precipitate servile insurrection. "If the whole thing," writes Professor Burgess, "both as to time, methods, and results, had been planned by his Satanic Majesty himself, it could not have succeeded better in setting the sound conservative movements of the age at naught, and in creating a state of feeling which offered the most capital opportunities for the triumph of political insincerity, radicalism and rascality over their opposites. No man who is acquainted with the change of feeling which occurred in the South between the 16th of October 1859 and the 16th day of November of the same year can regard the Harper's Ferry villainy as any other than one of the chiefest crimes of our history. It established and re-established the control of the great radical slaveholders over the non-slaveholders,—the little slaveholders, and the more liberal of the large slaveholders, which had already begun to be loosened." Professor Burgess then proceeds to show the still more disastrous effects upon conservative sentiment in Virginia and the South which resulted from the demonstrations at the North on the day of John Brown's execution. "Brown and his band," says Professor Burgess, "had "From the Harper's Ferry outrage onward the conviction grew among all classes that the white men of the South must stand together and must harmonize all internal differences in the presence of the mortal peril with which as a race they believed themselves threatened. Sound development in thought and feeling was arrested, the follies and hatreds born of fear and resentment now assumed the places born of common sense and common kindliness." VIRGINIA'S POSITION IN ELECTION OF 1860 But, despite conflicts within and assaults from without, it must not be concluded that the people of Virginia had entirely abandoned the right of free discussion in regard to slavery, nor forfeited their well-earned reputation for conservatism and self-poise. There were still, as we have seen, many of her foremost men, who were frank to deplore the existence of the institution and who had never surrendered the faith of their fathers, that the day of abolition would surely dawn. Neither did the outrage at Harper's The foregoing recitals will serve to present the almost insuperable difficulties with which emancipation in Virginia was invested during the period just antedating the Civil War. That her people took counsel of their fears, rather than their hopes, may be admitted. But for this attitude who shall arraign them? LINCOLN'S ESTIMATE OF THE DIFFICULTIES Abraham Lincoln, speaking at Peoria, Ill., October 16th, 1854, said: "When Southern people tell us that they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia—their native land. But a moment's reflection would convince me that whatever of high hope (as I think there is) there may be in this in the long run, its sudden execution is impossible. If they were all landed there in a day they would all perish in the next ten days; and there are not surplus shipping and surplus money enough in the world to carry them there in many times ten days. What then? Free them all and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? I think I would "If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution!" Such was the frank avowal of Mr. Lincoln. Nearly a half century later, Charles Francis Adams, the grandson of the "Old Man Eloquent," and himself a veteran of the Union Army, wrote: "The existence of an uneradicable and insurmountable race difference is indisputable. The white man and the black man cannot flourish together, the latter being considerable in number, under the same system of government.... The negro squats at our hearthstone. We can neither assimilate nor expel him." We need not yield completely to Mr. Lincoln's perplexity, nor to Mr. Adams's despair in acknowledging the gravity of the situation which confronted the people of Virginia and the almost insuperable difficulties which attended its right solution.
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