me accept this substantially as
their creed on the question of emancipation. They do not mean to justify
slavery; they abhor and hate it; they regard it as economically,
socially, politically, and morally wrong. But they regard emancipation
as tending directly and inevitably to incorporate the negro into the
mass of American society, and compel us to treat him as homogeneous with
it. To such a solution of the question they feel an unconquerable
aversion. It shocks their taste; it violates their notions of propriety
and fitness; they resist it by a sort of instinct, rather than from set
conviction and purpose.

Nor is there one man in a thousand of us, who is not conscious in
himself of a certain degree of sympathy with this view of the subject,
however much we may think that we morally disapprove it. With enslaving
the negro, and reducing him to an article of merchandise, or depriving
him of one of those moral rights which God has given him as a man, we
have no sympathy. But if, in full view of a proposition to break down
all the social barriers which now divide the races, so that our
descendants and those of the colored man shall form one homogeneous
people, we interrogate our own consciousness, we shall discover that
we, even those of us who have most eloquently and indignantly denounced
'prejudice against color,' are compelled to own ourselves in sympathy
with the great mass of the American people, in utter and unconquerable
aversion to such an arrangement.

It is probable that this article may fall into the hands of some friends
of mine whose judgment I greatly respect, and whose feelings I should be
most reluctant to wound, to whom these sentiments will at first view be
far from agreeable. But for many years I have entertained them with
undoubting confidence of their truth; and at this solemn crisis of our
nation's destiny it becomes us to lay aside all our prejudices, and to
endeavor to reach the truth on this momentous question. I repeat it:
this side of the subject has not been fairly met and considered in this
discussion. The time has come when we must meet it. Emancipation is an
indispensable condition of the restoration and perpetuity of the Union,
perhaps even of our continued national existence. The one great
objection to emancipation, in the minds of the people, North and South,
is the belief, so confidently and even obstinately entertained, that it
carries with it as an inevitable consequence, either an