In
talking of Slavery, its power, its weakness, or its prospects, men,
unless they have been intimately mixed up with its workings, are apt to
be reckoning without their host. Our own sentiment of justice in the
matter, North, poor and feeble as it is in most of us, is immensely
aided by the negative fact that our interests do not happen to be
immediately involved adversely. Not one in ten thousand of Northern men
or Europeans, thrown into the South previous to the war, ever withstood
the infection of pro-slavery sentiment and action. Our soldiers do so
now, only because they are in large bodies, because they are fighting
the Southern men, and because they are becoming more and more identified
with a distinct national policy in behalf of emancipation and the rights
of man. Withdraw these causes, and the effects would be rapidly
reversed. Northern officers and men could not be trusted to fraternize
with the slave-holding aristocracy, previous to the time when the
backbone of the institution of Slavery should have been effectually
broken; not because they are bad men, but because they are men, and
would act, under similar circumstances, as men--alike Northern,
Southern, and European men--have acted in the years that are past. There
is a far more reliable and trustworthy party of Southern anti-slavery
men than are as yet their Northern allies; men who have suffered
intensely from actual contact and struggle with the institution, and who
have felt, in some measure, the steel of Slavery enter their own souls;
but they are not numerous enough to stand without the aid of these same
untrustworthy Northern auxiliaries, who already, at the first indication
of incipient success for our arms, propose, like this writer, to remand
them to the tender mercies of a Southern majority rule.
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