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If affranchisement produced the destruction of planting in St. Domingo, we know now the reason. It is a proved fact that negroes who do not owe their liberty to insurrection, remain disposed to devote themselves to labor in the fields. With slavery, observe, disappear, one after the other, the obstacles in the way of agricultural progress.
Of so much true liberty, of so much progress, of so many noble examples, what would have been left standing? The secession of the South is not the secession of the North; affranchisement with four millions of slaves is not affranchisement with twenty millions; the crisis of 1861 is not that of 1865 or of 1869.
Whoever shall have replied to these questions will have decided, knowingly or unknowingly, whether liberty be possible. I do not know that any people should be excluded from liberty; only all are bound to pursue it by the path that leads to it, by earnestness of convictions, by internal affranchisement, which signifies by the Gospel.
In this case, again, the question of affranchisement will have made vast strides. The United States will have taken a decided position in the absence of the South, which its return cannot destroy; convictions will be fixed, the final impulse will have been given, and to this impulse, the South, come to repentance, will know that nothing is left it but to submit.
Buchanan. The barriers of public probity, and the right of men, yielded in turn; the administration dared write officially that Cuba was necessary to the United States, and that the affranchisement of slaves in Cuba would be a legitimate cause of war.
But it will not succeed in this; the question has just been decided. Between these two systems, which are to contend for contemporaneous communities, between socialism and individualism, the choice of the United States is made. Before witnessing the affranchisement of the slaves, we shall, therefore, witness the affranchisement of American politics.
The number of free States will increase, not only by the settling of new territories, but also by the affranchisement of the thinly scattered slaves, becoming continually more thinly scattered, of Maryland, of Delaware, or of Missouri. We can even now describe this affranchisement, so well is the American method known.
Look at these pretty cottages, this neat and almost elegant furniture, these gardens, this general air of comfort and civilization; question these blacks, whose physical appearance has become modified already under the influence of liberty, these blacks, who decreased rapidly in numbers during the epoch of slavery, and who have begun to increase, on the contrary, since their affranchisement; they will tell us that they are happy.
The llanos or vast plains of Calaboso, San Carlos, Guanare, and Barquecimeto, contain only four or five thousand slaves, who are scattered among the farms, and employed in the care of cattle. The number of free men is very considerable; the Spanish laws and customs being favourable to affranchisement.
Observe, too, how the edicts of the emperors multiplied as soon as the influence of Christianity was exerted in the Roman world. And all these edicts had but one aim: to sweeten servitude, to increase affranchisement by law, to facilitate voluntary emancipation. What the Gospel did then against European slavery, it is doing now against American slavery.
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