There is nothing so promotive of clearness of vision and4 correct judgment as to be subjected to wrongs and insults in our own persons. So long as those traitors confined their outrages and atrocities to their helpless, friendless slaves, it was all well enough, and not at all derogatory to their character as gentlemen, patriots, and Christians. They might deprive their victims of every human right, work them under the lash without wages, buy and sell them in lots to suit purchasers, and subject them to every species of brutal violence as passion or cupidity prompted, and still not forfeit their claim to be honest, upright, high-minded men! Nay, for abolitionists to brand them as robbers of God's poor and needy, and the basest of oppressors, was to deal in abusive language, and to manifest a most unchristian spirit! For were they not exemplary and
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to use their war-power to proclaim emancipation, in accordance with the doctrine laid down by John Quincy Adams twenty-five years before, and the North was1 warned that peace without freedom would be no peace.
Gen. Butler's gratuitous offer to use his Massachusetts troops in putting down any slave insurrection was still eliciting the indignant comments of the Northern press when, presto, change!
the astute General opened the gates of Fortress Monroe to the fleeing slaves, and pronounced them ‘contraband of war’; and the anti-slavery education of the soldiers in the field and the people at home who were ‘no abolitionists,’ while anxious to save the Union, began.
The ‘Refuge of Oppression’ still gathered columns of outpourings from the Southern press,2 and many of these were reprinted in a tract for the further enlightenment of soldiers as to the spirit of diabolism prevalent at the South.3 The object-lessons of Libby Prison, Belle Isle, Andersonville, and other Southern torture pens were yet to come, but already they were foreseen by the editor of the Liberator. Alluding to the sudden change of attitude and language towards the South on the part of many who were lately its apologists and defenders, he wrote:
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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