The Future of the Colored Race in America - Being an article in the Presbyterian quarterly review of July, 1862 by William Aikman
page 31 of 44 (70%)
page 31 of 44 (70%)
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The efforts which philanthropy has made to promote their colonization have met with an insuperable obstacle here, and will be compelled to contend, more or less unsuccessfully with it, till there shall be strength and education enough given the black to rise above it. Among the many objections which have been urged against emancipation, this has been a very common one, and has had great force in the popular mind;--it will flood the Northern States with free blacks. The objection is vulgar and thoughtless. If the simple economic law of supply and demand, as powerful over men as materials, were not sufficient to keep this people where they are needed, and to prevent them from going where they are not, the love of home would be strong enough to bar such result. The slave needs all the mighty stimulus of a prospective deliverance from slavery to induce him to leave the place of his birth, and that even is often enough; why, then, when he has that boon in his hand, and walks the old haunts a freeman, with work requited and enough, why should he now go away to strangers and strange land? No, the States which have meanly and and disgracefully passed their laws excluding the freed black from a home within their borders, might have spared themselves the dishonor. The dreaded calamity would never have occurred. The enactments were the assumption of a gratuitous infamy. The effect of emancipation will be the reverse of this fear. Instead of the freed slaves flocking northward, the free blacks of the North will gradually go South; in place of Northern States being overrun with the one, they will, in process of time, be stripped of the other. With slavery out of the way, the black will naturally bend his steps to the region where climate, congenial employments, |
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