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It had been left behind in the Captain's tent, the Army Regulations requiring that he wear one less conspicuous. Even now it might be in the hands of some slave-owning Confederate.
One of them said to me: "Earl Russell has no especial love for your Union, but he abominates negro slavery, and is very reluctant to acknowledge a new slave-owning government. Prince Albert and the Queen are friendly to you, but you must emancipate the slaves." My return passage from Liverpool was on board the Asia, and Captain Anderson commanded her for that voyage.
However, the dread of a slave-owning Government prevented any effective plan for supplying the army with labor except through the temporary impressment of slaves who were eventually to be returned to their owners. The policy of emancipation had to wait. Bound up in the labor question was the question of the control of slaves during the war.
The second note, then, of the Dark Ages is the gradual transition of Christian society from a number of slave-owning, rich, landed proprietors, taxed and administered by a regular government, to a society of fighting nobles and their descendants, organized upon a basis of independence and in a hierarchy of lord and overlord, and supported no longer by slaves in the villages, but by half-free serfs or "villeins."
Social and religious reasons, derived from the community of nature and origin in man, reinforced by a vivid realisation of the sufferings of others, and appealing forcibly to the tender and sympathetic feelings, have co-operated with the economical considerations drawn from the wastefulness and comparative inefficiency of slave labour, and with what may be called the self-regarding reason of the hardening and debasing effect of slave-owning on the character of the slave-owner himself.
Nor did any writer recognise the fact that slaves were potentially moral beings, until Christianity gave its sanction to dutiful submission as an act of morality that might be consecrated by a Divine authority. Lastly, it is not difficult to realise the mischievous effects of such a slave system as the Roman upon the slave-owning class itself.
There, as its president, sat Mason of Virginia, author of the fugitive slave law; there, at the desk in front of him, sat Cass of Michigan, who, for years, had been especially subservient to the slave power; Douglas of Illinois, who had brought about the destruction of the Missouri Compromise; Butler of South Carolina, who represented in perfection the slave-owning aristocracy; Slidell and Benjamin of Louisiana, destined soon to play leading parts in the disruption of the Union.
"I do not imagine I could enjoy slave-owning. I feel the majority of slave-owners lower themselves until they stand beneath the level of the brutes." Father said, "It is all wrong." Aunt Hildy added, "All kind of bondage is ungodly, and the days will bring some folks to knowledge." "Out of the depth into the light," said Clara, and our meal was over.
Accordingly in 1836 only three years after the failure of Nullification in South Carolina, the Territory, of Arkansas was forced in as a Slave State, and simultaneously the Slave-owning henchmen of the Conspirators, previously settled there for the purpose, proclaimed the secession from Mexico, and independence, of Texas.
He knew that the great slave-owning squires despised him, and he hated them in return. Unfortunately, by the same token, the new President had not, as Lincoln would have had, the ear of the North. Had Lincoln lived he would have approached the task of persuading the North to support his policy with many advantages which his successor necessarily lacked.
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