John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[117] of the modern world towards the elevation of the human family in all its branches, and discouraged impatience and violence as alike ineffective and undesirable. No one at this day can read this lecture without interest and approval. The most radical pro-slavery man of the war period, if living now, would find in it no suggestion of unlawful interference, or of anything else but the operation of economic laws and moral processes for the suppression of slavery and the elevation of both the white and colored race.

It concludes with the suggestion that as slavery had been entirely given up in the Northern States, become less and less dense in the border States, and had shown a decided tendency to become more and more dense in the cotton, rice, and sugar lowlands of the South, where negro labor was not only more profitable, but better in every respect than white labor, the negroes would gradually gather into those regions and finally become confined to them permanently.

It may not be improper to state here that during all my association with Dana in the South, where we were constantly face to face with slavery and those who upheld it, I never heard him utter a word in opposition to the sentiments and opinions contained in his Chicago lecture. He had no word of blame or even of criticism for the Southern people who had inherited slavery from their ancestors. He was always kind and considerate of their feelings and interests, and while with the rest of us, who were fighting to re-establish and perpetuate the Union, he approved the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure, I never heard him utter a word in its behalf as a means of bringing about the abolition of slavery had not the slave States undertaken to secede.

Long years afterwards in discussing the negro question, which it will be observed is altogether different from the