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Updated: June 11, 2025
Cuba became an object of desire, not only in the eyes of the slave-holding population of the South as an acquisition to slave territory, but of a large part of the nation, because of its strategic importance in relation to the inter-oceanic transit routes of Central America, which seemed the only feasible line of communication with our rapidly developing interests in California.
It is incorporated into the state of society; it is, moreover, a relation which can exist and no sin be committed under the relation; hence, it is not sin in itself, any more than the throne of Nero is sin in itself; and the Apostle speaks to the slave-holding Philemon as he would to a father receiving back a wayward son. "'The claim of Philemon to Onesimus rests only on his having purchased him.
We saw slavery enter Kansas, with bowieknife in hand and curses on its lips; we saw the life of the Union struck at by secession and rebellion; we heard of the bones of sons and brothers, fallen in defence of freedom and law, dug up and wrought into ornaments for the wrists and bosoms of slave-holding women; we looked into the open hell of Andersonville, upon the deliberate, systematic starvation of helpless prisoners; we heard of Libby Prison underlaid with gunpowder, for the purpose of destroying thousands of Union prisoners in case of the occupation of Richmond by our army; we saw hundreds of prisoners massacred in cold blood at Fort Pillow, and the midnight sack of Lawrence and the murder of its principal citizens.
But the slave stamps with indelible ignominy the character of occupation. It is a disgrace for a highborn Virginian or chivalrous Carolinian to labor, side by side, with the low, despised, miserable black man. Wretched must be the condition of the poorer classes of whites in a slave-holding community! Compelled to perform the despised offices of the slave, they can hardly rise above his level.
If the Southern people should unite in a slave-holding Confederacy, it was not only a question as to whether he could shape an army mighty enough to conquer them, the more urgent and by far the graver problem was whether he could mould into unity the warring factions of the turbulent, passion-torn North. These people who had elected him could he ever hope to bind them into a solid fighting unit?
Now, I am not stating the mere result of any discovery of my own, but it would be impossible to read the papers of the South, or the speeches made in the South, before, and at the time of, and after the secession, without seeing that the universal opinion there was, that the stoppage of the supply of cotton would be our instantaneous ruin, and that if they could only lay hold of it, keep it back in the country, or burn it, so that it never could be used, that then the people of Lancashire, merchants, manufacturers, and operatives in mills everybody dependent upon this vast industry would immediately arise and protest against the English Government abstaining for one moment from the recognition of the South, from war with the North, and from a resolution to do the utmost that we could to create a slave-holding independent republic in the South.
I never talked with an abolitionist before. You have convinced me that slave-holding is sinful in the sight of God. My husband left me several slaves, and I have held them for five years; but when I return, I am resolved to hold a slave no longer."
It is an ugly picture: but common sense will tell us, if we but think a little, that such will, and must, be the case in slave-holding countries, wherever Christianity is not present in its purest and strongest form, to control the passions of arbitrary power. But there was not merely profligacy among these Gauls. That alone would not have wrought their immediate ruin.
The world knows what that verdict was, and will never forget that it was largely due to the splendid eloquence of Daniel Webster when he defended the cause of nationality against the slave-holding separatists of South Carolina. While this great debate was in progress, and Mr. Webster and the faithful adherents of Jackson were pushing the "Force Bill" to a vote, Mr.
In the same year a pamphlet published in Charleston, S. C., on "The Critical Situation and Future Prospects of the Slave-Holding States," bitterly declared that the whole book and newspaper press of the North and East teemed with articles on slavery.
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