tual trust and kindness could not be reasonably expected ever to arise unless all serious inequalities in civic rights should be effectually done away. I regret to say that the course pursued in several of the states of the South in regard to this matter has not been such as might have been reasonably anticipated. By tardy and apparently reluctant action in the granting of those things which it is really not in their power ultimately to withhold, several of the states referred to have, it is to be feared, greatly weakened their own position, and enfeebled the President, their only protector now, in his efforts to serve them. How long they will, under the counsels of shallow and senseless demagogues, persevere in their present course, remains to be seen. For their own sake, and for the repose and happiness of the whole republic, I hope that in a week or two we shall learn that wiser and more considerate action has been finally adopted; that, in consequence thereof, the Southern representatives and senators have been received in Congress; that military organizations in the bosom of the states of the South have been dispensed with; that the habeas corpus has been every where restored; that all need for the Freedmen's Bureau has ceased; and that perfect federative equality may be thus secured among all the states of this grand and glorious republic.

While I now write, it is painful to learn that the Legislature of the State of Tennessee, a body elected by less than a third of the qualified voters of the state, the members of which have been heretofore claiming to be far more devoted to the cause of the Union than the hundreds of thousands of their fellow-citizens whom they obstinately hold in a state of cruel disfranchisement, and whom they are day by day driving, by intolerable oppression, into exile, has deliberately refused to grant to persons of African descent the right to testify in courts of justice. This, I repeat, has been done by the Union men of Tennessee, par excellence the persons who are boasting every day that they are the zealous and faithful supporters of the President! Now I undertake to say that such action as this is really more hostile, practically, to the avowed reconstruction policy of President Johnson than any thing besides which these individuals could possibly have done.

Outside of the state, I do not doubt that the whole people of Tennessee will be held responsible for the insane and illiberal conduct on this subject, which I feel assured that a very large majority of those not now allowed by a despotic faction even to exercise the right of suffrage, were it in their power, would emphatically repudiate.

PROMPT ACQUIESCENCE TRUE WISDOM.

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It is really astonishing to hear that men in this enlightened age should for a moment hesitate in regard to the propriety of allowing persons of African descent to testify in courts of justice, especially in cases where their own life, liberty, or property is involved. It is the most cruel mockery to call them free, and yet deny this essential right; it is, moreover, the most palpable and unblushing hypocrisy. In the name of Heaven, who could possibly be injured by such an act of simple justice in behalf of an unhappy race who have long submitted cheerfully to bondage, and who have only accepted liberty when it has been tendered to them? Every lawyer of philosophic mind would say at once, that to allow freedmen to testify, in any case, would be attended with no evil consequence whatever to those who were free from nativity. Each witness brought into court to give evidence would be necessarily subjected to examination and cross-examination, and an astute and unprejudiced jury would then determine how far such evidence was entitled to credence. I can well imagine a thousand cases in which this same right to testify might, in its excrcise, be eminently beneficial to white citizens—yea, lives might be saved from the scaffold, character be rescued from undeserved discredit, and the most valuable property rights be secured from destruction, by the veracious, manly, and unprejudiced testimony of one who had himself been born a slave. It is heartlessly unjust to the black man to assert that he is less a respecter of truth and less inclined to the exercise of justice than the white man. I have lived among this race all my life, and what I now say on this subject is the fruit of more than half a century's experience and observation.

At any rate, I now feel authorized again to declare to that portion of my fellow-countrymen of the South who are still perilously tampering with this delicate and important matter, that there is no possible ground for hoping that the white men of the South will themselves be restored to their suspended civic rights until they consent themselves to do justice to others.

By-the-by, I see that the Freedmen's Bureau has been given (and rightfully too) increased powers in the State of Tennessee, in consequence of this strange conduct on the part of the Legislature.

S 2

CHAPTER XVIII.

Observations mainly upon the Facts recited in the preceding Chapters.

I PROPOSE now to bring this volume to a conclusion with the presentation of a few additional observations, having reference, either direct or indirect, to facts already brought to notice, or to others too obvious and familiar to have required an earlier specification.

1. No clearer proposition could, in my judgment, be possibly stated than the one insisted on so emphatically in all that I have heretofore written, that the war, from the devastation and suffering of which the country is now slowly emerging, did not necessarily grow out of the fact that African slavery existed in the South, and did not exist in the North, and that there was not really any thing worthy the notice of a philosophic mind in the fact that, while white men and white women in the North performed the greater part of all the rougher physical labor, and voluntarily, this was done in the South chiefly by persons of a black or brown complexion, and after the manner that has been called involuntary. The truth is, that the opposition to the continuance of African slavery in the region wherein it has just become extinct, as the inevitable result of the war that has been for four years raging, was confined in the North to, comparatively speaking, a very small number of persons, and still fewer of these were, until very recently at least, possessed of

NO IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT.

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any large amount of influence over the general public mind of the country. Outside of small fanatical and political cliques, there was not, even as late as five years ago, any strong antagonism of sentiment between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding sections of the republic. As for any antagonism of pecuniary interest in connection with Southern slaveholding, the ascertained existence of which, as a source of large pecuniary gain, if believed also to be permanent, might, in an age so mercenary as ours, prove, perhaps, to some extent, productive of a sort of reciprocal rivalry of feeling, this is the merest phantom that ever vexed the over-fevered brain of a fanciful visionary. The pecuniary interests of the North and South, in connection with slaveholding, it is true, were not identical, but so far were they also from being conflicting and irreconcilable, that they were positively in perfect accord with each other, and were, anterior to the war, constantly multiplying and intensifying ties of sympathetic kindness between the two sections. There is no necessary antagonism between the blacksmith and the miller, the fisherman and the hunter of game, the cultivator of the land and the mariner who plows the fields of ocean. On the contrary, all of them, and a thousand diverse but not necessarily hostile classes besides, may not only subsist in quiet as members of the same community, but their very differences of employment, leading them naturally into the interested reciprocation of the respective products of their labor, must necessarily generate amity instead of hostility. It is quite safe to affirm that, anterior to the war, there was more capital in the North than in the South dependent for its profitable employment

upon the African slaveholding system. The growers of cotton, sugar, tobacco, and other slave-raised products in the South, though their multiplied responsibilities, moral as well as physical, were indeed most burdensome, derived far less of clear profit from the outlay of their capital than did the merchants and manufacturers of the North, and the other numerous classes dependent upon them. The truth of this statement was alike manifest in innumerable instances of individual fortune in the North, arising, directly or indirectly, from the slaveholding system-in the rapid and unprecedented growth of large commercial marts, and in the innumerous ramifications of manufacturing industry. It is said in Holy Writ that "where a man's treasure is, there will his heart be also," and thus it undoubtedly was in the case under consideration. It was not in nature for those who were, daily and hourly, over the whole North, becoming richer and richer from the cultivation of Southern soil by the sons and daughters of Africa, to cherish feelings of illiberal hatred for those whose skillful and vigilant administration of a system to them so productive of gain was constantly increasing the aggregate quantity of their wealth, and with it the means of luxurious accommodation, of extended influence, and of magnificent liberality. There are many who write and speak on this subject, and who speak and write, too, most flippantly and plausibly, who really imagine because they, before the war, hated the slaveholding system of the South, the whole people of the North did the same thing. There never was a greater mistake committed. I have had in my time much interest in looking into the truth of this matter, and have