Where chattel slavery exists, labor is
not held in honor, and just in proportion to the depth to which one
class sinks by industrial oppression, does the other sink through
enervating indolence and exhausting indulgence. Where there is chattel
slavery, there cannot be free speech: the utterance of truth may indeed
be incendiary, and the rickety, combustible institution standing out of
its time, must needs protect itself. There must not be free education or
free inquiry. It would never do to teach the slaves; and it is likewise
the interest of this form of society to retain the lower strata of the
nominally free population in ignorance equally dense and impenetrable. A
cringing servility must be generated and maintained on the one side, and
a haughty and exacting superciliousness on the other.
All these may be regarded as constituting minor issues, which are
dependent for their vitality on that which is greater; and when the fate
of the issue between chattel slavery and its antagonist shall have been
determined, there will be no further trouble with the collaterals. When
the main trunk is torn up by the root, the branches will all die.
But while the issue between slavery and freedom thus comprehends within
itself a class of issues which are subordinate, may there not be a still
greater issue which dwarfs that of slavery and freedom into a secondary,
and comprehends within itself this and other issues of equal magnitude
and importance?
Our Government has never given out that its object in the prosecution of
the war is the extinction of slavery.
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