The record stands, General Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate armies, voluntarily manumitted his slaves. Mr. Yancey, the oratorical agitator of the constitutional principles which were attempted by the Confederacy was a leader in the policy of rejection by the Confederacy of the African slave trade, thus hastening the maturity of the institution of slavery and providing for the industrial economy which must have worked out the final emancipation of labor from the status of prosperity to the status of wages.
Dr. McGuire relates that President Lincoln pronounced the Union indissoluble because the Southern ports on 10 per cent. duties would cut off this revenue of the port of New York and starve the northern nation. It is important to remember that upon the organization of the Provisional Government at Montgomery and the appointment of Mr. Yancey at the head of the commission to go to Europe to sue for recognition of the new born Republic, he asked to be instructed to offer to the commercial nations of Europe, England and France, a treaty quite similar to the treaty which General Washington asked, successfully, the Congress to negotiate with France and Spain.
Mr. Yancey, at the suggestion of Mr. Rhett, of South Carolina, asked to be permitted to offer European powers a contract of twenty years duration, fixing the duties at all Southern ports at 20 per cent. ad valorem. A bill was offered in Congress embodying these views, but reducing the time to six years. Mr. Rhett refused to accept this reduction of time, and this bill failed. The commission to Europe was thus doomed to failure, and with this fore knowledge, Mr. Yancey went upon it, consenting to his own sacrifice with characteristic valor.
