Belief 4 - Reading 4 of 8,The Reconstruction Convention

Use the links above to navigate this simulation.

Belief 4 - Reading 4 of 8

Navigate within this Belief: Reading 3 << >> Reading 5

Additional Beliefs: Belief 1 Belief 2 Belief 3 Belief 4 Belief 5 Belief 6 Belief 7 Belief 8

LETTING ALONE

Harper's Weekly, July 29, 1865, page 466 (Editorial)

A familiar cry is heard from the unorganized States. It comes from orators and papers which have been heard before. "Just let us alone. That is all we want. As for the negroes we know them better than any body else, and we must be permitted to manage them."

Except for the seriousness of the situation there would be something exquisitely humorous in this grave assertion. It is exactly what we have heard for the last twenty years. When it was perfectly evident that the spirit and policy of slavery were endangering the welfare of the country, a firm and vigorous protest was raised by a sagacious citizens who did not mean to connive, under any pretense whatever, at the national ruin. Then came the answering shout from the party of slavery: "Let us alone. It is our affair. We know the negroes and understand how to manage them. Le us alone." And many honest minds were deceived by the appeal.

Then came secession. The en who had cried so lustily "Let us alone" while they were plotting, cried still more solemnly "Let us alone" when they were ready to consummate the crime. Their armed effort has been abortive but bloody. It is necessary for them to recur again to arts and intrigues, and so we hear the same old cry, "Let us alone. Let us alone."

And who echo this cry? Those who in 1860 said that the Government had no right to maintain itself by arms. Those who in 1861 said that the war was really occasioned by the loyal States, and that the Government ought to compromise with treason and conciliate rebellion. Those who in 1862 said that our erring sisters should be allowed to depart in peace. Those in 1863 stimulated a counter-revolution. Those who in 1864 went to Chicago and declared the war a failure. Those who at the end of 1864 were politically annihilated by the American people at the polls.

What is the object of the cry? The overthrow of the Administration and the policy which directed the war, and the return to power of that alliance of Southern leaders and Northern followers which brought on the war. That alliance, we are told, secured peace to the country. Yes, it secured peace at the price of national honor and by delaying a struggle which delay embittered a thousand-fold. It secured peace as a man secures solvency by paying fifty per cent a day for the money he borrow. It secured peace as he does who puts his nose into the fingers of a bully and obsequiously succumbs to his kicks. And when the peace was broken, who broke it? When war began, who began it? Who justified those who began it? Who hoped and worked for their success? Those who now tell us that while they had the power they kept the peace. Those who we know when they lost the power broke the peace. They gave the country peace as a highwayman gives his victim life, on condition of obedience. "Just give us power again, fellow-citizens," they cry, "and you will see how we will keep the peace." Their fellow-citizens have already seen. Enough is as good as a feast.

The late rebels say that they know the negroes a great deal better than any body else. How have they proved it? By enslaving them with unparalleled barbarity. By outraging every human right and feeling. By so treating them that, when the war come, every one of the people they "knew so well" instinctively turned against them, and hailed the enemies of their masters as , for that reason, their own best friends. A society which is so ignorant of human nature, of history, of divine justice, and of the laws of political economy as to suppose it can treat half of its members as brutes without danger to the general welfare, when its foolish assumption has ended in tits own blood and ruin, might at least affect modesty of opinion if it does not feel it. There was never a class in the world which knew so little of another as the slaveholding class at the South knows of the slaves. Its ignorance has cost us a civil war; but it has also fortunately apprised us that such ignorance is a mortal peril.

And what are the late slaveholding class now doing to show us how perfectly they understand the negroes? The Southern States are paralyzed. They can be reinvigorated only by labor. The negroes are the laboring population. They are native to the soil and the climate, and they are free. Common sense indicates the only policy. The inevitable facts of the case should be cordially accepted. Liberal wages should be paid. Hones contracts made. Just measures adopted to provide education and equal rights for the most substantial part of the population. In a word, the public prosperity should be secured and public peril avoided by the simplest and most obvious equity. But, instead of this, farmers are offering five dollars a month to freemen who, as slaves, could hire themselves and make fifteen dollars a month. White people are gravely enacting that colored people shall not testify; shall not control their own children; shall not bear arms; shall not vote; and are surrounding them with disabilities for which there would seem to be no legal redress. And all the while the class at the South which has made educating slaves a crime protests against the fearful ignorance of the colored people; and those who have disgraced labor and degraded the laborer, and have themselves never lifted a finger to work, now complain that the negro is a dreadfully lazy fellow, and will work only upon compulsion.

In truth the class which wished to be "let alone" in its assault upon the Union and Government, unchanged and unsubdued, now wishes to be "let alone" to reorganize itself upon its obsolete, inhuman, and dangerous prejudices and passions. It hates the Union; it hates free labor and free society; it believes in its interpretation of the Constitution and in State sovereignty as much as ever. The spirit of this class is the cancer of the country. If the country wishes peace it will not let it alone.

Harper's Weekly, July 29, 1865, page 466 (Editorial)

This site is brought to you by…