Here
was a people, hardly emerged from the grossest barbarism, and
possibly, from the very beginning, of inferior natural endowment, on
whom they proposed to confer the same rights without any probation
whatsoever. A glance at the world around them should have induced
reflection. The experience of other countries was not encouraging.
Hayti, where the blacks had long been masters of the soil, was still
a pandemonium; and in Jamaica and South Africa the precipitate action
of zealous but unpractical philanthropists had wrought incalculable
mischief. Even Lincoln himself, redemption by purchase being
impracticable, saw no other way out of the difficulty than the
wholesale deportation of the negroes to West Africa.
In time, perhaps, under the influence of such men as Lincoln and Lee,
the nation might have found a solution of the problem, and North and
South have combined to rid their common country of the curse of human
servitude. But between fanaticism on the one side and helplessness on
the other there was no common ground. The fierce invectives of the
reformers forbade all hope of temperate discussion, and their
unreasoning denunciations only provoked resentment.
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