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There would have been no further amendment to the Constitution, there would have been no conditions of reconstruction, there would have been such a neutralization of the anti-slavery amendment as would authorize and sustain all the State laws already passed for the practical re-enslavement of the negro, with such additional enactments as would have made them cruelly effective.
As a complete rebuttal to this contention on his part, we quote from an article which appeared in the North American Review from the pen of the late Hon. James G. Blaine: "It must be borne in mind that the Republicans were urged and hastened to measures of amelioration for the Negro by very dangerous developments in the Southern States looking to his re-enslavement in fact, if not in form.
As the division between the President and Congress widened, their confidence increased; and as their confidence increased, a reign of lawlessness and outrage against the rights of the defenseless was inaugurated. The negroes, who had begun to learn their freedom, were not only subjected to laws of practical re-enslavement, but to a treatment whose brutality could not have been foreseen.
But, while the chieftains of the great Conspiracy and of the armed Rebellion itself remained at their homes unpunished, through the clemency of the American People; the active and malignant minds of some of them were plotting a future triumph for the "Lost Cause," in the overthrow, in consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact with an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own to be known under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself within the Union, for a time, greater or less, according to circumstances, and in the meanwhile to work up, with untiring devotion and energy, not only to this practical autonomy and Sectional Independence within the Union, but also to a practical re-enslavement of the Blacks, and to the vigorous reassertion and triumph, by the aid of British gold, of those pernicious doctrines of Free-Trade which, while beneficial to the Cotton-lords of the South, would again check and drag down the robust expansion of manufactures and commerce in all other parts of the Land, and destroy the glorious prosperity of farmers, mechanics, and laborers, while at the same time crippling Capital, in the North and West.
What will follow as the final outcome we do not know, but that is the beginning of his attempted re-enslavement. It is beyond any question that his return to involuntary servitude in some condition or conditions, the disarming him of the ballot being the initial step in the proceeding, is seriously contemplated, if not deliberately planned.
But, while the chieftains of the great Conspiracy and of the armed Rebellion itself remained at their homes unpunished, through the clemency of the American People; the active and malignant minds of some of them were plotting a future triumph for the "Lost Cause," in the overthrow, in consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact with an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own to be known under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself within the Union, for a time, greater or less, according to circumstances, and in the meanwhile to work up, with untiring devotion and energy, not only to this practical autonomy and Sectional Independence within the Union, but also to a practical re-enslavement of the Blacks, and to the vigorous reassertion and triumph, by the aid of British gold, of those pernicious doctrines of Free-Trade which, while beneficial to the Cotton-lords of the South, would again check and drag down the robust expansion of manufactures and commerce in all other parts of the Land, and destroy the glorious prosperity of farmers, mechanics, and laborers, while at the same time crippling Capital, in the North and West.
No man who has once been enslaved by any inordinate appetite can, in my view, ever get beyond the danger of re-enslavement unless through a change wrought in him by God, and this can only take place after a prayerful submission of himself to God and obedience to his divine laws so far as lies in his power. In other words, Mrs. Birtwell, the Church must come to his aid.
Yet he lent himself to the party cry that Pitt was taking his first measures for the re-enslavement of Ireland. Had it not been for what he himself called the delirium of the preceding session, and which had still not subsided, he would have seen that Pitt was in truth taking his first measures for the effective deliverance of Ireland from an unjust and oppressive subordination.
Kindred legislation was attempted in a large majority of the Confederate States, and it is not uncharitable or illogical to assume that the ultimate re-enslavement of the race was the fixed design of those who framed the law and of those who attempted to enforce them.
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