THE FUTURE OF THE COLORED RACE IN AMERICA.

BY WILLIAM AIKMAN, Pastor of the Hanover Street Presbyterian Church,
Wilmington, Delaware.



In whatever way the present civil war in America shall result, it
is certain that the future condition of the colored race in this
country will be the question over-mastering all others for many
years to come. It has already pushed itself into the foremost place.
However it may be true, that slavery and the negro were not the
proximate causes of this war, no one who gives any candid thought
to the matter can fail to recognize the fact, that back of all,
this stands as the grand first occasion of it. Had there been no
slavery, there would have been no war. General Jackson was only
partly right when he said, that while in his day the tariff was
made the pretext of secession, and that by and by slavery would take
its place, but that neither would be the true motive of disunion;
that a desire for a separate confederacy was the final cause. This
was evidently correct, yet had slavery not stood in this country
there would not have come into being that peculiar state of society
which now lives in the Southern States, and which demands for its
very existence that it should rule alone. Slavery has created an
aristocracy, not of numbers, but of wealth and power, which bears
with all the social forces. While the slave-holder are but a very
small minority of the whole people, yet by the force of their
wealth and the fact of their being slave owners, they hold all the
political power, and indeed, sweep out of existence any opposition.
There are, with very rare exceptions throughout the whole South,