f your undertaking.

A general emancipation of slaves ought to be--1. Gradual. 2.
Equitable, and satisfactory to the individual immediately
concerned. 3. Consistent with the existing and durable prejudices
of the nation.

That it ought, like remedies for other deep-rooted and widespread
evils, to be gradual, is so obvious, that there seems to be no
difference of opinion on that point.

To be equitable and satisfactory, the consent of both the master
and the slave should be obtained. That of the master will require
a provision in the plan for compensating a loss of what he held
as property, guaranteed by the laws, and recognised by the
Constitution. That of the slave, requires that his condition in a
state of freedom be preferable, in his own estimation, to his
actual one in a state of bondage.

To be consistent with existing and probably unalterable
prejudices in the United States, the freed blacks ought to be
permanently removed beyond the region occupied by, or allotted
to, a white population. The objections to a thorough
incorporation of the two people, are, with most of the whites,
insuperable; and are admitted by all of them to be very powerful.
If the blacks, strongly marked as they are by physical and
lasting peculiarities, be retained amid the whites, under the
degrading privation of equal rights, political or social, they
must be always dissatisfied with their condition, as a change
only from one to another species of oppression; always secretly
confederating against the ruling and privileged class; and always
uncontrolled by some of the most cogent motives to moral and
respectable conduct. The character of the free blacks even where
their legal condition is least affected by their color, seems to
put these truths beyond question. It is material, also, that the
removal of the blacks to be a distance precluding the jealousies
and hostilities to be apprehended from a neighboring people,
stimulated by the contempt known to be entertained for their
peculiar features; to say nothing of their vindictive
recollections, or the predatory propensities which their state of
society might foster. Nor is it fair, in estimating the danger of
collisions with the whites, to charge it wholly on the side of
the black. There would be recip