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It is a little amusing for us, to-day, to know that while the emancipationists were angrily growling out their disgust at the ruler who would not abolish slavery according to their advice, the rough draft of the Emancipation Proclamation had already been written. It was actually lying in his desk when he was writing to Greeley that letter which caused so much indignation.
The question of emancipation is not clear even in the heads of the leading emancipationists; not one thinks to give freeholds to the emancipated. It is the only way to make them useful to themselves and to the community.
Having an abundance of leisure, and being an Abolitionist, he devoted a portion of the time that was not absorbed by his profession to writing articles on slavery for the Missouri Democrat, which, notwithstanding its name, was the organ of the Missouri emancipationists, and lived in part on the money he received as compensation for that work. That in part describes the author's experience.
My illusion about both the brothers is wholly dispelled and gone. I regret it, but both sustain McClellan, both look askant on Stanton, and belong to the conditional emancipationists, colonizationists, and other RADICAL preservers of slavery. All such form a class of superficial politicians, of compromisers with their creed, and are corrupters of others.
Another member of the Cabinet was Montgomery Blair, of Maryland, who had been a resident of Missouri, and was a brother of General Francis P. Blair, Jr., of St. Louis. General Blair had been the leader of the Missouri emancipationists, but had turned against them. For his face-about there were, at least, two intelligible reasons.
Indeed, there are multitudes of fairly intelligent people who believe that slaveholding in this country ceased the very day and hour the proclamation appeared. Lincoln's proclamation, when, in fact, the proclamation never applied to Kentucky at all. The emancipationists of Missouri were working hard to free their State from slavery, and they would have been only too glad to have Mr.
It is true he has freed more than twenty millions of serfs in his empire, and, though following the dictates of political necessity, he may have acted with no more real anti-slavery sentiment than that which makes many avowed pro-slavery men emancipationists among ourselves, yet he certainly has achieved a noble glory, which even his monstrous reign in Poland may not entirely blot out from the pages of history.
When the question of slavery in the West Indian colonies was under discussion in Parliament, he went farther for abolition than even the professed philanthropists and emancipationists, the Clarksons and the Buxtons, were inclined to go.
But whether the theories of its origin were wise or foolish, the insurrection made its mark, and the famous band of Virginia emancipationists who all that winter made the House of Delegates ring with unavailing eloquence till the rise of slave-exportation to new cotton regions stopped their voices were but the unconscious mouth-pieces of Nat Turner.
One of the results was that the leading emancipationists of Great Britain signed and published a warning against the colonization scheme, denouncing it as having its roots in "a cruel prejudice," and declaring that it was calculated to "increase the spirit of caste so unhappily predominant," and that it "exposed the colored people to great practical persecution in order to force them to emigrate."
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