Party bowed and squatted lower than all other parties, became at last weak and impracticable, and the slaveholders broke it up as they would an abolition meeting. [Cheers.] Nevertheless: I am aware that there are such things as practicable and impracticable, and I will not ignore the objections, which may be raised against the policy which I would have the nation adopt and carry out toward my enslaved and oppressed fellow countrymen.
There are at least four answers, other than mine, floating about in the public mind, to the question what shall be done with the Negro.
First. It is said that the white race can, if they will, reduce the whole colored population to slavery, and at once make all the laws and institutions of the country harmonize with that state of facts and thus abolish at a blow, all distinctions and antagonisms. But this mode of settling the question, simple as it is, would not work well. It would create a class of tyrants in whose presence no man’s liberty, not even the white man’s liberty would be safe. The slaveholder would then be the only really free man of the country—all the rest would be either slaves, or be poor white trash, to be kept from between the wind and our slaveholding nobility. The non-slaveholder would be the patrol, the miserable watchdog of the slave plantation.[52]
Second. The next and best defined solution of our difficulties about the Negro is colonization, which proposes to send the Negro back to Africa where his ancestors came from. This is a singularly pleasing dream. But as was found in the case of sending missionaries to the moon, it was much easier to show that they might be useful there, than to show how they could be got there. It would take a larger sum of money than we shall have to spare at the close of this war, to send five millions of American-born people, five thousand miles across the sea.
It may be safely affirmed that we shall hardly be in a condition at the close of this war to afford the money for such costly transportation [cheers], even if we could consent to the folly of sending away the only efficient producers in the largest half of the American union.
Third. It may be said as another mode of escaping the claims of absolute justice, [that] white people may emancipate the slaves in form yet retain them as slaves in fact just as General Banks is now said to be doing in Louisiana,[53] or then may free them from individual masters, only to make them slaves to the community. They can make of them a degraded caste. But this would be about the worst thing that could be done. It would make pestilence and pauperism, ignorance and crime, a part of American institutions. It would be dooming the colored race to a condition indescribably wretched and the dreadful contagion of their vices and crimes would fly like cholera and small pox through all classes. Woe, woe! to this land, when it strips five millions of its people of all motives for cultivating an upright character. Such would be the effect of abolishing slavery, without conferring equal rights. It would be to lacerate and depress the spirit of the Negro, and make him a scourge and a curse to the country. Do anything else with us, but plunge us not into this hopeless pit.
Fourth. The white people of the country may trump up some cause of war against the colored people, and wage that terrible war of races which some men even now venture to predict, if not to desire, and exterminate the black race entirely. They would spare neither age nor sex. Even here in Brooklyn colored men have been hunted from their honest labor for no other cause than the color of their skin.[54]
But is there not some chosen curse, some secret thunder in the stores of heaven red with uncommon wrath to blast the men who harbor this bloody solution? The very thought is more worthy of demons than of men. Such a war would indeed remove the colored race from the country—but it would also remove justice, innocence and humanity from the country. It would fill the land with violence and crime, and make the very name of America a stench in the nostrils of mankind. It would give you hell for a country and fiends for your countrymen. [Cheers.]
Now, I hold that there is but one way of wisely disposing of the colored race, and that is to do them right and justice. It is not only to break the chains of their bondage and accord to them personal liberty, but it is to admit them to the full and complete enjoyment of civil and political equality.
The mere abolition of slavery is not the end of the law for the black man, or for the white man. To emancipate the bondman from the laws that make him a chattel, and yet subject him to laws and deprivations which will inevitably break down his spirit, destroy his patriotism and convert him into a social pest, will be little gain to him and less gain to the country. One of the most plausible arguments ever made for slavery, is that which assumes that those who argue for the freedom of the Negro, do not themselves propose to treat him as an equal fellow citizen. The true course is to look this matter squarely in the face and determine to grant the entire claims of justice and liberty keeping back no part of the price.
But the question comes not only from those who hate the colored race, but from some who are distinguished for their philanthropy: can this thing be done? Can the white and colored people of America ever be blended into a common nationality under a system of equal laws? Mark, I state the question broadly and fairly. It respects civil and political equality, in its fullest and best sense: can such equality ever be practically enjoyed?
The question is not can there be social equality? That does not exist anywhere—there have been arguments to show that no one man should own more property than another. But no satisfactory conclusion has been reached. So there are those who talk about social equality, but nothing better on that subject than “pursuit,” the right of pursuit has been attained.
The question is not whether the colored man is mentally equal to his white brother, for in this respect there is no equality among white men themselves.
The question is not whether colored men will be likely to reach the presidential chair. I have no trouble here: for a man may live quite a tolerable life without ever breathing the air of Washington.
But the question is: Can the white and colored people of this country be blended into a common nationality, and enjoy together, in the same country, under the same flag, the inestimable blessings of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as neighborly citizens of a common country?
I answer most unhesitatingly, I believe they can. In saying this I am not blind to the past. I know it well. As a people we have moved about among you like dwarfs among giants—too small to be seen. We were morally, politically and socially dead. To the eye of doubt and selfishness we were far beyond the resurrection trump. All the more because I know the past. All the more, because I know the terrible experience of the slave, and the depressing power of oppression, do I believe in the possibility of a better future for the colored people of America.
Let me give a few of the reasons for the hope that is within me.
The first is, despite all theories and all disparagements, the Negro is a man. By every fact, by every argument, by every rule of measurement, mental, moral or spiritual, by everything in the heavens above and in the earth beneath which vindicates the humanity of any class of beings, the Negro’s humanity is equally vindicated. The lines which separate him from the brute creation are as broad, distinct and palpable, as those which define and establish the very best specimens of the Indo-Caucasian race. I will not stop here to prove the manhood of the Negro. His virtues and his vices, his courage and his cowardice, his beauties and his deformities, his wisdom and his folly, everything connected with him, attests his manhood.
If the Negro were a horse or an ox, the question as to whether he can become a party to the American government, and member of the nation, could never have been raised. The very questions raised against him confirm the truth of what they are raised to disprove. We have laws forbidding the Negro to learn to read, others forbidding his owning a dog, others punishing him for using firearms, and our Congress came near passing a law that a Negro should in no case be superior to a white man, thus admitting the very possibility of what they were attempting to deny.
The
