The Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. | Page 4

the knot betimes, act bravely and
manfully, and settle the difficulty ere it settles us. Something must be
done, and that right early.
But what is to become of the freed blacks? Again and again does this
preposterous bugbear rise up to prove, by the terror which it excites, the
vast ignorance of the subject which prevails in this country, and the
small amount of deliberate reasoning generally bestowed on matters of
the most vital importance. Reader, if you would answer it, go to facts.
You have probably all your life accepted as true the statement that the
black when free promptly becomes an idle, worthless vagabond. You
have believed that a majority of the free blacks in the North are good
for nothing. Now I tell you calmly and deliberately, and challenging
inquiry, that this is not true. Admitting that about one-fifth of them are
so, you have but a weak argument. As for the forlorn, unacclimated
exiles in Canada, where there is no demand for the labor which they are
peculiarly fit to render, they are not a case in point. The black servants,
cooks, barbers, white-washers, carpet-beaters and grooms of Baltimore
and Philadelphia, which form the four-fifths majority of free blacks in
those cities, are not idle vagabonds. Above all, reader, I beg of you to
read the dispassionate and calmly written Cotton Kingdom of Frederick
Law Olmstead, recently published by Mason Brothers, of New York.
You will there find the fact set forth by closest observation that the
negroes in part are indeed lazy vagabonds, but that the majority, when
allowed to work for themselves, and when free, do work, and that right
steadily. In the Virginia tobacco factories slaves can earn on an average
as much money for themselves, in the 'over hours' allowed them, as the
manufacturer pays their owner for their services during the day. There
are cases in which slaves, hired for one hundred dollars a year, have
made for themselves three hundred.[A]
[Footnote A: 'If the slaves be emancipated, what with their own natural
ability and such aids and appliances as the government and 20,000,000
of people in the North can furnish, I do not believe but that they will
get employment, and pay, and, of course, subsistence.'--HON.
GEORGE S. BOUTWELL.]
But the vagabond surplus,--the minority? Is it possible that with Union
or disunion before us we can hesitate as to taking on this incumbrance?

In a hard-working land vagabonds must die off,--'tis a hard case, but the
emergency for the white men of this and a coming age is much harder.
After all, there are only some fifteen hundred or two thousand lazy free
negroes in New York city,--the climate, we are told, is too severe for
them,--and this among well-nigh a million of inhabitants. We think it
would be possible to find one single alderman in that city who has
wasted as much capital, and injured the commonwealth quite as much,
in one year, as all the negroes there put together, during the same time.
It would be absurd to imagine that the emancipation of every negro in
America to-morrow would add one million idlers and vagabonds to our
population. _But what if it did?_ Would their destiny or injury to us be
of such tremendous importance that we need for it peril our welfare as a
nation? The standing armies of Germany absorb about one-fifth of the
entire capital of the land. Better one million of negative negroes than a
million of positive soldiers!
There was never yet in history a time when such a glorious future
offered itself to a nation as that which is now within our grasp. In its
greatness and splendor it is beyond all description. The great problem
of Republicanism--the question of human progress--has reached its last
trial. If we keep this mighty nation one and inseparable, we shall have
answered it forever; if not, why then those who revile man as vile and
irreclaimably degraded may raise their pæans of triumph; the black
spectres of antique tyrants may clap their hands gleefully in the land of
accursed shadows, and hell hold high carnival, for, verily, it would
seem as if they had triumphed, and that hope were a lie.
But who are they who dare accuse us of wishing to weaken the
administration and impede its course? Bring the question to light! If
there be one thing more than another which those who demand
emancipation desire, it is that the central government should be
_strengthened_--aye, strengthened as it has never been before; so that,
in future, there can be no return of secession. We have never been a
republic--only an aggregate of smaller republics. If we had been one,
the first movement toward disunion would have hurled the traitors
urging it to the