Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 30.djvu/134

 126 Southern Historical Society Papers.

to the indisputable fact that the negroes could have ended the war during any one day or night that it lasted. And the kindly attitude of the negro to the master was shown not negatively only, not by forbearance only. Not only did a vast majority of them stay at their posts, working to feed and watching to protect the families of the absent soldiers when all the able-bodied white men were ab- sent soldiers but after their emancipation ten thousand examples occurred of respectful and grateful and even generous conduct to their.late masters, for one instance, where a revengeful or a reproach- ful or even a disrespectful demonstration was made. Of the few survivors of those who stood in the relation of master and slave, a considerable number still maintain relations of strong and often tender friendship. John Stuart Mill worshipped liberty and detested slavery, but he confessed that the good will of the slaves to the mas- ters was to him inexplicable. And all this is none the less true, if all be granted as true about the abuses of slavery that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe painted in " Uncle Tom's Cabin " and in the " Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin." Abuses no less vile and on a far greater scale have occurred and still occur in England and America, with all their boasts of freedom, not to speak of late occurrences in South Africa and in the Philippines.

To-day the negro is a formidable danger to the State and to society, and a danger that threatens only too surely to become con- stantly a greater danger. Elaboration of this proposition is unnec- essary. *

The curious may still see a manuscript letter in which Peter Minor, of Petersburg, Virginia, frankly tells his nephew John Minor, of Fredericksburg, that the Virginia Legislature did right in rejecting a bill the nephew had proposed for the emancipation of the negroes, and says that they had as well turn loose bears and lions among the people. The Virginians of that day were as ardent lovers of all attainable liberty as the Virginians of the sixties, whose conduct in the war between the States has at last extorted high praise even from such a representative of the best product of New England as Mr. Charles Francis Adams, son of Mr. Lincoln's Minister to England. The Virginians of a still earlier day, with other Southern leaders, notably the Georgians, had striven often and in vain to get the im- portation of slaves stopped, but Parliament before the Revolution and Congress afterwards listened to the owners of the slave-ships of Old England and New England and continued the slave trade. Many of the fortunes that now startle us with their splendor in New-