Passionate Abolitionist and
Witness to the American Civil War
Passionate Abolitionist and
Witness to the American Civil War
“Thereupon the slaveholding aristocracy immediately took up arms to make war on freedom. Slavery rebelled against liberty, to bathe this happy and prosperous land in fraternal blood, rather than have its insolent schemes of aggrandisement at all checked by the Northern free man’s vote.”
~ May 17, 1863
“I had been in America over 30 years when this rebellion broke out, and thought that I understood something of what I called the practical common-sense character of the people of the free states. But I find that I was entirely unaware of the darkest feature in Northern politics – the extent of the strong pro-slaveryism of the people of the free states.”
~ May 17, 1863
“The aristocratic slave owner or the bondage-blasted South has rebelled against the national government, the very first time the freemen of the North have fairly won at the ballot box the legal right to influence the national policy in favour of free labour and free soil, and against the unlimited extension of slavery.
~ May 17, 1863
Although the slaveholders had taken up arms against this “free” government that had always protected their so-called constitutional right to hold men and women in the most brutalizing bondage, and sell the wife away from the husband, and the child away from its mother for ever, still the infernal institution of slavery must be held as sacred as the holy of holies. The rebels’ right to his bondmen must be most scrupulously enforced as constitutional, although that rebel was trampling that constitution under his gory feet in the life blood of his slaughtered fellow-citizen.”
~ May 17, 1863
“The poor blacks ran to the Union army by hundreds and thousands, but they were repelled, driven back at the point of Union bayonets. Many brought valuable information to Union officers, and were still given back to their rebel masters, who flogged them fearfully. In some instances they were whipped to death for giving warning of danger to Union soldiers, and revealing the secreted arms and stores of the rebels. In many instances Union officers sent back runaway slaves under a guard of Union soldiers over the rebel lines, and returned them to their masters in the rebel army”
~ May 17, 1863
“The rebels used their slaves in this first battle against us. I have conversed with black men who escaped from them, that solemnly assured me they were forced to fight against the Union in the first battle of Bull Run, by being used to work the guns in the masked batteries. The rebel officers stood by with heavy whips, and flogged them if they were not quick enough in spunging out the guns and handing ammunition.”
~ May 17, 1863
“When it was found that the rebels used the slaves against us, our generals pronounced all slaves contraband of war, same as rebel army horses and mules, and received all that came to our lines, but refused to recognise them as men or human beings. Instead of enrolling and arming them, as men so willing and anxious to aid us should have been, they were called contrabands, and used as slaves to do the work or drudgery of our officers, or lay about in idleness. At first our Conservative generals would not use them, even to dig intrenchments or construct redoubts, and thousands of our white soldiers died from fatigue and exposure in unhealthy places, where black men could stand the work and the miasma without getting the fevers so fatal to our men. In the summer of 1862 the good Democratic general, M’Clellan [not McClellan], sacrificed fully ten thousand white soldiers to his constitutional conservatism and contempt for niggers, refusing to use them even in the hardest work and most sickly localities, and making white men do it at such a fearful loss of life.”
~ May 17, 1863
“The contrabands, as the poor fugitive negroes are called, have been fearfully abused and maltreated by our men, almost everywhere that they have come in contact with them. Only a few weeks ago I was coming up from Philadelphia in the railway cars. Sitting near me were two soldiers from the Army of the Potomac. One of them, a good Democrat, was abusing the President for issuing the proclamation abolishing slavery in the rebel states, and said it brought the “Dam niggers over to our camps by scores;” but, says he, “we serve ’em out! Four of ’em escaped across the Rappahannock the other night, where I was, and when they came to us there [not “they”; i.e., Four of ’em…, when they came to us there, were] were so dam saucy, we knocked ’em all four on the head and finished ’em.” I asked him how they were saucy. “Oh! they said they were free now, and did not fear anybody,” was the reply. I told him the poor fellows had been slaves all their lives, and might well be overjoyed that they were at last free; and putting implicit faith in the President’s proclamation, issued under the highest authority of the nation, they thought they had found friends, but met their worst foes. “Yes,” says the villain, “we didn’t want any of their dam’d niggers near us, and by Jesus we served ’em right!”
~ May 17, 1863
“After the last battle of Bull Run last summer, when the Union army was most disgracefully defeated and driven from the field, our General asked and obtained permission from the rebels to send for our wounded, still lying where they fell, and to bury our dead. A large force of unarmed men went for the wounded, and also nearly a thousand negroes, under a flag of truce, to dig the graves for the dead. The rebel guards stood quietly around until the negroes had finished their mournful task, and then seized and sent the whole of them south into slavery, laughing at the flag of truce, and neither our generals nor our government thought it worth while even to remonstrate, if ever so meekly. The rebel Congress passed resolutions, and the rebel President issued proclamations, enslaving or putting to death all blacks taken from the Union armies, [removed a space before the comma] or from the loyal States, and they have carried them out even so far as murdering many poor blacks taken only as drivers of union wagon trains, and our Government has never retaliated or even remonstrated.”
~ May 17, 1863
“They would have been brave enough at mobbing Northern negroes, and burning their houses over their heads, because they had the impudence to be free; or they would bravely flog a slave to please his master, but they had no courage to fight for their own free Government against that same master. I have heard of captains of companies who, after being engaged in a battle a little while, have found only one-third of their men left. Perhaps three or four of them had been hit by the balls of the enemy, and the rest were sneaked off. I know one captain who, at the battle of Fair Oaks, last summer, stopped the stragglers from his company by watching them (not the enemy), with revolver in hand, and threatening to shoot the first man that sneaked.”
~ May 17, 1863
“This is a rebellion of the rich landholders and slaveholders of the South – the aristocracy of the slave states – against the free working man’s vote, legally and constitutionally given at the ballot boxes in the presidential election of 1860. That election was against the further extension of the infernal institution of slavery into the hitherto free territories of the republic. Thereupon the slaveholding aristocracy immediately took up arms to make war on freedom. Slavery rebelled against liberty, to bathe this happy and prosperous land in fraternal blood, rather than have its insolent schemes of aggrandisement at all checked by the Northern free man’s vote. Rather than submit to have the national administration from under their control for one short presidential term of four years, they determined to break up the Government, seize the capital, sunder the nation, and make the 15 slave states a haughty, insolent, defiant, and despotic power, based solely and entirely upon the accursed institution of human slavery, and extend it permanently over the far greatest and finest portion of this vast continent, which we all had thought was dedicated to freedom and consecrated as the land of liberty, the home of the free for ever.”
~ May 17, 1863
“The only chance left for slavery is for the slaveholders to lay down their arms and submit now. And, thank God, there is not the least danger of them doing that.”
~ May 17, 1863
“The Almighty does not mean them to save their barbarously beloved institution, or they would not be so blind, and hardened, and determined as they are. The fate of the confederacy is sealed now. There was a chance for them while the North was so pro-slavery. But we are all becoming abolitionists now. What a change! It seals the doom of slavery. The slave power has committed suicide by rebellion.”
~ May 17, 1863
“Such is man most generally. Give him the power, and he is by nature a tyrant and a despot, whether it be the one-man power of monarchical Europe, or the million-men power of mob-ruled America. Were the rebels to lay down their arms now, and offer to let bygones be bygones, and come into the Union as they were before, a majority of the Northern people would vote to receive them with open arms, and would, if they could, crush out all anti-slaveryism in the free States to please them, and keep them in good humour when they had got them back. We anti-slavery people would be far worse off than we were before. My friends have often cautioned me, and said to me, “If you take the nigger’s part so much, you will get knocked down, and your buildings burnt one of these days.” But my buildings are insured, and I don’t fear these Northern pro-slavery rowdies.”
~ May 17, 1863
“They see now the devilish system of American slavery had become so infamously bad that it deserved the just vengeance of the almighty, and that this vast war is well deserved punishment visited upon a whole people for crimes but little less than called down fire from high heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah”.
~ April 18, 1864
“The black engineer is a stiller and much quieter man. Evidently a deep thinker and close observer…Nothing going on near him escapes his attention… such a quies earnestness, that it seemed a natural instinct in him to want to understand every thing quietly for himself, and in his own way without asking questions of any body. And after a while he would lend a hand or do a job at almost any thing as if he had been long used to it.”
~ April 18, 1864
“They may call him nigger because he is black and has a wooly head. But there is intellect in it and of a high order too. If when he was a boy he been properly educated and then allowed to choose the occupation he had the most likeing for, he would have been haas good a workman at any trade he took hold of as ever entered a shop. But all the slave states had laws severely punishing any attempt to educate a colored person, male or female, and they were always rigidly enforced”.
~ April 18, 1864
“And it was with the devilish determination to extend their infernal system of human slavery over vast regions yet free from the curse, that these southern aristocrats rebelled against a government they had entirely controlled over since the hour of its establishment, and could even then control, for they and their northern proslavery allies had a majority in both houses of congress and on the bench of the supreme court.
~ April 18, 1864
If they had remained quiet slavery would never have been interfered with in the fifteen states it was establish in unless the people of those states, themselves chose to abolish it by due process of laws passed by their own state legislators”
~ April 18, 1864