ves, for a benefit which they
profess to think doubtful to the slaves themselves. How far they are right
in anticipating ruin from the manumission of their slaves I think
questionable, but that they do so is certain, and self-impoverishment for
the sake of abstract principle is not a thing to be reasonably expected
from any large mass of men. But, besides the natural fact that the
slaveholders wish to retain their property, emancipation is, in their view
of it, not only a risk of enormous pecuniary loss, and of their entire
social status, but involves elements of personal danger, and above all,
disgust to inveterate prejudices, which they will assuredly never
encounter. The question is not alone one of foregoing great wealth, or the
mere means of subsistence (in either case almost equally hard); it is not
alone the unbinding the hands of those who have many a bloody debt of
hatred and revenge to settle; it is not alone the consenting suddenly to
see by their side, upon a footing of free social equality, creatures
towards whom their predominant feeling is one of mingled terror and
abhorrence, and who, during the whole of their national existence, have
been, as the earth, trampled beneath their feet, yet ever threatening to
gape and swallow them alive. It is not all this alone which makes it
unlikely that the Southern planter should desire to free his slaves:
freedom in America is not merely a personal right, it involves a political
privilege. Freemen there are legislators. The rulers of the land are the
majority of the people, and in many parts of the Southern States the black
free citizens would become, if not at once, yet in process of time,
inevitably voters, landholders, delegates to state legislatures, members
of assembly--who knows?--senators, judges, aspirants to the presidency of
the United States. You must be an American, or have lived long among them,
to conceive the shout of derisive execration with which such an idea would
be hailed from one end of the land to the other.

That the emancipation of the negroes need not necessarily put them in
possession of the franchise is of course obvious, but as a general
consequence the one would follow from the other; and at present certainly
the slaveholders are no more ready to grant the political privilege than
the natural right of freedom. Under these circumstances, though the utmost
commiseration is naturally excited by the slaves, I agree with you that
some forbearanc