the example of Washington, whose dying bequest gave freedom to his slaves, made no attempt to find a remedy.* (* On the publication of the first edition my views on the action of the abolitionists were traversed by critics whose opinions demand consideration.  They implied that in condemning the unwisdom and violence of the anti-slavery party, I had not taken into account the aggressive tendencies of the Southern politicians from 1850 onwards, that I had ignored the attempts to extend slavery to the Territories, and that I had overlooked the effect of the Fugitive Slave Law.  A close study of abolitionist literature, however, had made it very clear to me that the advocates of emancipation, although actuated by the highest motives, never at any time approached the question in a conciliatory spirit; and that long before 1850 their fierce cries for vengeance had roused the very bitterest feelings in the South.  In fact they had already made war inevitable.  Draper, the Northern historian, admits that so early as 1844 “the contest between the abolitionists on one side and the slave-holders on the other hand had become a mortal duel.”  It may be argued, perhaps, that the abolitionists saw that the slave-power would never yield except to armed force, and that they therefore showed good judgment in provoking the South into secession and civil war.  But forcing the hand of the Almighty is something more than a questionable doctrine.)

The latter had the better excuse.  He knew, were emancipation granted, that years must elapse before the negro could be trained to the responsibilities of freedom, and that those years would impoverish the South.  It appears to have been forgotten by the abolitionists that all races upon earth have required a protracted probation to fit them for the rights of citizenship and the duties of free men.  Here was a people, hardly emerged from the grossest barbarism, and possibly, from the very beginning, of inferior natural endowment, on whom they proposed to confer the same rights without any probation whatsoever.  A glance at the world around them should have induced reflection.  The experience of other countries was not encouraging.  Hayti, where the blacks had long been masters of the soil, was still a pandemonium; and in Jamaica and South Africa the precipitate action of zealous but unpractical philanthropists had wrought incalculable mischief.  Even Lincoln himself, redemption by purchase being impracticable, saw no other way out of the difficulty than the wholesale deportation of the negroes to West Africa.

In time, perhaps, under the influence of such men as Lincoln and Lee, the nation might have found a solution of the problem, and North and South have combined to rid their common country of the curse of human servitude.  But between fanaticism on the one side and helplessness on the other there was no common ground.  The fierce invectives of the reformers forbade all hope of temperate discussion, and their unreasoning denunciations only provoked resentment.  And this resentment became the more bitter because in demanding emancipation, either by fair means or forcible, and in expressing their intention of making it a national question, the abolitionists were directly striking at a right which the people of the South held sacred.