ers
and labourers, under the supervision of Northern officers and employers;
most of them have learned the use of arms, and possess them; all of them
have exchanged the insufficient slave diet of grits and rice for the
abundant supplies of animal food, which the poorest labourer in that
favoured land of cheap provisions and high wages indulges in to an extent
unknown in any other country. None of these slaves of yesterday will be
the same slaves to-morrow. Little essential difference as may yet have
been effected by the President's proclamation in the interior of the
South in the condition of the blacks, it is undoubtedly known to them, and
they are waiting in ominous suspense its accomplishment or defeat by the
fortune of the war; they are watching the issue of the contest of which
they well know themselves to be the theme, and at its conclusion, end how
it will, they must be emancipated or exterminated. With the North not only
not friendly to slavery, but henceforward bitterly hostile to
slaveholders, and no more to be reckoned upon as heretofore, it might have
been infallibly by the Southern white population in any difficulty with
the blacks (a fact of which the negroes will be as well aware as their
former masters)--with an invisible boundary stretching from ocean to
ocean, over which they may fly without fear of a master's claim following
them a single inch--with the hope and expectation of liberty suddenly
snatched from them at the moment it seemed within their grasp--with the
door of their dungeon once more barred between them and the light into
which they were in the act of emerging--is it to be conceived, that these
four millions of people, many thousands of whom are already free and
armed, will submit without a struggle to be again thrust down into the
hell of slavery? Hitherto there has been no insurrection among the
negroes, and observers friendly and inimical to them have alike drawn from
that fact conclusions unfavourable to their appreciation of the freedom
apparently within their grasp; but they are waiting to see what the North
will really achieve for them. The liberty offered them is hitherto
anomalous, and uncertain enough in its conditions; they probably trust it
as little as they know it: but slavery they _do_ know--and when once they
find themselves again delivered over to _that_ experience, there will not
be ONE insurrection in the South; there will be an insurrection in every
State, in every county