Belief 3 - Reading 1 of 31, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 3 - Reading 1 of 31

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THE PORT ROYAL FACT

Harper's Weekly, March 15, 1862, page 162 (Editorial)

On Monday last the steamer Atlantic sailed from New York for Port Royal with a cargo of clergymen, schoolmasters, and schoolmistresses, Bibles, school-books, agricultural tools, sewing machines, etc. The cargo was destined for the use of 10,000 persons with black skins, male and female, who are now tenants of the sea-islands occupied by the United States on the coast of South Carolina and George. The expense of it was chiefly borne by a charitable institution lately established at Boston, with branches at New York, etc.; which, we will take leave to say, appears to us to be fully as well entitled to the support of benevolent Christians as any foreign mission in existence.

We take it that this is a great fact, which all the fine talk of pro and anti slavery orators in and out of Congress can not gainsay or dissolve. Here are over ten thousand persons with black skins, who are living under the protection of the United States flag, and whom we are going to educate—the males to work and manage sea-island plantations of cotton on scientific principles; the females to sew and comprehend domestic economy; both to read, write, cipher, and realize moral and religious obligations. In a short time this colony of ten thousand persons with black skins will be twenty thousand, and by-and-by it will be two hundred thousand. Now it inhabits two or three extremely fertile and happy islands; presently it will monopolize all the outlying islets and will probably encroach on the main land itself. For facts of this kind are of their nature progressive. Civilization and Christianity take not steps backward.

It strikes us that if some of our leading men would be so good as to forget for a while t heir own importance, and the necessity of keeping themselves constantly before the apple of the American eye, the Port Royal fact would, without their aid, achieve, quietly and noiselessly, without bloodshed, and without rapine or violence, some of the extremely desirable results for which they are so fatiguingly clamorous, and which it is the business of this great war to achieve. If we contribute a small share of our substance to impart to those unfortunate persons with black skins, who are thrown by the rebellion upon our tender mercy, some portion of the educational and moral advantages which our enlightened law secure for the meanest of our own people, Providence will probably render them the instrument of effecting a revolution which will change the face of American destiny.

It has been proposed by some well-intentioned but weak-minded people to deport these persons with black skins to various islands or continents very far away indeed. And it has also been proposed by some evil-intentioned but strong-minded people to deport—not the persons with black skins, but other persons with white skins who are in arms against us, and have cost us already more than a thousand dollars apiece, to other continents or islands still further away. It is impossible to say to what straits this Government of ours may by-and-by be reduced. It may go into the transportation business for a living. When it does, these rival propositions will doubtless be fairly considered. Meanwhile, the great fact at Port Royal stares us in the face, and until some better thing can be suggested, we hope that every body who can spare a dollar will help to send Bibles, and spelling-books, and teachers, and sewing machines, and cotton gins, and other implements of civilization there, for the benefit of these poor persons with black skins whom this atrocious rebellion has thrown upon our hands.

Harper's Weekly, March 15, 1862, page 162 (Editorial)

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